519 – Writing Short Stories

Show Notes

• Bunny’s Short Story 
• How to Write a Short Story
• Save the Cat 
• Magnum Opus 
• Storytelling Constraints 
• Deathslinger 
• Shattered Ascension 
• Honor Among Thieves 
• Chaser of Shadows 
• Hellgate Incident 24
• Gently Down the Stream
• Dragon’s Hoard 
• The Dragonet Prophecy 
• Spinning Silver
• The City Born Great 
• The City We Became 
• Vorkosigan Saga

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

 Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Intro Music]

 Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

 Bunny: Bunny

Chris: …and…

Oren: Oren.

 Chris: Oh, sorry. This episode could only be five minutes long, so we need a topic that we can completely cover in that time. Quick, what should we do?

 Oren: How about a topic about how this was supposed to be five minutes long, but ended up being two hours. Because that’s usually what happens when I try to do this sort of thing.

 Bunny: [laughs] Unfortunately, I have to agree with Oren.

 Oren: Or maybe we could just play the first five minutes of another episode as its own episode.

 Chris: [laughs]

 Bunny: What if we just played The Princess who Saved Herself for five minutes?

 Oren: Yeah, here we go!

 Chris: We could just cut it off at five minutes and then say To be continued, then promise somebody will make a follow up, and then never do it.

 Bunny & Chris: [laugh]

 Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about writing short stories, which is partly because I’ve recommended short story writing on the blog, and I’ll explain why.

But if you’ve been writing novels and really longer works for a while, you might not know how to pivot to writing a short story. And there’s lots of different types of short stories. There’s not necessarily just one way to do them.

At the same time, I think it’s worth going over some tips and what tends to work better for them. And I’m gonna focus on the 3000 ~ 5000-word length, just because that’s usually the standardized short story side that if you’re size it, if you’re submitting to a publication, people are writing.

But I don’t mind talking about other sizes if the need arises.

 Bunny: Oh!

 Chris: Oh no, I just rhymed.

 Oren: You did it. There’s an excellent rhyme there, but you should obviously do is start by saving the cat on page three.

 Chris: And that ends up being like the very end of the story.

 Bunny: And the cat was saved.

 Chris: The cat was saved. The end.

 Bunny: To be continued.

Chris: To be continued.

So first: why two short stories?

We’ve talked before about how we work with a lot of writers—when we’re editing—that are on their magnum opus: Their first story, which is usually super huge, often a series. And what I personally experienced is very often you start this big passion project when you don’t know anything about storytelling, and then you learn a whole bunch of stuff because you wanna make your magnum opus that you’re super passionate about work.

But what ends up happening is, unfortunately because of practical reasons, it’s just hard sometimes to get something that you thought of when you were new and didn’t know anything to a really good place. It’s not impossible. Some people have done it, but it’s like pulling teeth. It’s real hard and you have to rethink everything.

And a lot of times you’re attached to everything, and you don’t want to give anything up. And so you’re working under 20 different constraints. We had a whole episode about constraints and storytelling and how they make everything hard. And it’s just really easy to get discouraged and think that’s how storytelling always is when your project has just made everything really hard for you. Because it can be really hard to rearrange those pieces.

So if you work on a short story, that gives you the chance to start fresh. Focus on your skills as they are now, and to also experiment, which a lot of new riders really need—to get some experimentation out of their system. So that’s a really helpful place to do it at the same time.

And then you could get a feeling of accomplishment because you could actually finish something that’s short.

That doesn’t mean it’s like super easy. It tends to be more intense per word than writing a novel, but it’s still a short length. Again, it’s easier to just get it done and call it finished.

 Bunny: See, I can intellectualize why all of these points are good reasons to write short stories. And yet I am god awful at it.

I don’t think I would write a short story of my own volition. I’ve mostly been made to write short stories for various classes and granted. Those classes usually had us read short stories that were far longer than the short stories we were actually able to write for the class. So most of my frustrations with short stories come from specifically the 10-to-12-pages-double-space-Times-New-Roman-font-size-12 limitation.

But I just, I cannot. So I’m glad someone here has tips about it.

 Oren: Yeah. I used to have fun with a biweekly little flash fiction “contest”. The prize was that you got a little emblem to put next to your forum name for a week.

 Bunny: Oh yeah. I love flash fiction for some reason. I can do extremely short and long things, but the short story is simply the wrong length.

 Oren: Yeah, it’s ’cause the flash fiction is enough for one kind of neat idea. And then the moment you’re like, okay, I need a second one, and then that just opens the flood gates and it’s like, why not all the ideas?

 Bunny: Exactly. See, Oren gets it.

