{"id":198,"date":"2013-03-26T23:34:39","date_gmt":"2013-03-26T21:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/suchwanderings.wordpress.com\/?p=198"},"modified":"2013-03-26T23:34:39","modified_gmt":"2013-03-26T21:34:39","slug":"short-stories-challenges-of-brevity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/2013\/03\/26\/short-stories-challenges-of-brevity\/","title":{"rendered":"Short stories: the challenges of brevity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I edited and sent off a short story today. Exciting! I should really write more shorts. The trouble is, I often tend to go for expansive stuff rather than the knife-sharp and short stuff&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking I should practise writing flash fiction to hone my short-writing skills. Was inspired by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2012\/may\/14\/how-to-write-flash-fiction\">this piece<\/a> in The Guardian; I love the notion of &#8220;stories in your pocket&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>Related to short stories, a while ago I read David B. Coe&#8217;s post on Magical Words comparing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.magicalwords.net\/david-b-coe\/on-writing-why-i-love-writing-short-fiction\/\">novels vs short fiction<\/a> in terms of the writing process. I wish I could learn to do this well: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This is the essence of writing a compelling short story:  taking a situation, a moment in time, and giving it narrative structure so that it becomes something greater and more meaningful, something that feels complete.  It is what I strive to do with my short fiction.  When writing a short piece, I know that I can\u2019t explain everything about my world or my characters or even my magic system.  So I tell my readers the bare minimum of what they need to know and I try to allow my story to exist on its own terms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Today I also wrote a poem draft during my walk to work and did some daydreaming for a potential fantasy trilogy (shhhh), so it&#8217;s been a surprisingly good writing day, all in all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I edited and sent off a short story today. Exciting! I should really write more shorts. The trouble is, I often tend to go for expansive stuff rather than the knife-sharp and short stuff&#8230; I&#8217;ve been thinking I should practise writing flash fiction to hone my short-writing skills. Was inspired by this piece in The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,30,19,22],"tags":[39,40,12],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion","category-linkage","category-short-stories","category-submission","tag-discussing-the-craft","tag-magical-words","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}