Breaking Through Frustration and Writing the Best Short Stories
Today's Guest Post is by Kirsten Schuder of Apex Literary Management. Thanks for sharing, Kirsten!
The more I speak with other authors, the more I hear lamenting over their challenges with “writing short.” Whether it’s creating short materials for your special, 300-page baby or getting your name out there with shorter story materials, writing short is often a source of aggravation for novel writers. I am no exception.
One might think that because I am Vice President of Operations for the Apex Literary Management and I have spent years writing content and editing, that I might not have any frustration with getting my own short work published. Don’t let the title fool you. Even though I have been published in nonfiction many times over, I go through many of the same challenges you do with my own fiction.
There’s good news, though. You can learn the skills you need to write short materials, both for your novel and short stories. I’m sharing what I learned on my writing journey.
Just recently, Prose chose my short story, “GO” as a finalist in one of their challenges. The top five percent of the entries were selected, and now “GO” is being read by The Prose’s partner for the challenge, Simon and Schuster. I believe all of the factors I explain below to be part of my most recent success.
Origin Story
Four years ago, I was finally able to complete my first novel, the culmination of a lifelong dream.
Seriously, when I was five-years-old, I made a book with smiling children, rainbows, and butterflies. I bound the spine with a green hair ribbon and promptly asked my mother to publish it for me. My mother laughed and never confirmed nor denied that she tried to get it published for me. I don’t even know if she had kept the book. Such was the sentiment in my family about my becoming a writer.
This sentiment was blatantly expressed one evening when I was out for dinner with my father at a restaurant just off of the Saw Mill Parkway in Yonkers, New York. I was 32-years-old. We had just finished our Italian meal and were drinking espresso laced with Sambuca. He asked me what my plans were. I stated that I wanted to be a writer and author. His reply: “You should not pursue being a writer. You’ll just fail.”
So, for me, producing a novel from these origins was somewhat of a miracle.
Finished the Novel, but Not Home Free
Imagine my shock and dismay when I learned that I would have to try and encapsulate all of my novel’s specialness into a single-paged query letter. It took me a greater part of a month. I felt like I was going to croak. At first, I did what almost every writer does. I tried to cram as much information into my sentences and paragraphs that I could. I even dropped the font down and shrunk the margins in order to achieve the one-page statement. What resulted was an unreadable page on many levels.
When I received sixteen rejection letters after a month, I looked at my letter again. On top of information cramming, I also had typos, a big no-no. During the revision, I also concentrated on the conflict of Inside Dweller. A young, vulnerable woman versus a cold, inhuman demon bred on a planet just outside the solar system bent on the destruction of humankind. What’s not to love?
Three months after my search, I garnered the interest of a small publisher, who referred me to my first agent. Neither had read my book. They both accepted me on my query letter. I thought, I’m home free. Now we can shop for a publisher, and I can start my book tour.
But, my agent made certain to point out a couple of things. First of all, no one knows me. This is because I don’t have a lot published in fiction yet. Editors are a tough crowd and very difficult to impress. It doesn’t matter if you were published in all the top magazines for nonfiction articles. They will ask, so, what have you published in fiction? To help me gain more of a reputation as a fiction writer, I had to produce some shorter works.
Moreover, I learned that I would have to summarize my novel in several different ways. First, a logline. Then, a paragraph synopsis. Then, a one-page and three-page summary. And any other summary materials my publisher might require.
So, once again, I was confronted with having to “write short.” For nonfiction it was never an issue because it’s a lot like writing term papers for school. I did very well in my graduate program for mental health counseling. As Vice President of the American Emotional Wellness Organization, I wrote countless pages of bibliotherapy and client education materials. I also wrote and edited content for corporations. However, when it came to writing short fiction, I found myself at a loss on two fronts: finding ways to write short content about my novel and writing short fiction.
The Struggle
Since I trusted my agent, I began my short stories. Over the course of two years, I wrote six pieces and set out to have them published. Two years later, no publications. Why, why, I kept asking myself. I felt that the stories were good. I was quickly becoming disillusioned and frustrated. Also, I had the added joy of hearing my father’s advice echoing in my head.
