So I was originally going to tie this blog post into the release of my debut book, titled Little Life Lessons: Fifty-Five Super Short Stories. However, due to technical difficulties, the book still isn’t out yet. That being said, I didn’t want to sit on this post any longer, so I’m putting it out there now. Once the book finally is out, I’ll come back to this post and edit it so that it includes a link to the actual book itself.
Update: Here it is!
So with that now out of the way…
I thought I’d make a blog post to explain what exactly this book is, and how it came to be! As the title indicates, it’s a collection of “fifty-five super short stories,” but when I say short, I mean really short! Have you ever heard of flash fiction? Stories that are only a thousand words or less? That’s what all of these story entries are. Why write a book consisting entirely of stories that are that small? Well, to understand that, we’d have to backtrack to the beginning of my “journey” as a writer…
So it was a few years ago, right as I finished college, when I decided that I wanted to take creative writing seriously. Initially, my goal was to write a film script in the realm of sci-fi, fantasy, etc. Something along the lines of the kind of films and books I grew up with. I knew I didn’t want to direct because I had heard horror stories of all the moving parts that sort of job entails. I figured if I could write a strong enough script with a low-budget “feel” and get it onto what they call “the spec market” (a place where independent scripts could potentially be sold to studios), then I could probably get somewhere with it… Needless to say, it didn’t take long before those delusions started to fade. Soon enough, I realized that even if I were to complete a script (and a good script, at that!) the chances of it ever getting sold were slim-to-none, and the chances of it actually getting made after being sold were even slimmer! Furthermore, even if it did ever get made, by some miracle, the film producers probably would’ve made tons of changes that I likely wouldn’t have agreed with, and there would’ve been nothing I could’ve ever done about it (once you sell your script, it’s not yours anymore).
Funny enough, these days, I don’t really take my art that personally anymore. But back then, I still did, and I quickly realized that I wanted to have full control of whatever it was that I was creating. So what did I do? To put it simply; I woke up one day and said “Screw it! I’m gonna write a book instead!” As a starting point, I took my script idea, which I already had an outline for, and started “transposing” that over to novel format. Rest assured, this phase didn’t last long either. I soon realized that different storytelling mediums required different forms of pacing. In other words; what works for a movie doesn’t necessarily work for a novel, and vice versa. I started making changes to my outline, which helped a little, but ultimately, I still struggled to get beyond the fourth or fifth chapter before feeling the need to scrap everything and start again, over and over…
It was at this point when I realized that I needed to take a break from writing altogether, and focus on some actual reading, for a change! I bought a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy books, things that seemed similar in one way or another to what I myself wanted to write. And it was here when I started to realize something… I don’t really like full-length novels as much as I once thought. It was also around this point when a writing peer of mine who had several more years of experience under his belt provided some profound advice; “Don’t start with a full book. Start by reading and writing short stories instead. Then you’ll see what to do.”
I didn’t believe him at first, but then I went to go pick up a collection of Philip K. Dick short stories and started working my way through those, and pretty much instantly, I realized he was right! Suddenly, I started to see storytelling from an entirely new angle, one which excited me far more than the long-form narrative format. And so, I took the ever-evolving outline for my story idea, trimmed out a ton of fat from it, and wrote it out as a short story that was about ten thousand words long (so a novelette, if you wanna get specific). I sent this to a friend who was kind enough to take the time to read it, and his feedback was that it felt like “a shortened epic.” Hearing this made me feel that maybe I had made it too short, so I wrote another draft that was double the length (so a novella this time). The same friend read this revision, and called it a “vast improvement,”which left me feeling elated, of course, but deep down, I knew something was still “off” with the story…
It was at this point when I started to truly learn and understand the concepts of theme and tone. You can’t just throw whatever you want into a story. Everything needs to “fit together” somehow. Once I was finally able to grasp that concept, I took another look at my novella draft and realized that I had basically taken multiple story ideas and squished them all together, without even realizing it! And so, logically, I started to break all those ideas apart again, isolating each of them into their own stories, and making sure to maintain consistent theme and tone in each of them as much as possible. From here, even more new story ideas started to prop up. At this point, I was still sticking to the realm of “genre fiction” (sci-fi, fantasy, etc.). As I continued to write different drafts of different stories and share them with friends, I kept receiving the same feedback from multiple people; “This doesn’t feel like a proper short story. It feels like it wants to be a full book.”