 Oren: I do.

 Chris: This is process advice, but again, if you have not been consuming any stories that are about the length that you wanna write.

Right, because that helps you get a sense of what kind of stories can you tell in a small space and helps get those ideas flowing. So I think that if you do wanna write a short story and you’re having trouble pivoting, one of the first things I would do is just look for how you can consume smaller stories on a regular basis.

But I do think that sometimes it comes a matter of if we’re writing longer stories, we have a sense of what kind of material we find motivating. And that’s gonna change because you can’t do some of the things you’re used to with a novel. But you can do other things that might not hold your attention for a whole novel.

And so, getting used to like, okay, this is what actually works for me at this length and this is what I like writing. I can take some kind of experimentation.

 Oren: Yeah. Like I mentioned a few podcasts ago a manuscript that out of nowhere has a really intense car chase. Why does it have this? Well, the person watched Fury Road.

If you want to write about a car chase and there isn’t room for one in your novel, just write a little short story. Car Chase is a perfect thing for a short story. They’re fun, they’re tense, they’re easy to explain what’s happening. Go for it. That’s a perfect scenario.

 Chris: So just to be mean and stir up some drama on this podcast.

 Oren: Oh yeah…

 Chris: I gotta point out something I’ve seen both of you do in the short story, that does not work very well. And that is the fraught interaction. Between two characters that have a long history together.

 Bunny: No! [laughs]

 Oren: Chris, no, no! You can’t take that from me. Come on, Chris, have you no decency?

 Chris: It just doesn’t work very well at a short story length because again, what you learn is that that matters if you already have emotional ties to the characters. If you already understand their history, so that you can be invested in that conflict.

Whereas with a short story, you don’t have time to set any of that up, so you’re dropped in with characters you don’t know, with a history you don’t understand, and it really kills the emotions in their interaction. It really makes something that would be really heartfelt just fall flat.

Backstories in general require—

Bunny: Don’t take my backstory from meeee!

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: Maybe I want the emotions to die, Chris. maybe this is a story about emotional ghosts. You can’t be the boss of me.

Bunny: Ugh, I’ve been burned so thoroughly.

Oren: Yeah. I didn’t realize I was gonna be personally attacked on this episode.

Bunny: But you’re right though. I think that is another thing that I struggle with with short stories is that we want a climactic, heartfelt, dramatic confrontation, but you don’t have time for much context.

And it sucks because I want you to weep at my scenario, but you don’t care about it.

Oren: It’s not my fault that I love interactions between characters with lots of history. It is a medical condition that I have, Chris.

Bunny: [laughs]

Chris: People can definitely do heartfelt short stories, but I do feel like by default the ones that are most successful, particularly speculative fiction, short stories, tend to be the ones that focus on high novelty concepts and fun ideas and gimmicks, and not on creating deep emotions.

Because of that upfront investment in, okay, we have to get to know the characters and get to know their situation. And emotional investment takes time. So, I think that if you were gonna try to do that in a short story, you really have to focus in on it. You have to simplify, cut it down. And I’m not gonna say it’s impossible, but it’s gonna be a lot more difficult.

And you gotta think about, okay, how am I gonna sell my audience on this character real fast? And is the character in a really sympathetic position, for instance, for me to do that? So it’s definitely a higher bar, whereas I think the ones that tend to be do really well are just like, Hey, look at this cute, fun monster.

Oren: Yeah. Sometimes this can be a good opportunity to make use of one of those high novelty storytelling prompts that float around Tumblr and potentially other social media sites, but they’re like always screenshots of a Tumblr exchange. Some of those can work pretty well as short stories.

What if that frog that we see dancing a lot was trying to start a dance school or something? That could be a short story maybe, but like probably not the ones that are like, okay, so what if a woman sold her firstborn to both a witch and a demon, and then the witch and the demon had a custody battle, and then they had to co-parent and then they fell in love.

That probably wouldn’t work for a short story. There’s too many steps there.

Chris: There’s a lot of different steps there. Yeah, but here’s some example of concepts I’ve used for short stories. I have a short story—

Bunny: [sarcastic] Which are perfect and without any flaw.  Cause I don’t do that tiresome, ineffective, dramatic character confrontation. Isn’t that right, Chris?

Chris: I mean, I do have serious short stories. I just think that the novelty ones work better. I’m just shoving them under the rug so that you don’t see them. [laughs]

Bunny: Are you gonna passive aggressively link to Honor Among Thieves with the show notes? Just to leave that there.

Chris: I don’t make the show notes. This is up to Oren.

