Episode #349: Shorten Our Stories Reduex

I found this random floral bouquet during my afternoon walk the other day (10/15). Not sure why it was left there, but seemed just enough out of place for me to take a picture of it. Because you know, curiosity makes Georgie's daily routine less routine.

I know I've mentioned on more than a few occasions that I've gotten back into writing short stories, and I've been basically writing short stories that were previously published in my now closed short story blog, with a few originals thrown in for fun.

Over the years I've been saying to myself and to you the reader that I've been (mostly) a pantster when it comes to writing because generally, I found planning a novel to be a lot more complicated than just writing on the fly.

However, the three plus years that I had spent writing my fantasy series basically blew that viewpoint completely out of the water to smithereenies. How, you may ask?

Well....when you incrementally expand your universe to include eighteen characters and fifteen plot/sub-plot points, you decided that plotting/outlining that universe isn't such a bad thing after all.

So we applied that learned lesson to our short stories, albeit in a modified form: we took that previously written short story and used it as a viable outline for the new version of that short story.

And it does come in handy, as it gives me a predetermined starting point and a predetermined ending. All I have to do, in general, is create the filling. And sometimes, we improvised the starting point, so that it blends with the filling and the ending.

For example: I had chosen a train story in my latest batch of rewrites. It wasn't anything particularly special about the story: a man was riding a train and encountered a woman who left a hairbrush behind.

Using that original story as an outline, we tweaked the beginning (riding a train to visit his late wife's parents), created a middle that elasorateds on how he came to be a widow, tweaked the original ending and we ultimately wounds up with a ghost story.

This was the process that I used for rewriting over a dozen short stories: use the original as an outline to plot out nearly 75% of the story (aka, the beefy middle), with the remaining 25% evenly split between the beginning and the end.

I've gotten so used to writing with an outline that I now often wonder why I hadn't tried it sooner. Then I remember after asking myself that question, I answer it by stating that going into that much detail prior to putting pen to paper makes Georgie a dull writer.

So today, or rather, this year I learned that you can teach a crusty old dog new tricks, but only after you heavily bridge them with treats and harsh persuasion of the crystal blue variety.

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