Between school and therapy I have been drained and I barely have time to bathe and breath yet alone do enjoyable activities. Thankfully, Spring Break has allowed me time to myself and with beautiful nails and a screwdriver I begin to type this post.
How freaking cute right? That's what's on my nails and it was 5 dollars!
Does this mean I never have to cut out anything that I write? Absolutely not, there are no absolutes, except for the Absolut in my beverage. No. I mean that as a writer who adores reading and writing short stories it is fairly difficult to commit and write a novel. I believe my longest short story was roughly five pages, rest its soul. It was lost to technology when my old computer, lovingly named Big Mac, journeyed into the great beyond.
Oh there I go getting sentimental. Perhaps some back tracking/flashbacking would be helpful.
Get the Delorean ready!
In high school I took accelerated courses in English so from eighth grade until tenth I was only required to take my English classes at the local community college. Eleventh grade I decided to pick up the English classes at the high school to
A. Torment a teacher.
B. Learn from this teacher because he's a literary genius.
C. Some academic reasons that have long been forgotten.
Anyway, at this point my writing and textual analysis skills were fairly superior to my peers because for all intents and purposes, they hadn't actually taken an English class ever. Since I had experience my teacher and I would have more in depth discussions on our reading and the rest of the class just listened to us argue back and forth. But on the days when he actually focused on the rest of the class I had fifty minutes to myself and on these days I just did some free writing. In my accelerated course my assignments included writing papers and some creative writing projects and I used this time to focus on them. You can't write a novel in fifty minutes so I wrote short stories.
Which brings us up to the present day. I consider myself a short story author and on my better days I very pretentiously say I write poetry. And a novel is nothing like either of these disciplines. In a novel I can get into the heart and soul of a character, they can change over time, they don't have this huge epiphany where their world flips on its axis. I can have more than a single character to focus on and I don't have to choose a single personality and likes and dislikes and speaking style and mannerisms. The essence of short story is the quickness with which the story conveys everything and the focused detail. The reader focuses on what the author wants you to focus on because it's relevant.* Often, you read a short story like a poem, slowly with the understanding that you will not be able to really experience the work the first time you read it. Novels have the luxury of having some leeway. Not to say you can vomit up some adjectives and call it a day, but a novel is like a television series where a short story is more like a movie.**
THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS.
There are so many things I can put in this novel and, there is no harm in doing so because I can eventually just extract it if I find it more cumbersome than enabling to my story! Yet I still find myself thinking to myself, "I should explain that more if I want this to tie in.", "Does her dad really need a background story?" and "Do I actually want to kill that person? Do they work better alive rather than dead?"
But that's what I think about people I meet in real life and when we get down to it, writing is just describing the real life that doesn't exist.
Sincerely,
S. Darkly
* Hills Like White Elephants is a phenomenal example of the focus I described. Hemingway isn't actually just describing the terrain people.
**Yes, I understand that a movie is longer than a television show, but I said series. Series can last for years and can really travel into who a person is whereas a movie has to move it along.
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