Writing Long-Form and Me
Tuesday, 30 June 2015 12:45![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lea_hazelWhen I was a teenager, my dream was to write a novel.
In the army, my dream was to write and publish a novel.
In my early twenties, I was convinced that it was just a matter of time before I wrote a publishable novel.
...I am terrible at writing novels.
Over the past fifteen or so years, I have been writing short fiction of various lengths and descriptions. I flatter myself that I have become quite good at it. I can look back at something I wrote two or three years ago and be largely pleased with it. Farther back than that, things get a little hazier. But no matter what else I've done, I've always struggled with writing longer form works of fiction.
Writing a novel is so easy and automatic an idea, that it took many years and many failed attempts before I considered the idea of not trying to write one. Most of my successful and satisfying works have been short fiction, and when I write in chaptered form I often feel like I'm floundering. Part of the impetus behind the Collar of the Damned project was to try and develop my short original fiction as part of a shared universe.
Then again, writing well-structured short fiction isn't easy, either. Looking back at the past few years of my writing, I feel like I have improved my pacing and structure a lot. Most often, when a story went past a certain length, I would structure it out of snippets clearly divided by sharp scene transitions. It made them read like chained vignettes. More recent stories are better paced and more cohesive in their structure.
Here are some hard numbers, primarily for my own reference:
The longest work on my AO3 account is The Golem of Denerim. It was begun as a loose chaptered work posted to Tumblr. The final, edited version was posted to AO3 chaptered, but could just as easily be read as a single work. It's nearly 8000 words long, so on the high end of the formal definition of a short story.
Several works have a long-ish word count because they're comprised of shorter pieces posted as chapters, mostly cross-posted from Tumblr or from anonymous fic memes.
Next longest among the single works is Black Butterfly. This is an incomplete chaptered work of fanfic. I count it among my unsuccessful attempts.
This is where things get interesting for me. Hail the Hunter (original work, 3500 words) is one of my most recent works. It's raw, and it needs editing and possibly rewriting. But the bottom line is, this is a short story written as a single, cohesive unit. Proof of concept, if you will.
Of the other works, I can say that Memory of Distant Shores (2600 words, October 2014) was posted in chapters but written as a single work, and Make Me to Rest (2600, written summer 2014, posted February 2015) was written all of a piece. All in all, I have about fifteen works over two thousand words that fit my criteria for a single, cohesive story.
It feels like progress.
In the army, my dream was to write and publish a novel.
In my early twenties, I was convinced that it was just a matter of time before I wrote a publishable novel.
...I am terrible at writing novels.
Over the past fifteen or so years, I have been writing short fiction of various lengths and descriptions. I flatter myself that I have become quite good at it. I can look back at something I wrote two or three years ago and be largely pleased with it. Farther back than that, things get a little hazier. But no matter what else I've done, I've always struggled with writing longer form works of fiction.
Writing a novel is so easy and automatic an idea, that it took many years and many failed attempts before I considered the idea of not trying to write one. Most of my successful and satisfying works have been short fiction, and when I write in chaptered form I often feel like I'm floundering. Part of the impetus behind the Collar of the Damned project was to try and develop my short original fiction as part of a shared universe.
Then again, writing well-structured short fiction isn't easy, either. Looking back at the past few years of my writing, I feel like I have improved my pacing and structure a lot. Most often, when a story went past a certain length, I would structure it out of snippets clearly divided by sharp scene transitions. It made them read like chained vignettes. More recent stories are better paced and more cohesive in their structure.
Here are some hard numbers, primarily for my own reference:
The longest work on my AO3 account is The Golem of Denerim. It was begun as a loose chaptered work posted to Tumblr. The final, edited version was posted to AO3 chaptered, but could just as easily be read as a single work. It's nearly 8000 words long, so on the high end of the formal definition of a short story.
Several works have a long-ish word count because they're comprised of shorter pieces posted as chapters, mostly cross-posted from Tumblr or from anonymous fic memes.
Next longest among the single works is Black Butterfly. This is an incomplete chaptered work of fanfic. I count it among my unsuccessful attempts.
This is where things get interesting for me. Hail the Hunter (original work, 3500 words) is one of my most recent works. It's raw, and it needs editing and possibly rewriting. But the bottom line is, this is a short story written as a single, cohesive unit. Proof of concept, if you will.
Of the other works, I can say that Memory of Distant Shores (2600 words, October 2014) was posted in chapters but written as a single work, and Make Me to Rest (2600, written summer 2014, posted February 2015) was written all of a piece. All in all, I have about fifteen works over two thousand words that fit my criteria for a single, cohesive story.
It feels like progress.
no subject
2015-07-01 01:50 (UTC)I fully support you tidying up "Hail the Hunter" and getting it published, both because it's a cool story and because then I could say "this internationally renowned Nebula award winning etc story was written for ME" :D
no subject
2015-07-03 08:12 (UTC)Transitioning to thinking about writing for money is going to be work, I can tell.
no subject
2015-07-03 12:02 (UTC)Yeah doing things for work is a whole other thing! Becoming a technical blog writer for a while was certainly a mental change from regular blogging, though my manager was from the "Yeah, looks great!" school of editing.
no subject
2015-07-02 09:11 (UTC)And short stories are hard. So many short stories I've read lately are mostly just a single scene of a larger work and they don't feel like a short story. It leaves me wondering whether I just misunderstand the definition of a short story or whether people just generally aren't writing cohesive stories anymore. :/
Hail the Hunter sounds awesome. Do you think I'd enjoy it?
no subject
2015-07-03 08:18 (UTC)