Episode 28: Short Stories
K
Hello, all my beautiful cinnabar moths or whatever kind of moth you want to be, today, I’m so excited to be talking about what makes a good short story. And I think that this is really subjective like it is with anything. So when, for me a big red flag is when someone says that they’re the expert. And there’s only one way to make a good anything. I think that’s wrong, because what’s good and what’s not good is a matter of taste, and what your taste as may not be my taste. So for me, I love a good portal fantasy. But I also love a good horror story. And I love a short story where nothing happens when like people get up, they just have a normal day, everything’s great and happy. And there’s no rising or falling action. And that kind of goes against convention, right when we’re talking about writing stories. And even when we look at teaching people to write as little people in, you know, kindergarten, on up, and kindergarten, I really think that’s when writing is most exciting. And the teaching of writing is most exciting, because we let kids write about a day on the playground. And that’s just pure happiness. For most kids. For some kids, it’s not and I’m sorry for for that. And for anyone who the playground wasn’t a safe space. It should be for everyone always everywhere. But that’s not the case. There’s some kids. And I was one of these kids and kindergarten, I wasn’t really interested in the playground, I like writing my own little chapter books. And I would write four or five page sentence book, and feel like I had just changed the world. Like I had written the next masterpiece. And that was really fun and exciting for me. And I would gather my family and be like, it’s presentation time. Everybody sat around, pay attention to me, because I have written a masterpiece. This little four sentence thing is going to be the next best seller propel us all the fame, lights, action camera, I’m ready for my close up level of writing. And I think that naivete of the rules, and the convention and just basically publishing as an industry creates some really great stories. And I was looking back. I didn’t have the best relationship with my mother. But one of the things my mother did do that really warmed my heart is she kept everything I’ve ever written and gave to her. And for her birthday, my mother would always request that we make her something rather than buy her something. Because she felt like if something was store bought that that was someone else’s creativity, someone else’s energy. And there wasn’t really any love in it is how she would describe it to us. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that. I’ve gotten some great storebought gifts. And I’ve given what I think is are some great storebought gifts, I feel like one of the best gifts I’ve ever given was a walk, I gave my husband a walk the first birthday that I knew him and that we were together. And it’s something he had wanted for a really long time. And we still have it over 22 years later. And in pepper grinder that we still have over 20 years later, every time I see them. It reminds me of that birthday, and how just thrilled and happy he was to receive these two things he always wanted, but never got around to buying for himself or no one ever gave him. But back to doing what makes a good short story. And I think what makes a good short story is a story you enjoy. Because I look back at when my mother died. I got all of the things about me that she had saved because it was just clutter to my stepfather. And it was one of the things I did was cleaned out her her house for him. And I said hey, I want all of my baby stuff and he was like, pick it I don’t care. And I looked back through those books with illustrations. Thank you very much. And I liked them. I still stand by them today. I enjoyed reading them. I think they’re fun and interesting. And
K
I have dyslexia so I’m one of the few people who can actually read them. And my husband also chats also able to read them. And they just fill me with so much joy, that I had this unbridled license to create. And that’s what I hope this, this episode of the writer’s triangle will give to all of you who are listening is an unbridled license to create. And there are enough places out there in the world that you can publish. And you know what I encourage people to get on medium. If you’re a writer, and you have a story, and it just for whatever reason isn’t picking up steam, or nobody’s wanting it, start your own blog, or go on medium and publish it yourself, put it out there for the world to see, I think in the world of writing that writers don’t trust themselves anymore. And I think that is a byproduct of publishing. I think publishing teaches writers not to trust their instincts. And I want that to go away. I want writers to trust their instincts, I want writers to revel in their writing, and love and enjoy the writing. And I’ll be honest, there are writers that I’ve looked at their writing on medium. And I’m like, this is an amazing writer, I want to reach out to them and get an ask for a piece of their writing. There’s also a poet who I don’t have their permission to blast them on, on the podcast. But there is a poet that I’ve been pursuing for a year that I would love a story from. And that’s because I saw their writing on their website, I absolutely fell in love with it. And I felt like every single one of their poems could easily be turned into a story. We don’t publish poetry, and that’s why I’m hounding them for a book. Or even a submission to the E zine. Short story because I just love the way their mind works. And I just love their poetry, their poetry, and I am blown away anytime. Amy ones work that I love is projected on Mike, what are they out of their minds to not just scoop up every last morsel of your writing. And that’s exciting to me. And I want them to feel excited. So when you’re thinking about holding everything back, hoping for that publication, hoping for that prestigious publication, you might actually be sabotaging yourself because presses like me, I won’t see your work. Because I’ll be honest with the amount of reading that I do my reading for fun. I do reading for reviews, I do reading for submissions. And I also do reading for fun, and reading for fun. I’m on medium, and reading for fun. I’m on blogs and websites. So to me, what makes a good short story is one that you love, one that you enjoy. And there’s a lot of talk in the industry about what a short story is, for me to publish a story. It’s a short story for the purpose of publication. As y’all know, if you listen to the podcast regularly, I start at the end. And when I started the end, that means I look at page count. And I look at final word count. What do I want the document I’m creating, whether it be a book or the ezines page count to be and
