Rare Bits

One of my favorite blogs, the SF-themed io9.com, has an interesting article on writing short fiction. As a writer and an artist I found this to be a very useful jolt to my creative process.

3) Start crude, and then work on refining When I first tried writing a short story a week, I found that I was having a lot of trouble with the basic shape of the short story — my efforts at short fiction often meandered a lot, featuring scenes that didn’t add anything to the story. Often, I would realize at length that the story really started on page five, or that one of the many strands I’d layered in really was the story. So one experiment that I tried was writing stories that were very basic.

Here’s what I mean: try starting your story with the central problem cropping up in the first sentence. Like “At first, Admiral Apoplexy thought the glowing warning light on the flight console was just one more bit of disco mood bling, but soon he noticed the words COLLISION IMMINENT written under it.” And then resolve that conflict in the very last sentence, like “At last, the hundreds of danger indicators had stopped their insane strobing, and normal atmosphere and gravity were restored. Admiral Apoplexy looked at the beloved Gloria Gaynor record he’d had to sacrifice to save the ship, lying in jagged black vinyl pieces on the space-capsule floor. And wept.”

[...]

READ MORE