It’s a good thing the women in my family have a vicious stubborn streak. Despite the fact that the statement eroded my self-confidence as a writer for many years, I eventually got to the point I had gotten with my novel. I was mad enough where I wasn’t going to give up until I was successful at writing short.
The Lessons: Breaking Through the Frustration
When I expressed my frustration to my first agent, she stated, “I know writers create to please themselves, but if writers would just listen to literary agents, they would realize that the best way to get published is to write for markets. Buy publications and see if you can write a piece that was inspired by the type of stories and the styles they are in from that magazine.”
This made a great deal of sense. I was hoping that the short story magazines would be more open-minded about what they publish, but many of them aren’t. As I progressed as a literary agent, I discovered the reason for this. They know their readers and their tastes. If they deviate from their usual style, the readers might get annoyed instead of pleased, and they might lose their readership.
You see, I get it now as a literary agent. All literary agents wish that authors knew the importance of writing for existing markets. If you think of a book or a shorter work in terms of a product, you would see that the book companies and short story magazines must do this to please their readers. If a short story magazine usually publishes thrillers but then suddenly switches to sci-fi, this would be akin to buying a package of curtains with a photograph of a blue set only to find that the curtains are pink. If you really wanted the blue curtains, wouldn’t this irritate you? Good publishers know how to hone in on what their readers love, and they make sure to provide to them copious amounts of it so they will keep buying.
I knew what my agent told me, but it didn’t really sink in until I did a beta reading. I labeled Inside Dweller: Book I: Genesis, my novel, as a supernatural thriller. It’s mostly a thriller, and the rest of the series is definitely more like a thriller, but the first book has a lot of character development, slower parts that are still entertaining and enjoyable, but slower nonetheless. I had a beta reader who was a total thriller fan, and she pointed out to me that my book could not qualify as a thriller. She was actually a bit upset about it because she was expecting a supernatural thriller.
When this hit home, I realized that this could be one of the reasons for my shorter works getting rejected. So, the first lesson I learned is:
Lesson 1: Write for markets, even for short stories.
However, when I sat down to write short stories in particular, I found myself ill-equipped, lacking in skill, and in a state of constant frustration. I wrote a summary for my novel with the help of my agency’s expert, but I found writing short stories particularly challenging.
How does one cram an entire story into 1,000 words or less? Unwilling to give up, I created my first story, “The Boxing Gloves.” The story explains a part from my novel in fuller detail. Before Dr. Jack Gallagher became a psychologist, he was a correction officer and had gotten caught in a twelve-hour riot. When I first wrote it, it was 12,000 words. I managed to cut it down to just over 7,000 words, but even with that, I was still treading within the novella zone.
My novel was also very long. I had managed to cut fifty pages out of it. My son laments my having to cut it. He loved reading the elaborate backstory of the characters and the flavor of the language. Again, this is going back to the fact that books are products. Most publishers will not even entertain a piece if it’s over a certain word count. It’s too costly. One hundred thousand words is on the long side. Eighty thousand words is preferable.
Through the process of cutting down these two stories, I realized I needed to develop certain skills. I had to find how to write concisely.
All writers must concern themselves with “economy of words.” This means that with your prose, you pack the most punch with the least amount of words.
I have had many authors argue that they need their work to remain intact because it reflects their writing style, or that’s simply the way characters talk every day. However, this is not what writing style is really all about. When your readers are trudging through a 1000-word description that you could have stated in 100 words, they tend to get a bit impatient and skim over a lot of the content. Another argument I hear is that the author must stay faithful to the voice inside their characters’ head. I helped out an author who wrote a faithful representation of what the character was thinking for all of the experiences in the woman’s life, with long sections of backstory and expressed exactly how the thoughts would be expressed in one’s thoughts and everyday language. It was a very faithful account of what happened in the character’s life, moment by moment, blow by blow. This resulted in a 600-page mammoth, and it’s very difficult to get something of that length published.
