Thursday 29th August 2013

At ‘that’ stage with a good few short stories. I’ve been a bit like a magpie with them over the last few months (and by ‘few’, I’ve just realised I mean ‘twelve’), in that as soon as one idea gets a bit too tough to carry on writing, then I’ve flitted to another work in progress, and tinkered with that one. As soon as the tinkering gets a bit too much like hard work, then I’ve gone back to the first WIP (or a completely different one), so that my attention  span doesn’t get too hammered over the head, and I give up on the writing altogether.

Now, depending on who you listen to, this is either a perfectly fine and noble way to stop ideas (stories) getting too saggy and baggy and boring, or it’s the worst idea ever, because you have to stay committed to your ideas, and see them through to the very end, otherwise you’re never actually going to finish the bloody things at all. And, of course, in some cases, both those statements have been made by the same person at different times. Like all pieces of advice, they can be embraced or ignored as you see fit (and as you see that the advice itself fits you).

Right now, however, I feel that I need to go the hard-work route, and commit to the stories, and finish them off. One by one. This will be somewhat tough, because, at the moment, a lot of them are crap. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t self-loathing, deprecating analysis. Even at their current stage (and I think a good few of them are about three drafts away from the final version), some of them read better than a few of the short stories I’ve bought on the kindle. There’s a reasonable amount of short stories self-published by unknown authors, some of them good, some of them awful (not nearly as many as you might think, however), and the majority of them – uh, average. Now, I’m sticking my neck out here slightly, because of course, I intend to publish my own collection at some point (reasonably) soon. So it’s a bit of a risky job – if not actually arrogant – to compare my unfinished works to those that have actually been uploaded onto a website and people are paying for. But, what the hell. I will claim that in at least a couple of cases, the stories that I’ve got, in their second or third draft, are better than the stories that somebody has deemed fit for public domain, publication, and consumption. And, yes, I am talking about the drafts of my stories that are currently in the ‘crap’ stage.

It’s not as if the stories that I’m talking about are bad, not at all. And I’m aware that I’m certainly setting myself up for a fall when I do publish my own (hey, here’s an idea, maybe I don’t publish them, that’ll keep me safe from public criticism – even better, hell, I won’t actually finish any of the stories ..). The ideas behind the stories (the ones that people have published, not mine) are actually pretty good. But quite often, the story is told in such a brief, perfunctory fashion – in the matter of about three kindle pages – that I wonder, what’s the point? It feels less like a story well told, and more like the synopsis on the back of the DVD cover : ‘Once there was this guy who said that it would be cool if we were all nice to each other but he got nailed to a tree but it was OK because he came back to life the end’ … Now, come on. I’m sure you could’ve stretched that out a bit.

It’s occurred to me recently that short stories don’t always have to be short, and they don’t have to be stories, not in the normal sense of the word. Quite often, I see short stories (very short, around 1,000 words) struggle to keep to the format of a beginning, a middle and an end. I understand the desire to keep things coherent and within a recognisable framework, but I’m not sure it’s always vitally necessary. Some of the best short stories deal with a passing thought or emotion, a reaction to something else (I’ll be honest – some of the very worst short stories do that, too, because the writer is shrinking away from committing to an idea – but that’s a blog for another time).

Anyway, I managed a few thousand words each on two stories this morning. They’re both currently at the stage of ‘terrible’, but they still feel good to write, and I still (just about) remember what I liked about the ideas in the first place, which isn’t always the case. Plus, it’s helped that in the café where I’m writing at the moment, there’s a couple of other people, both working on Important Stuff. There is a distraction here, and it’s name is Free WiFi, but there seems to be a atmosphere in these kind of places; if you’re vaguely aware that the other people are actually furiously working, rather than piddling about on facebook, or tweeting the hilarious ‘other’ dream that Martin Luther King was going to talk about, it ‘shames’ you into doing some work yourself.

Or, as writing avoidances go, writing a blog isn’t exactly the most terrible ..