K
what do I want the makeup to be? And what do I want the layout to look like? So I have all of this imagery in my mind of layout, flow, consistency, readers expectations, all of those things are going through my mind. And for me, I just really got stuck on 3000 to 3500 words. And I’ll be honest, when I started writing short stories, the short stories I really gravitated to and really enjoyed reading. We’re between 10 and 15 pages, and that’s between 3003 1500 words, and also depends on font and spacing and all of that. But we’re publishing an anthology and I read a really amazing and I don’t have their permission to say their names. I don’t know. And I don’t know why I’m so weird about that. I think I should just ask people Hey, do you care if I talk about you on the cast. And if I mentioned you by name, that I’m working with a really talented, fabulous, short story author. And it’s really exciting to me because they one of the stories that they they send in for the anthology that are creating was four pages long. And it was an amazing story, I absolutely loved it, it had a beginning, a middle and end, it had flow, it made sense. And even that dynamic, beginning, middle and end, every story has to have a beginning. So every story has a beginning. And every story has an end. And the end of the story is when you stop writing. And it may be that the story leaves the reader wanting more. But with the short story, I find a good short story for me. At the end of it, I want more. For me, a good short story makes me feel greedy for the writing. Right? Just want more of it. And I don’t want it to end. There are some short stories, that when I read them, I have a feeling of satisfaction. I’m just deeply satisfied with the ending. And I feel like okay, that was a story that’s finished for me. I would read a sequel of it. But I wouldn’t want this story to continue, I’d want it to be something else. So do you see how I take a breath? I start with, I want a story that that leaves me wanting more. And then I switched to you know what their stories I read that really had a great ending that left me satisfied. My point being is that even when we think as publishers that we know what our rules are, something can come along. That’s so amazing, that it completely changes everything we think about writing. And that’s exciting.
K
That’s exciting when you read a short story that changes your understanding of what a good short story is. And that’s what’s been happening to me because before getting into publishing my for myself and having my own process, I’ll admit that I read a lot of the traditional writers, right, like if you think short story for me, the first person who pops to mind is Ray Bradbury. But Ray Bradbury, His writing has a very set structure. And the same with Stephen King, they both have very set structures. And I mentioned them because they’re the first two short story authors that I read a lot of when I was younger, I went on to read other fabulous, fabulous authors. But I want to talk about those two, because they both follow conventions for their genre. When they write a start story in a specific genre, they follow like what you would learn in a literary class is the right way. And I’m putting air quotes around that to write a short story in terms of short story structure. But when you look at posts on, for example, I feel like Paul gave himself permission to write whatever he wanted. And I know scholars will say that he followed classical structures does that and the other, and no, he didn’t he created convention, if we really look at writing, and there aren’t a lot of typical short story writers who are writing in the vein of Poe. And the reason why I mentioned these three really famous authors, I want to make it accessible to everyone. And I don’t want to mention authors that they might not know because I’m trying to compare and contrast. If you look at these three authors, and you take any short story from all three of them, because they’re both undeniably all three of them are undeniably successful. They’re so different. How do you make rules? How do you make a set of rules that says, This is the only way to do it? I think knowing the rules of writing for me when I was reading them in the six years to make the press when I was reading about writing, and all of the rules of writing. And when I was creating the anthology, and reading about the rules of short story writing. For me, I was like, huh, I don’t know if I agree with all of this. And some places are so specific about anthologies that they have a paragraph count for when the action is supposed to rise. And I thought, Wow, talk about that. wrapping a writer in chains. I don’t know how a writer would write with, okay, thinking about all of these rules, okay, I’m not paragraph x y Zed. So there was one place I read that like by paragraph for the action should, the setup of the story should be done. So for port four paragraphs rather, should be dedicated to backstory, and setting up the characters and setting up what the action will be. And I was like, what? That doesn’t feel right to me. For me, and I’m published in our Anthology, I wrote two short stories for it, because I still enjoy writing short stories on a publisher and I can, but I didn’t shorten the length of the anthology, I didn’t count my stories and the lengths so that I didn’t take an author’s place. Because I love authors. And I wanted to give as as many opportunities as I could for for the anthology. So, for me, when I was writing my stories, I didn’t follow that role at all. There’s not four, there’s not four paragraphs of story background, or setting up, I feel like for me, when I write a short story, you’re jumping into the middle of someone’s life or the middle of a scene. And that’s the way I write. That’s quite a turn some people off. And I get that, and that’s okay. Everything is not for everybody. But for me, just doing a lot of setup and backstory, as a writer writing a short story doesn’t feel organic, that there’s another short story artists that really likes doing setup that we
K
