Of Continuance

Continuing from the topic I wrote about yesterday, I sat down this afternoon with Mind at Rest (which I by the way think I'll give a new name, again), and started crossing out and removing things from my sixth draft. As I said earlier, I had previously italicized everything that I thought a candidate for removal, and when I sat down with it this afternoon, most of it had to go. I italicized even more, but this time I didn't bother waiting with most of it and just removed it directly. And even though I told myself not to, I couldn't help but pressing the Word Count button.

 

1984.

One thousand, nine hundred, and eighty-four words.

How embarassing. (Not to mention the eerie connection to Mr Orwell)

And that's with a couple of sentences still italicized, and I don't think I've gotten round to rewriting the unnecessarily long introduction.

Then again, as I myself wrote in an English assignment, "the better the cook, the less you get", applies to most written text as well. But at some point, you must get that perception that maybe you're writing too little after all. Perhaps you're not dwelling on certain subjects and ideas as long as you should. Perhaps your sentences are short, cut off, or not descriptive enough. I mean, I don't think one should go on too much in any type of text, but I, personally, like lavish descriptions and detailed ideas. And I always had the background intention of writing something somewhat longer than last time.

Now, I used to be a notorious rambler. When someone told me to write a short story, I'd go on for forty pages. This was to me perfectly reasonable as at the time, I believed a short story was really anything under 100 pages. I'm not sure whence it came, but there was some point when I realized that a short story really should be short. It's not flash fiction, obviously, but there's a certain art form in keeping to a certain length.

But what is a short story, really? To me, it's really maybe two to four thousand words, -ish, not too concrete, and with some sort of subtext. But I realize that just as flash fiction has a tendency to be rather... concrete, down-to-earth, so is there a large movement that holds that short stories are really just novels in a mini format. To me, it's a completely different form of writing, as different as, say, a novel to an article. Shorter, sure, but there's a lot more to it.

I mean, sure, there's the sci-fi and fantasy short stories, I suppose. Isaac Asimov, whose books I have in the thousands, wrote a whole lot of short stories. Most of his short stories expanded upon the concept that he worked with in his novels - i.e., this kind of technological philosophical theory. Robots, their laws, and the loop holes. Every short story he wrote, more or less, examined some aspect of his technological scenario, with a philosophical underline. The philosophy was obviously built on a fictional basis, which would be the case in most scifi/fantasy books , but there was still a tinge of background thought, and when I closed the book I did feel intellectually satiated.

Now, granted, I'm not an avid reader of short fiction outside of anthologies and the occasional website. I've not much to do with short stories at large. Yet through the education that I've gotten, through the work that I've done on the subject, that has always been my final conclusion. Perhaps it's just a genre thing. After all, a crime novel, the whodunnit kinda thing, for instance, will have a completely different setup than another kind of novel. 

Of course, perhaps short fiction is just that, short fiction. Flash fiction has a tendency to be, at least to the degree that I've read it. Just a snippet, a very short tale of everyday life, usually. Interesting in a sense, but I prefer the slightly longer pieces.

I think I should look into some novellas. See what they're like.

(my god, "intellectually satiated"? see the kind of stuff i need to remove from my drafts all the time? left it there just as an example.)