The truth is, when you cut down your work to make it more concise, leave it for a bit, say, a few days, and go back to it, you find it says exactly what you wanted it to say, except with more efficiency.
I was able to cut out at least 20,000 words from my novel by simply trimming unnecessary words. Here is an example of a work that would benefit from practicing “economy of words:”
I was thinking of going over to Giselle’s house to confront her about the affair. Thinking about it cut me deep, but it was more than that. I simply wanted to find out what was wrong with me. Was I not attractive enough? Did she just get really tired of me?
Thinking about it made my head hurt. I instead decided to go to the store and buy some groceries.
There are plenty of opportunities to cut this down so it’s the same exact thing, but shorter. Also, in doing so, you have the opportunity to show your readers, even editors of short story magazines, that you have progressed to the next level in your writing skill:
I had to see Giselle’s about the affair. It cut me deep. What was wrong with me? Was I unattractive? Did she tire of me?
My head pounded. Sighing, I resigned to buy some groceries—for the moment.
When writers start out, no matter how cool a story idea is, they must progress to the next writing level, which is writing in language that doesn’t contain a lot of words that either the reader already knows, or is laden with unnecessary language. In the example above, you see that it’s the same exact scene with the same information. I trimmed all of the words that are unnecessary to state, such as, “I felt my head starting to pound.” We know the character is feeling it, so you never really have to state that. “Starting to” and “beginning to” are often included in beginning writers’ prose because they don’t know that it’s unnecessary to state. Of course, at some point, the character’s head started to pound, but we never really have to state it in our stories. It’s understood.
Try this. Pretend one of your short stories has been accepted for publication, but they asked you to cut it down by half. Apply the steps I share above, and then keep whittling it down.
For another Prose challenge, Trident Media, a huge literary agency, was looking for novel excerpts, but below 5,000 words. I decided to post the first chapter of the Inside Dweller series, IN-Vasion. Dr. O’Connor, in an effort to help spread the word of the oncoming invasion of the alien demons, writes a book named The End of Us. Unfortunately, only the Jerry-Springer-styled talk shows would book him. The hostess recruits an outspoken opponent to Dr. O’Connor’s works. If I were ever confronted with a situation where someone was trying his best to publicly humiliate me in front of millions of television viewers, I would want to handle it just like Dr. O’Connor did in my book.
However, my first chapter was around 6,000 words. The challenge was for 5,000 words. I didn’t have to cut out any major parts. I revised the chapter ten times and applied the concepts above. I got the chapter to 4,900 words and had a bit of room to write in some of the content the agency asked for at the end of the work.
For your first few drafts, it’s okay if you have a lot of detail in your stories. This is the process our authors go through when we write their summaries for their manuscripts. An author must state all that the author feels is important in the work. After this is down on paper, it’s easier to cut down the content from there. It’s not a process of cutting out content or information. It’s really more of a process of taking a bunch of information and summing it up into one sentence.
For the logline of Inside Dweller, for example, it looked like this when I first wrote it:
A young woman and her psychologist discover the commander of Lucifer’s army, an extraterrestrial demon, is dwelling inside of her, attempting to unlock the key to the human mind and soul and enslave mankind.
The expert in my first literary agency helped me rewrite it like this:
Humankind is doomed unless a woman and her psychologist can vanquish the commander of Lucifer's alien demon army dwelling inside her.
As you can see, the second version is pithier. However, we wouldn’t have gotten to the second version without the first version.
Thus, for the next lesson, I learned:
Lesson 2: Be merciless in editing out all unnecessary words.
Avoid words like began to, thought, felt, just, really, etc. or sentences that over-explain the obvious. Go for pithy descriptions, eg. instead of “Man, was I angry. I’m talking how red infuriates bulls. I was so angry, I could taste it,” try, “I was like a bull charging the matador’s red cape.”
Backstory should also be edited mercilessly. While necessary in the beginning stages of creating your characters, backstory should be included selectively and in service of the story and the plot. Backstory is not something that you would want to explain in hairy detail… um, sort of like I did in my first novel. Yes, it’s true. I am the former queen of backstory.