published. And there. There’s a few actually, in the anthology who really enjoyed writing this setup, really did a lot of dedication to backstory. And I really, really enjoyed their story. Like there’s not a single story in the anthology that I don’t love. I think they’re all really amazing short stories in their own right. And all of them are written so differently, that there are none of them. Like if we look at the anthology as a collection, none of the short stories in the anthology follow all of the rules. They’re a mix of the rules. Like I don’t think there’s any that has four paragraphs, exactly dedicated three or four paragraphs dedicated to backstory. I think there’s some with a paragraph or two in there, some with maybe a page or two, dedicated to backstory. And then there’s some that have no backstory that jump right in from page one into the action. And there’s others that have building action, and it doesn’t really feel like anything’s happening until wham, like the last three pages, everything jumps off. I think all of those are valid. I think all of those are interesting to read. And I think the ones I haven’t mentioned, are the different formats and approaches to writing are interesting to read. And that’s what makes a good story. So a good short story or a good story in general. So for me, when I was putting together the anthology, and I was looking at short, short stories, the question I asked myself is, could I defend it against a one star rating? And that’s kind of my rubric. If the story ever gets a one or two star rating, what would my reaction be? Because as a publisher, if my reaction is Yeah, I agree with it. I shouldn’t have published the story. That’s me. That’s my thing. So I look at what would be the worst thing someone could say about this, and why wouldn’t they like it? And if I were in conversation with someone, what would I say to them about why I disagree with their opinion? Now, here’s the thing. Pro tip, authors do not go after anyone who reviews your story and gives it a bad review. Don’t ever have this conversation. This conversation is in my mind for me, and how I survive a one or two star rating, because I love every single book we’ve published, and every single book we’ve published has gotten at least a 212 star rating. And I don’t agree. I don’t agree with the two stars. Whenever I see it, I don’t agree with it. And that’s an important part for me. And my emotions. and managing negative reviews is in my mind, I say, okay, I can see why this person is saying that. And it’s not something it’s not a perspective I share. And I stand by this story. And I stand by this author. And I believe in this author, and I believe in the story. So for me, I don’t share with up I don’t draw authors attention to negative reviews. I think if you’re oppressing, you’re doing that stop it. You can’t stop authors from going on Goodreads, and, and checking out their reviews. But I would say to all of the authors of the anthology, if somebody picks out your story, and gives your story, in particular, a negative review, I hope that you remember me saying, I love your story. I think it’s fantastic. And this is for every single one of our authors in the anthology, I stand by every single one of those stories. I stand by the content notes. And I think even with the content, no one always read content notes before you read a story. Because a lot of the law reviews come from people that go into books blind. And that’s a bad habit. Y’all need to stop that not wanting to know what a story is about fine. That’s all well and good. Don’t read the back of the book, judge a book by its cover, go into it that way. Awesome. Love it. What I say is, don’t go into the story
K
without reading the content notes, because you’re doing your staff and the author a disservice. Because if they follow my guidelines for what makes a good short story, and that is a story that at the end of it, you love it and you’re satisfied with it. Or if you’re a writer that hates everything you write, you have a critique partner that loves it. Or you have a press that loves it, you have at least one person saying good things about your story, and about what you wrote. And if you can get that in a critique partner and a friend that will be honest and tell you when the story reads well, has good flow has consistency. I think there is a place for inconsistent consistency with an unreliable narrator. But that has to be clear that that’s what the readers reading. And it always goes back to readers expectations. So for me when I’m judging a story, I asked myself, Does this meet readers expectations? And that’s what everybody on the team. Number one is, Does this meet readers expectations, and readers expectations are set with the title or set with the cover are set with the back with the back blurb. But they’re also set with the opening paragraph and how the story is introduced. If you write an opening paragraph that is grotesque and horrible. And then the rest of the book is sunshine and light, I would say cut that first paragraph. But go ahead and write it. If that’s where your process start, go ahead and write it. If your story is going to be filled with gross things, and you start with sunshine and light and rainbows and happiness. I guess with both if you take me on a journey that gets me there, I’m here for it. But if it’s just gross and shocking, and then boom, sunshine and light with no transition. Um, I’m gonna recommend that you chop off the gross part. Or you add a transition, either or, or you move it to somewhere else in the story. If it starts off with sunshine and light, and then boom, it’s growth tests. The same thing, I’m gonna say, give me a transition that gets me there, move it to a different place in the story, or take it off. And that’s the kind of critique partner that you need. You don’t need one who’s going to go over your grammar who’s going to go over your spelling and all of that, because in my mind, that’s the job of an editor. And the editors job is not to read your story and like it or dislike it. The editors job is to look at the grammar, the flow and the consistency if you’re doing a literary edit. And that’s what our editors look at. They look at does it flow? Is it consistent? And is this grammar correct? And that’s it The only three things they’re looking at, they’re not reading the book for enjoyment. Sometimes the book is so good a lot of times most of the time they enjoy the book. And so they’ve asked for a longer time, I was like, get this back to me in five days. And like, can I have 10? Because I’m wanting to read it. And so now we’ve readjusted it to 10, which is kind of industry standard. And that was what happened with the anthology. The editor was like, hey, these stories are really good. I want to read them. And I was like, that’s awesome. That makes me feel good. And makes me feel like okay, other people are going to feel the same way. So the long is the long and short of it, I guess the long winded pneus of it is find someone you trust, who you think has a good mind for literature. But who is also kind and generous, but not so kind and generous, that they will lie to you to save your feelings? I think as a critique partner, for me, the first time a story is critiqued, it should be does the story make sense? And does the story meet the meet your expectations as a reader?
