Three Hundred Stories Later

Today marks the three-hundredth short story I’ve published, one per week, over the last (almost) six years.

I haven’t missed a week yet, even when my son was born. I write extra stories ahead of time if there’s something coming up, like a trip, or indeed a pregnancy due date. A new story is published each Monday and sent out via email for free. You can also buy the full e-book compendium, if you like.

There are 380,000 or so words in those stories collectively, and you can’t write that amount without learning a few things. For me, here they are.

On ideas

To carry a story, a single idea is enough: it’s both the logical minimum and probably also the ideal maximum. Stories can cope with perhaps two ideas before making sacrifices elsewhere, whether in pace, coherence, impact, or a dozen other things. With two ideas, a story can be very good; with one, it can be great.

There’s no shortage of ideas, and in fact there can’t be a shortage. Having ideas is a state of mind, not an outcome. You choose to have ideas, by viewing your life from the perspective of a writer. Once in that mode, there will be too many to capture.

The best and most useful ideas can be represented with a handful of a words, and sometimes with a single one. The vast majority of my stories come from ideas which I noted down in the form of fewer than ten words, and always in the form of a phrase or a clause, not a list. A list is too many ideas.

On plot

It seems to me that thinking about plot is often to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Plot is the compositional result of solid elements, properly crafted and arranged, in the same way that you’d create a bridge, or a concerto. The work is in service of the end result of that thing, but the thing doesn’t exist until it’s done; until then, you’re making other, more concrete and graspable things.

For short stories, constraints of word count force the same sort of telephoto treatment we find in late 20th Century episodic television: we arrive in media res, with all assumable pieces already assumed. This isn’t just efficient; it’s better storytelling, because stories are only tangentially about plot which is just a delivery mechanism for characters facing situations. Unless you’re writing a biography, start with your characters already facing a situation.

On structure

There’s such a thing as a standard story structure, and people spend a great deal of time unnecessarily fretting about it; if you tell a story, you’ll probably find it’s automatic.

A short story, or some other non-full-novel-length thing, isn’t a compressed book: it’s a fractal snapshot. A snapshot because it will be an extract of some notional longer telling of the same tale, and fractal because it will nonetheless retain the same structure as the full version. Story structure remains the same, no matter how much you zoom in or out.

On writing

I’ve previously written and spoken at some length about being a planner, one of the two breeds of writer according to popular opinion. Planners will outline the whole work, iteratively refining the tree of acts and scenes and beats, before beginning to write. The other kind are pantsers, who fly by the seat of their pants and just get started with little or no plan, seeing where the words take them.

When I wrote my first novel, Changer, I had something of a plan, but certainly not a full outline. I wanted to be a writer, and writers write, so that’s what I did. I ran into serious trouble in my second act, had a crisis of faith, a bought a huge whiteboard which I attached to the back wall of my office. I spent weeks there with index cards and markers and magnets, working out what I had, and what was wrong, and how to fix it. It was my come-to-Jesus moment, reborn as an affirmed plotter.

Writing three hundred short stories, and a few more novels besides, has made me slowly realise that I was mistaken about the whole thing. In fact, the problems with Changer were issues of inexperience, and naivety, and a misguided prioritisation of genre conventions. Plot wasn’t a problem, or structure, or characterisation, or any need for ideas.

Looking back now, I got back on the track the only way I possibly could have at the time. I did the right thing, but I learned too permanent a lesson. The thing about pantsing is that you have to trust yourself, and some of that trust comes from instinct and some comes from the subconscious magic of experience; I didn’t have the latter, but I do now.

I looked back at the outlines for Toll and Jinx and Middleshade Road; all very different novels. Toll was intricate and constructed; a sculpture of a murder mystery, investigated before the crime was committed. Jinx was a play, or perhaps a pantomime, debating the issue of the day in a kind of bottle-show. And Middleshade Road road was so fast and so personal, writing itself from within, reducing me to a marionette. But their outlines had something in common: they were incomplete. Mostly missing a third act, or even a latter half, in any kind of detail. Because I knew what to do. I thought I was being a plotter the whole time, but the evidence says otherwise.

And I’ve been telling myself that, clever subconscious to stupid conscious mind, for three hundred weeks now. Tiny idea, no plan, and out it comes. I feel foolish that it’s taken so long for me to notice what I’ve been proving to myself, again and again and again.

I am a pantser, and I always have been. I just mistakenly thought otherwise for a while.

In conclusion

If there’s a common thread, it’s that consistent practice of something will invariably bring improvement, but it will certainly bring confidence, and I think that confidence is both more important and probably also the primary means by which the improvement occurs.

It’s very possible that these lessons are only of much value to me as an individual, but that’s fine: they’re of significant value in that regard. All it took was six years of consistency, no excuses, and three hundred little stories — and I think that’s a good return.