This is because I had trouble knowing where to begin my novel. Three or four years ago, I told Miranda’s story in detail: how the possession was affecting her, chasing the reason for her issues through the medical field but finding nothing.
I found that in beginning the book at a slower part of the story, it mislead people as to what the story was really about. A young woman is possessed by an alien-demon. However, my literary agent was very straightforward, to a fault. She marked those sections as “BORING! L” Plus, people thought that the story was about a sick woman, something that has been done to death. I moved the story to the car accident, where the story picks up and becomes exciting, and people responded to the beginning a lot better.
When I was doing some acquisitions editing during my proofreading internship, I came across a book that I liked in terms of the story premise, but then, all of the sudden, the action of the story stopped, and I read pages and pages of the main character’s account of her failed relationship. I got what my agent was trying to tell me.
However, backstory is still necessary, and sometimes an intricate part of the action. How do you cut it out of your precious baby? Here’s more good news: You don’t have to. I tell my clients, you can have it in there, but shorter. It will pick up the pace of the story. Backstory will stop the action of the story to pull you out of it and tell you about a time past. There will be times where it is necessary, but try to keep it as short as possible.
As painful as it was, I cut out around twenty pages of backstory out of the beginning of the novel and summarized it all into two paragraphs and blended it with the action of the story:
Miranda Sheppard had crossed a line, unable to turn back the hands of time to extract her from the set of circumstances placing her at the intersection of Wilson Street and Marten’s Place in Davenport. A scream evolved from a deep, primal urge she didn’t know existed until the moment her life was in peril. Miranda’s seventeen-year war with God stopped dead. Using her last conscious second, she begged a faceless, callous entity for her life, but all she could muster was an enervated “Please…”
The impact was going to be ruinous. A million pins stung Miranda’s arms and hands as she clutched the steering wheel and slammed both feet on the brakes. The nose of Miranda’s 2007 custom-painted, candy-apple-red Corvette convertible collided with the flank of the crimson Shop-n-Bag box truck and crumpled inward. The cancer scare, the constant state of exhaustion from the last six months, the horrible dreams and images lurking every time she closed her eyes, and the last image, her sister, liquesced as she plummeted into darkness.
It’s all there, but shorter. All the trouble she had sleeping and her health concerns tied up into one neat sentence.
Backstory, when you’re writing short, needs to be implied artfully in most instances. Some feel that there isn’t any room for backstory at all. Some feel there is some room, but keep it short. You have to discover what works for you. However, be aware that backstory needs to be in service of the plot and can’t overtake the action of the story because it acts like a stoplight. When you describe backstory, it stops the action of your story dead.
Thus:
Lesson 3: Minimize backstory too.
Even if you haven’t yet written any short stories yet, if you get into the practice of cutting out the unnecessary, you can carry over this practice to your short stories. Short stories are like a snapshot in time. You are taking one instance and describing it in enough detail to create an effective, entertaining story. There isn’t a lot of room for wordiness, copious amounts of backstory, or anything that takes away from its short plot.
Take heart if your first attempts are novella size. You will eventually find a way to either shorten your stories down or write stories that can fit into a word count criteria.
I learned that there are certain stories that need to be told beyond the word count of a short story. Writers must learn to respect their story. It’s not productive to write just to cram a story into a word count.
My friend, David J. Gibbs, once looked over my short story, “Anisha’s Hair.” This was my first short short story under 2,000 words. He felt I could expand on the ending a bit. I expressed my concern over word count. He had this to say: “Sometimes, stories simply just don’t fit into a word count. It’s better to flesh out your story and let it breathe comfortably at whatever length it needs to be. Is your story good without adding more to the ending? Yes, it sure is. Could it be better if you added more to the ending? Yes, it sure could be. Word count is always a concern, but don’t worry about it so much that you wind up stifling your stories.”
