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Yesterday I spent my morning revising a horror short story. In the afternoon, I switched over to my massive novel revisions. Because I’m working on both at the same time, I had some time to reflect on the differences between the two.
When I first threw myself into writing again, I started with short stories. They were, well, short, and they seemed so much more accessible to me after years of editing nonfiction and marketing materials. These fiction stories that I wrote were between 1,000 and 5,000+ words. I wrote most of these in the first-person point of view, and they all had a horror bent (and when I say horror, I mean more of a cozy horror, and not a Grand Guignol entertainment or exploration of body horror). Perhaps I used them to explore the existential horror I experienced after being laid off in my late forties. Whatever the case, I loved immersing myself in these small, contained worlds of creeping dread.
When it came time to edit them, I would read and reread them. Each time, I would patch a plot hole, edit out the filter words, and clean up any tense switches. At the end of each revision, I could feel the tangled mess of words becoming silky smooth.
However, working on my first novel was an entirely different experience. Aside from the obvious difference in length, I soon found it to be a monumentally challenging task to keep continuity. Character names, hair color, places, seasons, environments—all of these elements became unruly in the massive rush of the first draft. I had started working in a Google document, but I then decided to make a one-time purchase of Scrivener, a writing-focused app. This a beast of an application, and I’m sure that I’m not fully using all of its functions, but it has helped me to keep track of my characters, timelines, and storylines. Because my scenes are separated into distinct folders, it’s easy for me to move back and forth between the scenes to change notes throughout the book.
Even with that great organizational tool, my first revision pass has been full of minefields. All of those bracketed passages where I literally wrote [come up with an interesting transition here] generic placeholders to keep the plot momentum going came back to haunt me during my edits. And it has taken me a few weeks just to make it one-third of the way through my first revision. And then, horror of horrors, I had to go back and redo my fresh revisions, because I was changing my point of view. This was going to take forever. At this rate, I felt like I was never going to be able to polish, repolish, and then polish my story again to get it to perfection.
But, I then realized that my first novel has been an exercise in letting my creativity flow. I’ve spent my life editing. Refining. Honing. I had not spent time creating and filling space with new ideas. To do that, I needed to let go of perfection.
My short stories are places where I can experiment and practice my writing techniques. I can work a short story until it is near perfect and then use the knowledge that I’ve gained there to use in my longer works. My longer works teach me how to be consistent with tone, and I can use this in my short stories. These two formats feed into and support each other.
I’ve really enjoy writing both, and now it’s time to put another polish on another short story!
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