How much detail should one put into a short story? As much detail as needed. Easier said than done.
Let’s start with Hemmingway’s 6-worder. ‘For sale: baby shoes never worn.’ Here the reader gets a story but is forced to do almost all of the work for themselves. The skeletal framework is enough to suggest what the tale might be. It’s a couple of intriguing dinosaur bones dug out of a pit. Paleontologists can try to reconstruct what the original dinosaur might have been, but each scientist will probably come up with a different version.
A short story, however, can be anything up to 7,500 words. I’ve seen people classify 10,000 words as a short story. This time you’re a few bones short of a herd of Velociraptors, and different rules must surely apply. The first of which is that the reader will expect to fill in far fewer gaps.
One obvious rule may seem to be: pick a scope of subject that’s suitable to your target word length. You can’t tell the story of War and Peace in 500 words. Or can you? Artists like the Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC) make a living of it.
Now, the RSC is popular, but it also rubs some people up the wrong way. Why? Two reasons. If you’re not in the mood to cut corners and finish skidding in sideways out of breath, it’s not for you. Also it’s a bit of an in-joke thing. If you don’t already know the Complete Works, it won’t be half as funny. So the reader needs to be a) tuned in to the writer’s degree of corner-cutting and b) familiar with the frame of reference for the story.
This can be a hard thing to judge, I find. Only today, I got some thoughtful feedback on a new short story of mine explained to me thus. ‘It’s all over so quickly. It’s like you’re watching a film and the title credits have just finished, and suddenly wham it’s right in the middle of the climax scene, things are exploding, Bruce Willis is jumping out of a plane and Bam! It’s all over.’ Although I can think of a few people who might actually quite enjoy watching this version of cinema, I obviously missed the mark on this reader’s willingness to corner-cut.
On the other hand, even more frequently extraneous matter is shoved in and the reader loses interest. Sometimes it seems a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation.
The sad news is that this is not a ‘Five Easy Steps’ blog post and I don’t have the magic pill for judging the perfect content-to-word ratio every time. Or any time. But I’d be keen to learn how other writers deal with the problem!
(First published in Writers Abroad blog 6th April 2015)
Let’s start with Hemmingway’s 6-worder. ‘For sale: baby shoes never worn.’ Here the reader gets a story but is forced to do almost all of the work for themselves. The skeletal framework is enough to suggest what the tale might be. It’s a couple of intriguing dinosaur bones dug out of a pit. Paleontologists can try to reconstruct what the original dinosaur might have been, but each scientist will probably come up with a different version.
A short story, however, can be anything up to 7,500 words. I’ve seen people classify 10,000 words as a short story. This time you’re a few bones short of a herd of Velociraptors, and different rules must surely apply. The first of which is that the reader will expect to fill in far fewer gaps.
One obvious rule may seem to be: pick a scope of subject that’s suitable to your target word length. You can’t tell the story of War and Peace in 500 words. Or can you? Artists like the Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC) make a living of it.
Now, the RSC is popular, but it also rubs some people up the wrong way. Why? Two reasons. If you’re not in the mood to cut corners and finish skidding in sideways out of breath, it’s not for you. Also it’s a bit of an in-joke thing. If you don’t already know the Complete Works, it won’t be half as funny. So the reader needs to be a) tuned in to the writer’s degree of corner-cutting and b) familiar with the frame of reference for the story.
This can be a hard thing to judge, I find. Only today, I got some thoughtful feedback on a new short story of mine explained to me thus. ‘It’s all over so quickly. It’s like you’re watching a film and the title credits have just finished, and suddenly wham it’s right in the middle of the climax scene, things are exploding, Bruce Willis is jumping out of a plane and Bam! It’s all over.’ Although I can think of a few people who might actually quite enjoy watching this version of cinema, I obviously missed the mark on this reader’s willingness to corner-cut.
On the other hand, even more frequently extraneous matter is shoved in and the reader loses interest. Sometimes it seems a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation.
The sad news is that this is not a ‘Five Easy Steps’ blog post and I don’t have the magic pill for judging the perfect content-to-word ratio every time. Or any time. But I’d be keen to learn how other writers deal with the problem!
(First published in Writers Abroad blog 6th April 2015)