Oren: But I was definitely going to do that, so…

Bunny: Oh, no. Cut it. Now I’m passive aggressive.

Chris: I didn’t name any names. I did not name any stories.

Bunny: Look, mine’s not published so you can’t prove it even exists.

Oren: Yeah, we’ll see about that.

Bunny: I don’t even remember what I called that one.

Chris: But again, these are things like little shadow creatures must tame the household cat that’s terrorizing them. It’s a fairly familiar situation. There’s something that’s different, but it’s also something that can happen relatively fast, like you’re trying to monitor a gate to hell, but your asshole coworker won’t get you in an important document.

Again, something that has something novelty in it, but is a relatively familiar situation otherwise, and is something that could be resolved quickly.

Oren: Based on reader feedback in a mild defense—but not really—of my bad habits. My two best received short stories on the site have been Deathslinger and Shattered Ascension.

Both of which have characters with backstories but getting that backstory across was the hardest and probably worst part of the story.

Chris: But those are also your longest ones.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: Those are notably your longest short stories.

Oren: They are longer.

Bunny: They’re so good!

Chris: Which is fine if you decide that, okay, I wanna do my backstory and I need all this set up and I can’t fit it in the standard story length, and you don’t have your heart set on sending it to a publication or whatever, then yeah, go ahead! Make it a little longer! Make it a novelette instead or something that’s at a slightly longer size. Make it the size that it needs to be, and then you can try for a shorter idea for your next one.

Oren: And even in those two stories, I didn’t depend on characters who knew each other super well. In de Slinger, the protagonist.

Meets a character who she knew as when they were kids, but they haven’t seen each other for a while, so it’s not like they have a long history. And then in Shattered Ascension, the protagonist doesn’t know either of the two main characters who are also there with her. She’s only just met them. And so instead, I spent the time explaining this weird premise of what if everything was airships.

Chris: I do remember having to very carefully manage how your backstory and context was communicated in Deathslinger. I do remember working a lot on that.

Oren: Yeah, that was hard. It was a hard thing.

Chris & Bunny: [laugh]

Bunny: And that’s why you should write novels only.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: Yeah, only ever novels.

Bunny: [laughs] See, I think the problem I have with a lot of short stories is that they feel like scenes from novels, and that’s because I’m used to writing novels and because I want them to be novels. And that’s how I end up doing these interactions that require so much context.

I think the first short story that I’ve written that was alright but not very good was basically just an action scene. It was just an action scene grabbed out of context and it still wasn’t very good for that reason. Cause I had to explain in the middle of combat how the magic system works.

Oren: Yeah! [laughs]

Bunny: And that was, difficult, let’s say. But required less personal setup.

Oren: I did basically the same thing for the first and possibly only short story I got to write for college.

Bunny: Wow. How’d you get away?

Oren: All of the classes said creative writing. And I finally found one that didn’t entirely lie.

We did one short story exercise. And I wrote something similar, it was an action scene. And with very little setup, it was like, assassins want to kill this lady and she’s very cool, so she’s not gonna get killed. And I turned it in, and the professor’s feedback was basically: It’s not very good. Make it better.

Which you’re right, it’s not very good, but I don’t know. Could I get something a little more specific?

Bunny: Right. And I think Chris, with the short story that you mentioned, of mine, that you’re subtweeting here: I made it more difficult for myself because not only was it this backstory between two characters, but they were also on a quest to retrieve or reach a magical object that also needed to be explained because it was affecting the environment. So there were eight different things going on at once.

Chris: Bunny. I hate to break it to you, but I’m not referring to just one story.

Bunny: Oh, no. [laughs] Wait, what else would mine have you read?

Chris: I’m so much a meany. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help it. I had to say it.

Bunny: Okay. Okay. Okay. You gotta name ’em then.

Chris: I don’t remember their names.

Bunny: Oh… [laughs] we were gonna fight about this.

Chris: That was one of them. The other one was actually a play.

Bunny: Oh, it was a short play with the monsters, wasn’t it?

Chris: Yeah.

Bunny: Okay. Yeah, that one too. I like that one though. Aw.

Oren: Please stand by as the Mythcreants hosts air their dirty laundry.

Bunny: [laughs] I mean, maybe I’ll just give you a link so you can post one of them, so that people actually know what we’re talking about here.

Oren: If you want, you might as well.

Bunny: I might as well.

Oren: If they’re available, I’ll take a link. I’ll put that in the show notes. Just see if I won’t.

Bunny: Yeah, I think Stormcaller was that first one. I will get you all a link so you can see how bad that short story was.

Chris: Yeah. Oren just has lots of them. Oren has even more of them than you.

