Five things I learned about short stories this week.
1.Simplicity. Most short stories only have one overarching theme or story, I think this is important because a short story is so short that it is important not to confuse the reader by making it too complicated.2.The time period is often short. Many short stories happen over a time period of a few days or a week, even stories that include longer time periods will often focus in on a certain day or two.
3. Characters, and setting. Both can vary greatly, but a common theme is to be in a world that's similar to ours so that it doesn't take a long time to explain, and the characters are often pretty simple too, with maybe one main problem that they have to overcome.
4. The Hero's Journey. A lot of books and longer writings follow this format, but not short stories they almost always completely ignore the steps, the writing is more about the emotions and a snap shot rather than a story of events.
5.Purpose. I think the purpose of short stories is to allow for someone to write a story without having to plan a more complicated theme, motives, develop characters, ect. A short story allows the writer to focus in improving their writing skills like imagery, metaphors, ect.
Considering that I'm looking into writing some short story stuff I found all of the information that you posted really helpful and interesting! I always have such an issue with writing in a simple and concise topic, so your first point on simplicity was a good reminder for me to work on focusing how to just narrow it down to a key idea that will be relevant throughout the entire piece.
ReplyDeleteWhat are you going to write your short stories on? Are you working on anything specific at the moment? I would love to give you sorts of feedback if you wanted!
Like God (Sawyer) here, I want to focus most of my efforts on short stories / fiction (at least for the beginning of the semester here) and I think these are tips that I can try to even make just from the ideas and such that you write down. While I found things such as the time line and character in my own research, I never thought of hero's journey, and working on simplicity as a goal, as opposed to a side-effect.
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