When less is more
A week to go in our latest competition and what is again emerging is how the good authors write effectively.
What do I mean by that? Well, in a short story, and in other forms of writing, the key is to keep the reader interested and the trick to that is cutting out what is not important or not needed.
A forest may be beautiful but to take a page and a half telling the reader does not work in a short story. You just do not have the space to do that.
It may, instead, mean selecting just three or four facts and letting the readers build their picture up from there.
I am a great believer in using triggers - phrases, images that allow the reader to draw on their own life, their own history and bring them to your story.
If you write about a park, it does not matter that I, as a reader, do not see exactly the same park that you see - what matters is that I see a park. If that happens, then your job is done and done well and if you only need three or four sentences to achieve it, then all the better. More space to tell the rest of your story.
Good short story writing cuts out the extraneous stuff and focuses in on what is really important. It can be a tough discipline hitting the delete button when you slaved so hard over each hand-crafted word but it is a discipline that turns a decent short story into an absolute cracker!
John Dean