Bunny: Look, I think Honor among Thieves is very good. Don’t listen to her, Oren.

Oren: It’s less bad than it originally was. You put it that way. It’s part of the expanse punk genre of stories where you can tell whoever wrote this had just recently read The Expanse.

Chris: Again, the other thing, backstory is huge. That’s a really big deal and trying to jump into super emotional moment without enough context…

But I think it’s also worth talking about, okay, how much stuff do you have in your story and how unique are you trying to make it? So you have a unique and complex world and tons of characters and lots of places and things. It can just be too much. That’s unfortunately a lesson I had to learn when writing short stories is that I don’t really have room. To do an interesting world.

Even in my novelette, Gently Down the Stream. I tried to do an interesting world and I realized it was a bit overburdened. That I struggled with that one a bit because the world was actually more complex than my 12,000 words short story could really handle.

Oren: I do remember there was a bit of discussion about whether we could have letter carrying dogs.

Bunny & Chris: [laugh]

Chris: I really wanted the letter carrying dogs.

Bunny: Oh my gosh.

Chris: I really wanted them.

Bunny: Okay, well now I want them.

Chris: That was the darling I had to kill.

Oren: We tried to figure out a way to make that work and we just could not do it.

Chris: Yeah, we had to kill, I had to kill that darling

Oren: But the dog is fine, to be clear

Bunny: This episode is just trauma. This is just short story related trauma, some of which is inflicted.

Chris: Now that I’m working on stories that are longer, that’s the thing I’m enjoying: doing more worldbuilding.

With the short story, again, it works much better if you just take a stock world from the nearest sub-genre. And then if you want something unique, make the story about that so that you’re not overloading. The story has to be directly about that.

I mean, Gently Down the Stream is a post-apocalyptic version of Seattle with a unique monster that causes a post apocalypse and then people live an entirely different way and it’s just, you know, it’s just too much.

Oren: I would say that the pick a standard sub-genre and then add a weird thing is a very successful way to do short stories. Because one of the issues with short stories is that they cannot deliver the same level of satisfaction as a novel because they’re very short and they aren’t gonna have the same attachment ’cause they are short.

So giving something that is a big novel hook. Is a good way to get people to read them. And good news: By the time the novelty fades, the story’s over.

Chris: And that’s also why they work really well for subversions.  Cause you can then use that stock story and then make something different about it.

Oren: Yeah. I don’t have to do an entire novel from the point of view of a dragon. What is a dragon gonna do for the entire novel? I’m sure I could come up with something, but it’s not easy.

Chris: I mean, there are a surprising number of novels now about dragon main characters.

Oren: Yeah. But they all just turn into people. Boring!

Bunny: Yeah. You’ve read The Dragonet Prophecy?

Oren: Yeah, they’re just people.

Chris: They do kind of just become people.

Oren: They’re just people that are vaguely dragon shaped a little bit. Whereas when I just did it, it was just for a short story. It was for 2000 words. What’s the point of view of this dragon as adventurers attack her in her cave?

And that works great. I couldn’t have done that for a novel. There wasn’t a novel worth story in there, but it was fun for a short story, and it was neat. People were like, oh, that’s interesting. And also kind of gross, it turned out. But you know, you take what you can get.

Chris: Horror also can be novelty driven. So I think horror can actually work surprisingly well. cause you can bring out all of the surprises and kill a character right away and you’re done.

Oren: Yeah. Horror works well as a short story for the same reason. And that is that in a novel, horror fades over time. You get less scared of things as you learn about them with familiarity. And that’s not to say you can’t make a horror novel. You can.

It’s just more challenging, you need to figure out how you’re gonna keep the spook factor going—

Chris: or just do a much slower buildup.

Oren: Yeah. Whereas with a short story, you can have a spooky thing and then the story ends like BOO! Story over.

I have also personally found that spooky stories work well as short stories because if I’m going for a spooky ending, I often don’t have to figure out a way to get my character out of the trouble I got them into. Because they just die. Or some other spooky thing happens. And you still need a downward turning point or whatever to make it feel satisfying. But logistically, it’s easier.

Chris: Big twists work really well with short stories. So if you’re like, oh, that would be a cool twist, you don’t have to write an entire novel just to be a vehicle for a twist. You can write a short story instead.

And you don’t want it to be boring before the twist, but because there is less to get through, if you have a twist that really is surprising and works, there’s almost like less burden. You want some entertainment factor before there, but the twist could make the story more just because the story’s short.

Oren: So we could address the elephant in the room, which is: Can I write a short story and then turn that into a novel?

