Going off on a whim and making major changes to your novel can be great, but it can also create unintended problems. Once you have a reduced word count it is easier to narrow your focus. When you have an unlimited word count it is easy to fall into the trap of adding multiple scene goals or overloading the scene. Helps you identify the story or scene goal: This does depend on the length of the short story, but if you struggle with scene structure, a short story is a great way to learn. Short stories can be compared to scenes in a novel. Choosing one sentence over the other helps you to choose only those sentences that really do their job. A reduced word count forces you to re-examine and re-evaluate every word. Strings of beautiful sentences will make you happy, but sometimes we are so in love with those beautiful strings we forget that they must also advance the story. There is no better way to learn what is important to the story than a reduced word count. The reduced word count helps you to decide what to cut and what to keep. Making changes, experimenting and taking risks is a little easier because if you get it wrong or if it doesn’t work you’ll only lose a few hundred words, not a few thousand. The reduced word count makes it more manageable. Hone your skills:Ī short story is, well short. Even More Reasons To Write Short Stories 1. Make it easy for yourself, but let’s look at why you should write short stories and how they can help you improve as a writer. You can start with a novel, of course, but break it down. Just like the marathon runner needs to train, we as writers, need to train as well and short stories are a great way to do that. So many people who want to write a book haven’t written in years, or some even never, but they expect to sit down and write a flawless 80 000-word novel. You don’t just wake up and run an ultra-marathon on a whim. ![]() Whenever I speak about writing so many people immediately say, “I want to write a book.” It is always followed by a ‘but’, but rarely, “I think I’ll try a short story first.”Īnyone who knows about running ultra-marathons knows there is training involved. ![]() In this post, we’ll discuss even more reasons to write short stories. Please read it here: 10 Awesome Reasons For Writing Short Stories. I first wrote about reasons to write short stories in 2017. Are you pondering the pros and cons of writing short stories? In this post, we’ll explore 12 more reasons to write short stories.
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