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Ah, taking a nice break from writing my daily blog during the Thanksgiving holiday was exactly what I needed. It’s that time of the year that I used to so look forward to as a child. Holiday feasts, family gatherings, presents. And now that I’m an adult, these holiday months fill me with no small amount of anxiety. Those same things that used to fill me with joyful anticipation—holiday feasts, family gatherings, presents—now fill my days up with shopping lists, long hours, and lots and lots of planning.
So, when my parents came to visit for Thanksgiving, I was both happy and dreadfully busy. So busy that my blog writing needed to fall by the wayside. Though busy, I was able to spend a bit of time thinking about why I’m writing this blog and who I’m writing it for. I think I’ve come down to the fact that I’m mainly writing this blog for myself. This exercise gives me regular writing practice, which is the best way to improve my writing and my thinking. I do also write it for an audience. I write about things that I’ve learned and that I wish I had known earlier in my life. By sharing that knowledge with others, I hope that I spare some searching soul a bit of time as they look online to find tips about writing, about art, about living. But, that is really secondary to my main objective of teaching myself how to grow as a writer.
That epiphany has really lifted a burden off of my blog-writing shoulders. I can be a lot more flexible with both my topics and my writing. Today’s blog, for instance, was going to be about finding out when you’re done with your short story, and it still is. It’s just that I also wanted to spend some time thinking about why I write these blog posts in the first place, and I’m OK with that little bit of narrative meandering.
So, how do you know when your short story is done? I’ve been giving this a lot of thought as I’ve spent this past holiday break revising several short stories that I’ve written and submitted them off to several markets. I can only assume that this is a highly individualized decision, but, still, there are some helpful tips I’ve discovered as I’ve started submitting larger numbers of my stories.
First, if I’m not writing specifically to a submission prompt, I will do a fast initial rough draft. That draft purely focuses on the story idea and getting it all down on paper, grammar and logic be-damned. I will even put in bracketed text for ideas that I haven’t yet fully realized (protagonist says something really angry and biting here).
I will then go through that draft over several revisions where I will polish up grammar and structure. I will do additional drafts to clean up consistency. As I was getting ready for my very first story submissions, I would revise before submitting to a new market. Now, however, I read through a market’s submission guidelines and then I start on revisions. This was a super important lesson because each market has its own individual guidelines. Some will only want you to write in the past tense. Some don’t want you to ever submit anything in the second person. Some, podcast submissions generally, prefer that you write your story in the first person. Some ask that you use the Shunn submission format. Some require you to only use single quotation marks around dialogue.
The list of submission requirements are varied and seemingly infinite. I now wait until I have fully read through a site’s submission guidelines before I complete my final revision pass.
And many, many markets will reject your manuscript without reading it if you have any easily caught grammar errors or typos, so I make sure to do a final grammar and spelling pass.
So, when is your short story done? As I’ve gone through this submission process, I’ve found that many of my short stories are never done until they are published. During every revision I’ve completed, I have made fixes and changes to my text. Some of these are substantial (say if I’m revising to fit the format for an audio drama). Some of these updates are small.
What I have found is that short stories are done for a specific submission when I feel comfortable and confident enough with the quality of the story for that submission. I’m a perfectionist. If I hadn’t come to this realization, I would never actually submit a story because I would keep going through each story forever finding faults to fix.
So, for my short stories, they are done when I feel that they are ready for submission. And if there is a rejection, well, then I will read the next site’s guidelines and revise again until that submission is ready.
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