Chris: I think it’s interesting. The thing we usually see is, again, people making short stories out of their novel world and characters to advertise their novel.

I feel like that’s an uphill battle right there, because things inherently need to be simpler and less complex and nuanced in a short story, so they come off strong right away, and you’re not overloading yourself with complexity.

Whereas with a novel, if you make things more unique and more nuanced, that tends to pay off with a larger amount of space. So I feel like you would need to have some way to show something that is simple enough, and then be able to expand it into something more complex if you’re willing to just rewrite it. How canonical does this have to be?

Oren: Yeah, the examples I was gonna bring up are that there are a number of books that are on lists as being based on short stories. And they are—sort of—but they’re also very different from their source material.

Like Spinning Silver and Enders Game are apparently both based on short stories. And just based on the descriptions of these short stories, they were not available anywhere that I could read.

Chris: Oh, that’s too bad. I would like to read the original Spinning Silver.

Oren: But apparently it was about Rumpelstiltskin.

Chris: You can still kind of see the Rumpelstiltskin element in the novel, but I didn’t realize it until I was told that it was a Rumpelstiltskin story.

Oren: And then Ender’s game was supposedly different in some other way. I think Ender’s Game was really narrowly focused on the reveal of actually you were killing the aliens and you thought this was just a game.

Bunny: Spoilers!

Oren: So those are both very, very different. It’s not like you took the short story and then wrote a novel at the end of it. It’s like you took the short story as inspiration and then wrote a novel.

Bunny: I’ve actually managed to do that. I turned one of my flash fiction pieces into a game.

Oren: Oh, very cool.

Bunny: A branching game, which seems to have been well received. I don’t know. It got one five-star review on itch. And the short story was basically about—I guess spoilers for the game—It was about a bride who’s about to be married and she’s turning into a bug. She’s gaining the characteristics of a mantis. The groom kind of sucks and she eats him at the end.

But obviously, for a branching story, you have to have it go other places. Other than that, so it became much more fleshed out. I could not have kept it as simple as I did in the initial flash fiction piece.

Oren: Oh, wait, wait. I read the game. Okay. That’s why it sounds familiar. Yeah. I’m beta reading on the game itself.

Bunny: Yes, you beta read the game. That’s right.

Oren: It’s a good game.

Bunny: But yeah, I’d say it ended up being successfully fleshed out, but I needed an actual setting. I needed different ways that it could go. At one point I considered just calling her the bride the way I do in the original short story. But that didn’t really work for the purposes of a longer piece, what was functionally a novella. So I don’t know. It can be done.

Oren: The one warning that I’ll give is that it will probably not work to just use your short story as chapter one of a novel. If it does work, chances are your short story wasn’t a good short story to begin with because that suggests you did not really wrap up the plot properly. And you can see this in the book The City We Became, which is based on a short story. And the short story basically just becomes the extended chapter one.

But—spoilers for this book—the short story is the bad guy getting the shit kicked out of her and losing. And so the novel just has that as its opening and then at the end she barely manages to escape.

Chris: That is not a good opening for a novel.

Oren: It’s a bad opening and it makes everything else that comes after it feel way less interesting because the characters are slowly discovering their magic. But we’ve already seen like a giant magic city battle in the first chapter. So, none of this is that exciting.

Yeah. So just don’t, just don’t do it.

Also don’t take the epilogue and sell that as its own short story. I think it was Escape Pod which did that with like a Raksura book.

You’re listening to it like this is clearly not a short story. Like this is the end of some other story that I haven’t read. And then I finally found that Raksura book and read it and I was like, Hey, guys, what the heck?

Bunny: [laughs]

Chris: If you’ve already written a novel and you have fans and you want tidbits for your fans, then it becomes more reasonable to write short stories with those characters and that world because they already know and like the characters.

Oren: Yeah. I guess if your name is Lois McMaster Bujold, you can do it.

Chris: Martha Wells has some short stories that are related to her that Raksura books with the same characters. They’re not bad if you know the characters. But there’s so many characters and she wants to put them all on her short stories, and it just wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t know and like those characters already, but as a way of something to give fans while they wait, for instance, for the next novel, then yeah, they’re pretty good for that.

Oren: All right, well, I think we are gonna have to call this podcast to a close. We’re out over time, once again. I told you we couldn’t stay within the word count limit!

Bunny: [laughs] At least it’s not two hours. Maybe someday we’ll turn this into the first part of a two-hour episode.

Chris: And if you can spare a dollar for this poor podcast that has gone over time, please go to patreon.com/mythcreants and become a patron today.

Oren: And before we go, I’m gonna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.

We will talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.