Some stories are simply too long to fit into a short story, and my friend David thinks this is okay because there will always be a market for stories regardless of the word count. Some are perfect for short stories, short, short stories, and even micro short stories that are 100 words or less. Some stories need more room. Each story needs to be appraised on an individual basis. However, David is also an expert samurai when it comes to cutting out the unnecessary as I learned working with him at Storyteller, a short story magazine, where he and I serve as editors, so his stories are never over word count.
With five stories under my belt, I came up with an idea for a story that would weigh in at just below 1,000 words. No one had really seemed to write much on women in drag racing. I had watched a movie about Erica Enders last summer with my daughter and learned about some of the flack she had to put up with because she was a woman in racing, including harassment from other competitors and finding sponsorship. I combined some aspects of her struggle with my own personal struggles, as I detailed above, and “GO” was born.
In honoring what I had learned about writing concisely, cutting down my own novel so the story shined through, and writing shorter stories as time went on, this is what I learned:
Lesson 4: Honor your stories.
Some stories are meant to be novel length. Some can fit neatly under 1,000 words. Either way, balance this with applying the necessary skills to write concisely, and it will all be okay.
AND
Lesson 5: Write something that is deeply personal.
Even though the story is fictional, people will always connect to the emotional journey of your character.
I cannot stress the importance of reading. A great way to cultivate your short writing skills is to read materials from successful authors. Read their summaries for their books. Read the back of books. Subscribe to several short story magazines.
Read with a critical eye. For instance, do novel summaries simply tell you what is happening, or do they summarize a novel in a snappy way? Do the focus on details, or do they focus more on the bigger picture? For short stories, how do some of your favorite authors handle story mechanics, such as backstory and plot, character and setting development? Also, why do those stories fit in well with the other stories for that issue? What features do all of those stories have in common? What slant do they all possess (such as, is there an international flavor to them, or are they all historical fiction)?
Reading with a critical eye will serve you in a lot of ways. It will not only help you refine your craft, but it will help you define your markets. For example, if you decide to take some stories and offer them on platforms, reading their content with a critical eye will help you understand what readers they are targeting. For example, take a look at the most popular stories on Wattpad, for example. All of the stories seem to attract a certain type of reader. Recently, I had decided to give Wattpad a try. I felt that it was better use of my time to offer the stories on different venues to promote my work, and instead to write works that were custom-fit for different publications, like my agent had suggested.
However, I learned that my short stories might be better placed on Amazon Kindle Singles. Some Wattpad works get over a million hits. After a while, I realized that my short stories, which I had collected under the title The Rise of Zombie Cat and Other Real Fiction, are more suited for mature audiences. I decided to switch platforms and put my stories on Kindle Singles.
Whereas Wattpad didn’t generate the return I hoped it would, I was met with resounding success on Prose. For my first post, I submitted “GO” as part of the Simon and Schuster challenge. The terms of the challenge were simple. Post anything you like, we’ll choose the top 50, and we’ll send off your materials to Simon and Schuster for consideration. The fact that the work could be of any genre or content showed me that they weren’t looking for a specific theme or genre.
At long last, after a three-year struggle, my story “GO” was chosen as a finalist and is now in the hands of Simon and Schuster. Even if they don’t pick my work, it is still an honor and a thrill to have the company read my work. We all crave some recognition, and this is my account of how I got some.
I took what I had learned from Wattpad. I read the content on Prose with a critical eye. So, for this lesson, I learned:
Lesson Six: Read with a critical eye.
It will help you develop your writing muscles and determine the best home for your wonderful short story.
In my journey, I learned a wide variety of skills. I also learned how to believe in myself, which is a struggle for many writers, especially if they are just starting out. It’s a worthwhile endeavor to focus on what you have already accomplished, even if you have to keep a list of them to remind you every day.
My source of inspiration: I had a professor at the University of Wisconsin who was teaching Chinese literature. The class was taught in English, which was refreshing after the years I had spent in classes studying the language. It was actually my first opportunity to write about Chinese literature in English. My professor stated that my writing skills were among the best he had seen and suggested I go into writing. I still have his letter in my top desk drawer.