I was still missing something! I just didn’t know what, exactly. Then one day, somewhat out of nowhere, one of these friends I had been getting feedback from proposed an interesting idea; “Have you ever heard of micro-fiction? You may wanna look into that. I think it could help you a lot.” I knew that by micro-fiction he really meant flash fiction, which I had heard of already, but hadn’t explored much of yet. I decided to take his advice and shift my focus towards reading more flash. Around this time, another writing mentor of mine mentioned how he often practiced his craft by writing a form of flash called drabbles (stories that are exactly one hundred words). I began to take an interest to these types of stories as well, and found myself beginning to move away from the “genre” stuff and focusing more on story ideas that were set in “the real world,” if you catch my drift.
From here; I entered my “idea explosion” phase. Now that I was no longer limiting myself to “genre stuff,” I was coming up with new story ideas left and right, almost every single day! I made giant lists of working titles on my phone. I also used an excel document for this purpose at one point, but it was too difficult to maintain, so I quickly abandoned that approach. As you would probably expect, I soon found myself overwhelmed by all my different ideas; “Where do I even start now?!” Furthermore, I couldn’t make up my mind about how I wanted to actually release any of this stuff! “Do I submit these stories to a bunch of different magazines? Do I put them all up for free on a blog? Do I group them together as collections, and put those out on Amazon?”
In the end, I went with the last of those options. The idea of grouping everything together into collection books gave the stories a sense of “tangibility,” which boosted my motivation, and I specifically chose Amazon as my outlet because I knew that people would be able to order physical paperback versions of my books, and the thought of actually being able to hold my own work in my hands like that enticed me even further. But despite all of that, the same question still remained; “Where do I even start?!” After some more thought, I ended up grouping the stories based on “genre,” which meant one group for sci-fi stories, one for fantasy stories, one for apocalyptic stories, one for “real life” stories, and lastly, one for period pieces. I decided that these would become my “books,” so to speak.
I then decided that the “real life” stories would be the first that I would tackle… The only problem was that I had sixty-three different story ideas for that group listed out. All intended to be flash fiction, of course. But still, it was a lot! Nevertheless, over the course of about a year or so, I worked through them all, and believe it or not, it was fun! Writing all those stories never once felt like a chore. As a matter of fact, I would even say that the act of writing them all was “therapeutic,” in a way. Throughout my year of this frequent writing, I essentially “tricked” myself into thinking that it was all just a hobby, and that I wasn’t writing anything for a book of any kind. I think this helped to alleviate a lot of the pressure, and therefore kept me motivated to keep working…
Once the stories were all actually done, I knew right away that the next step would be to figure out how to organize them. Make no mistake; this part was not fun! For months, I tried all different kinds of combinations, each of which gave me a raging headache. Eventually, I hit a point where I decided to list all sixty-three stories on a word doc on my computer. Next to each title, I listed a few “key factors” pertaining to the story, such as whether it was in first-person or third, whether or not the story was a drabble and/or double-drabble, and most importantly, what type of story it was. It was through this exercise that I realized that the vast majority of these stories could be distinguished by one of five different “types”; Family Stories, Youth Stories, Office Stories, Aspiration Stories, and lastly, Tragedy Stories.
Finally, I was starting to get some sense of “structure” for my work! It was also at this point when I made the choice to narrow the number of stories down to fifty-five (eleven per section). This allowed me to eliminate some of the stories that I felt were a little weak and/or redundant. I ended up eliminating more than expected, however, so I took the opportunity to write some new story entries at the last minute that I felt fit better with the new structure, as well as helped to “fill in some gaps,” so to speak.
But I still wasn’t done there! From that point onward, I was revising different stories all over the entire book up until the very last possible moment. This entailed changing certain stories to make sure they all stood out from one another, yet still “fit together” appropriately, among other things. Sometimes stories would move to different places in their respective sections, or be swapped out for one of the rejects, or something new. I even changed the cover art at the very last minute! It’s true what they say; revision is where the art really happens!
And so, eventually, I got to a point where I was finally ready to call the book “good enough.” Is it perfect? No, of course not! Could I have worked on it even more? Yes, of course! But sometimes, you have to just say “screw it” and be done with it. Move on to something new, which is exactly what I’m doing now! I still intend to finish and release all of my other short story collections (in some shape or form), as well as continue to study and write poetry (something I started to do only just very recently). Rest assured, I still plan to continue with this blog as well.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my writing journey here, and hopefully, some of my experiences and findings may help you on your own path as well…
Peace!
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