Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "flash-fiction"

This week is National Short Story Week. Short stories come in and out of fashion and perhaps are regarded as the poor relations of novels - by readers and writers. Avid readers of novels might say they like to have something to 'get into'. Writers often regard short story writing as a learning experience on their way to the best selling novel they hope to write.
Of course the best short story writers make every word count, write something that stays with the reader for a long time and create something many novelists could not.
But who is to define a short story? Does the length matter? You can say something deep in 75 words. At www.paragraphplanet.com you can read a new story every day of exactly 75 words.
A longer story allows the characters to develop, the reader to become attached and perhaps infuriated if their fate is left hanging in the air. Should tales be rounded off neatly or is it the writer's privilege to cause an event and not worry about the long term consequences! My novel 'Brief Encounters of the Third Kind' evolved to find out what did happen to the heroine, but in my anthology 'Dark and Milk' there are stories with the hero literally left hanging in the air or in....but I won't tell you any more!

How long is a short story, how short is flash fiction. How many words must you pen to claim you have written a novel? A story should be as long as it takes to tell a good tale. A couple of years ago I was short listed for the Magic Oxygen 6-word story contest, I didn’t win the £100 pound prize; but how ironic it would have been to win so much for so few words. I enjoyed the challenge and tried to think how six words could encompass the whole universe. My entry was ‘I am starting again said God.’
But most of us want to read and write about every day life, the smaller pictures of human life, not the unknowable frightening vastness of the universe. Indie Authors can write however many words they like, with no publisher to insist on condensing or stretching the word count. Still there is plenty of scope for debate. Flash fiction can be as short as six words and perhaps as long as 1,000 words; whatever the length it should still tell a story or bring a surprise at the end.
Short stories are fun to write and handy for reading in your coffee break. Competitions are popular, especially with the chance to have your story featured in an anthology, but vary widely in minimum and maximum word count.
Until this year I had only written short stories and long novels, but two stories were evolving; a consensus of opinion from other writers was that a novella was between 20,000 and 30,000 words and without planning my novellas evolved to around 27,000.
‘Someone For The Weekend’ finds Selina Harris’ son bringing a very strange guest for the weekend.
‘Durlswood’ is set on a pleasant summer solstice weekend at a country estate; strange events bring two very different young people together, the other main character is a beautiful horse.
The two novellas are featured in ‘Someone Somewhere’ and this new collection is rounded off with four short stories and two chapters of flash fiction. Enjoy topical stories about ordinary people, who often find themselves in strange situations.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Someone-Some...

Read more about Someone Somewhere and my other collections at my website.
https://www.ccsidewriter.co.uk/chapte...