K
Does the beginning of the story give you a sense of where the story is going? And terms of is it consistent? Does the dialogue flow? Does one scene flow into the next? Does the story feel seamless? Or does the story feel deliberately tattered? Does the story feel purposeful? Does it feel intentioned? And for me, I am really lucky that all the stories we’re getting, they all feel intentional. But they may lack in one area like world building or, or some other area. And those short stories, we didn’t have time to send back and asks for rewrites. But I do include it. In any time I say yes or no to a story. I say why I’m saying yes. But I also say why I’m saying no. And for me, the number one thing will be if my expectations weren’t met, if the story didn’t feel purposeful, or if the story didn’t meet the submission guidelines when you’re submitting, and this is different than what makes a good short story that says how to get a short story accepted. Make sure you read the guidelines. Please do yourself dear publisher, do everyone a favor and make sure you read the guidelines. If the guideline says that the story has to include a magical tattoo, it has to include a magical tattoo. If a story says that it has to be set in winter, you can’t send me a story talking about spring. You just can’t. There were a few stories. And I won’t say which that went on and on and on about spring for the winter anthology. And I will say I love the story so much that they got away with it. And I asked for a rewrite. There were a few authors that the story was just so good that I did send it back for a rewrite. But that’s a rare thing. That’s really rare. And I’m finding with the anthology. When the short stories come in, I’m like, doesn’t meet the theme is the first thing I’m checking. And I just put, I take the short story in whatever way it’s given to me. I put it in a searchable format, I Ctrl F the word tattoo for the magical tattoo stories that are coming out in the January edition of the E zine. And if it didn’t have the word tattoo, I just didn’t read it. Because if it doesn’t have the word tattoo, it doesn’t include a magical top two. That may seem unfair, but I feel like it’s unfair to me to have to read 3000 or 3500 words that aren’t on theme when asking to read the guidelines. And I think every publisher feels that way. At least all of the publishers I talk with a kind of they want everyone to read the guidelines. But for me, I’ll be honest and say it hurts my feelings a little bit like I spent all of this time and effort writing the guidelines to help authors be successful and you don’t care. And that makes me feel like you’re not going to care about the publishing process and You’re not gonna care about where you fit in with the other stories. And I like caring authors. I like authors that are going to care take me as I care take them. And the first way you care take a publisher is by reading their guidelines. So good short story, in the general sense is a story you like. And if you hate everything you write, is a story that meets at least one readers expectations. for publication. A good short story is one that follows the guidelines for whatever you’re submitting for. I hope that this was insightful and I hope that this takes off some of your shackles and some of your of your chains if you’re an author that’s been shackled or changed, or chained by what you’ve read on the internet about what makes a good short story. Have fun, write stories you like my stories you want to write, write the stories that you want out in the world, right, the stories that you want people to read, and somebody will read them and if no publication wants them, put them on a blog, start an author’s page and put them on your blog, because I read blogs and you never know a publisher might come across your blog and and reach out and invite you to write something for them with guaranteed submissions.
K
I know I do that. Put it on medium. I’m a huge medium fan. And I read a lot of the works on medium and have become fans of a lot of authors that way. Put yourself out there and don’t let publishing make all of the rules for what you put out there. I hope that makes sense. And I hope that is a cheerful positive message. I want to thank all the beautiful cinnabar moss or any kind of mock you want to be or like I say at the end of every podcast. You can also be a butterfly, but I’m not Mariah Carey, my mom still in her rhyme. Thank you for tuning in this week and I will talk to you in two weeks. Bye. Bye bye