Lesson Seven: Believe in your work, but always work towards improvement.
Know that you will eventually develop the skills you need if you stick with it.
Lessons eight, nine, and ten can be applied to your writing career as a whole, but whether you’re writing long or short, you can always find these lessons useful.
Finding beta readers for your work needs to be a top priority. Betabooks is a great app, but try and hook up with some serious writers who have writing experience and can help you develop your skills. This is most advantageous because writers are all in it together. We want the same things, and we all have different skills and pieces of knowledge to offer.
For example, my present literary agency, Apex Literary Management, runs a writer’s group. We give a few tips on how to provide great feedback, and also make certain that the environment is supportive, friendly, and professional.
If you have some writing experience, please feel free to apply to the Facebook group “Apex Literary Management Writers Group”. We will most likely be using Andrew and Paul’s wonderful app for the exchanges.
Lesson Eight: Make sure you get beta feedback for all of your work.
Everyone has a unique perspective and a different skill set and may see things in your work you may not be able to.
This is a minor thing, but I have had many writers who were shocked when they realized that their ideal of being a writer is not the same as how it is really like in life. Writing is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. It’s long hours at the keyboard typing away. It’s revising and revising another hundred times. It’s working on skills, story elements, and reading. It’s far from the hermit who lives in the mountains with a typewriter and gives interviews only to Diane Sawyer. You have to be skilled and you have to speak up and market your work.
I have seen writers go into the shakes over marketing. It’s okay. You don’t have to grease your hair back and wear a cheesy suit. Just share, share, share, and be open to having conversations with other writers and readers, and you’ll be fine. Everyone loves to speak about what they love.
So, don’t hold onto those ideals too tightly. Use them to help give you motivation, but know when to let go of them so you can fully immerse yourself into your writing career.
Being a writer is difficult work. You will sweat, groan, bleed, cry, gnash your teeth, and self-doubt to the very depths of your soul. Much of this conflict is created because we are enamored with the end prize: six-figure publishing contract, touring on all the talk shows, our fans hanging on our every word. When we aren’t there even years later, we get down on ourselves. Stop torturing yourself like this. Keep writing and receiving feedback through Andrew and Paul’s wonderful beta reading app, Betabooks. Your skill will eventually be able to support your ambitions. Revel in your accomplishments big and small. If you’re having trouble writing short materials, keep at it. You’ll get through it.
Lesson Nine: Don’t get too caught up in the ideal of being a writer.
This doesn’t come easy for some people. Placing yourself into beta reading situations will help you become more open to feedback. Not only that, but you will also learn how to navigate feedback tactfully that you don’t agree with.
It’s good to be open-minded to feedback, but eventually, you might hit something that won’t sit well with you. This is natural. However, you really have to beat down that part of you that rears its ugly head and wants to bite off people’s faces if they don’t totally agree with you.
I took a class with a fairly well-known television writer, and I just love the way he stated how he works with defensiveness. When he receives feedback for his work, his initial reaction is always, “Shut up. You’re stupid.” But then, after he resists telling the person to shut up and that he’s stupid, and he calms down, he’ll go back to that feedback and think about how it can be applied to improve his work.
This is a very necessary skill writers need to develop. Personally, I cannot work with authors who are too defensive. I always expect that an author at some point will get defensive once in a while because it’s only natural. I cannot present publishing companies an author who I know is going to be highly defensive and therefore difficult to work with. It would burn bridges I have worked hard in developing.
This piece applies to writing short as well. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll find a group where writers share their short works as well as their long works. Just always be sure to:
Lesson 10: Be open and gracious towards people’s feedback, and don’t allow defensiveness to rear its ugly head.
This is only my first short story accomplishment. I am happy that I finally broke through, but I certainly won’t quit. I will keep going and learning. I have a lot to learn.
You can do it. Keep going. I believe in you. If I can pull it off, so can you. Let’s get together and beta read, and we can figure it out together.
Kirsten can be found online via her agency and on Facebook.
