In short….
An entry received over the weekend brings me back to a subject I have tackled in previous blogs, namely that of the short short story.
All writing is about every word doing its job but that becomes an even more pronounced skill when you are writing something short, like a poem or a story.
I write novels and they tend to run to between 60-70,000 words. I try to make sure that every word counts but I do have the luxury of taking a paragraph or two to describe a place or a person if I want. As long as I do not bore my reader, that is fine.
However, if you are writing a short story you really do not have that luxury, something of which I was reminded by the story that came in over the weekend, which ran to less than 200 words.
The length meant that the writer had to make every word do its job and discard every word, every thought, every element of the story that slowed it down. The story was stripped to its basics.
Did it lose anything for that? In my view, no. Yes, it left me to work out a lot, think through what I was being told and where it was happening. But it remained a powerful piece of writing for all that.
So when people send in requests asking how long their story should be, I always remind them that our top limit is 2,000 words (for ease of reading by our judge) but as to the bottom limit? Well, it is how many words you need to tell the story. That’s the true art of storytelling and always will be.
John Dean