Every now and then it’s
good to go back to your roots, and I did with my Decadent Edge stories. For me,
my roots are with the short story. The first story I published in 2009 was less
than five thousand words, and this was only months after I declared I couldn’t
write less than a ninety thousand word novel.
A friend, knowing I
needed to change my evil ways, challenged me, saying I had to learn to tighten.
After reading my current manuscript, she’d declared it wordy, full of inactive and
unnecessary words that did nothing to move the story forward. And full of my
personality, which if you knew my friend, this wasn’t a compliment. You see, I
have all the attention span of a two-year old and my manuscripts ran all over
the place like a snot-nosed toddler, finding trouble wherever they could.
I will admit, she was
right and it took some hard lessons and nose to the grindstone efforts to whip
my stories into publishable shape. Now I’m proud to say, in almost every review
I’ve received, my quick pace and engaging characters are often mentioned. This
pace is the result of my friend’s challenge, one I’ll be eternally grateful
for.
The challenge went
something like this. Tell a story in seven-hundred words.
I can’t begin to tell you
how anxious that made me. How does anyone tell a story in that short of word
count? I dug my heels in and shook my head. No way could I do that.
Of course, being a good
critter and friend, she didn’t let me get away with it. What I discovered
during that little exercise in patience and frustration, is that writing a short
story isn’t any easier than writing a long one, actually, for me, it was
harder. Every single word had to have a purpose. I had no wiggle room. Hell, I
couldn’t describe my hero with so little words. Who could? So, determined to
prove how wrong she was, I penned a story about a cattle rustler and was amazed
when I managed to keep it fewer than seven hundred words. Actually, it ended
with five hundred.
After that, I began to
write shorts with a passion, challenging myself to make every word count. In
one story, about a spy, I’ve been told the hero is hot by several readers. Now,
I’m not going to lie, this bloats my ego a bit. When you go back and read the
story, nowhere in the five thousand words is an actual description of the hero.
Booyah! Nothing. Not one word of race, eye color, height, weight or hair color.
It is his personality that readers are seeing and I can’t begin to tell you how
much that thrills me.
Taking the techniques of
short stories into your novels will do several things. One, it will make it
extremely difficult to pen those one-hundred thousand word beasts you used to
write. You will struggle to hit sixty. You’ve trained yourself to cut the junk
and you will see this when you write your novels. It’s a habit that will stick
with you.
Two, you will find your
wordiness is under control. No, characters glancing back over their shoulders,
or licking their lovers with their tongues. (Don’t shake your head; you know
you’ve done it. If you haven’t, ever, I
bow before you.)
Three, action will become
limited to powerful, focused scenes. There will be less unnecessary movement,
speech tags and eye gazing. And in this process, your characters will become
three dimensional. Don’t worry so much about getting the description out in one
or two paragraphs. You will learn to let your characters reveal themselves.
One. You do not have the
word count to describe scenery. No strolling through fields of lavender holding
hands and contemplating the meaning of life. Sorry, unless that lavender plays
a pivotal role in your story, you just don’t have a place for it. This brings
me to my next point. Sometimes you don’t have enough word count to describe the
characters in detail. OMG, how do I let the reader know he’s totally hot? I
mean he’s got dark hair, blue eyes and washboard abs. They have to know. I
can’t leave that out. You can and in some cases, you will. And when you do,
those characters will have to be believable. The reader needs to be able to
relate to them on some level, or the other, or the story will not be engaging.
It is this challenge about the shorts I love so much. And the shorts that
belong to the Edge series are intense. They are snapshots, hot scenes that hit
hard and fast. They may not be epics, but they do tell a story, and they tell
it powerfully.
It took me a while to
figure this out, which brings me to number four. You will become a better
writer by putting into practice the skills you learned from penning short
stories.
So, all that being said,
I hope you check out my Carnality shorts in the Decadent Edge Series. I promise
there’s no strolling through fields of lavender, but you will get memorable
scenes and a sense of place and character.Buy Link: http://www.decadentpublishing.com/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=D+L+jackson&osCsid=vtuhfb5pq8sc03cvtekgsnbhk4&button=search
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