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Post by ScintillaMyntan on Apr 3, 2021 22:50:28 GMT -6
Have you ever had to make tough decisions about the form of a piece? Length is one matter. How do you know whether your story idea is a short story or a novel, and is it important to have an idea how long your story will be when you begin?
But there are further choices to make. Is this idea going to be a book or a screenplay? An actiony crime drama or a thoughtful literary piece about a crime? A children's story or a grown-ups' one? And for poetry, there's a lot to be decided in terms of form. Have you ever had a conflict like this as a writer? Or maybe started with one form and tried to switch to another?
For myself currently, story ideas are short stories by default; I just generally don't have the attention span or the writing ability for a novel. The two ideas I do have for longer forms are plots that simply couldn't be written from beginning to end in a couple thousand words: one in its essence involves changes in a character, the other changes in a society, and neither is going to happen quickly. And the latter is my main daydream setting, so if anything, I'd have more attention span for it than I ought.
Other than length, I think the only interesting form decision I've made was whether a certain story should take itself seriously. It had a rather outlandish premise, and between revisions I wavered between making it totally caught up in itself as this tense drama written in formal language, and writing it in a more 'outside' way, making it aware of its absurdity. When the former got critiqued, I think people couldn't tell whether it was meant to be satirical or not. Actually I'm not sure myself.
This question comes to mind because I have an idea for the poetry contest and two 'key' lines written, but I can see a couple of ways to go with it. One option is a short piece that just conveys the idea and would feel more light or understated; the other is a longer, more complex piece that examines and builds up to the idea and makes it feel final and heavy. And that's still without having decided whether this is going to rhyme or not, and whether to repeat one of the key lines every stanza, and so on. I don't think I've had this problem before, and I think that's because I usually think of poetic form as being part of my idea for a poem, not something I have to decide on once I already have the idea. But in this case, I can really see both options making use of my idea in a different way.
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Post by Alatariel on Apr 4, 2021 17:46:28 GMT -6
So....
I fail to think about this very much. I default to novel length when a new idea pops into my head (like how you default to short story). Whereas you say it's due to lack of attention span (I relate), I have the inability to condense. I don't want to be hindered by word count restrictions.
When I write short stories, it's because I specifically WANT or NEED to write a short story and so I try to force ideas to appear. Sometimes there's a magazine that has a theme or prompt and I feel it's in my wheel house. Like, I wrote a fairytale retelling because I've always wanted to write one and the story idea came quickly and it instantly conformed to short story form. As for contest pieces, a lot of the time I take a novel idea I've had for a while (but never wrote) and pick a scene or the beginning to turn into a short story.
As for genre, I know anything I write will have a paranormal/supernatural/fantasy-ish spin. I cannot write literary fiction to SAVE MY LIFE. Sometimes I decide genre first- like with contest pieces. And sometimes the subject matter makes the genre clear (futuristic setting, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, fantasy, sci-fi), like writing about a cyborg that wakes up from a 300 year slumber to a unfamiliar world, or writing about a ghost haunting the person who killed them, or writing about demons and angels.
As with impulse pieces, like poems, I'm always surprised by the turns they take...but I'm kind of a dark person on the inside and it almost always turns out twisted in some way.
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Post by RAVENEYE on Apr 5, 2021 7:57:58 GMT -6
Have you ever had to make tough decisions about the form of a piece? Length is one matter. How do you know whether your story idea is a short story or a novel, and is it important to have an idea how long your story will be when you begin?
But there are further choices to make. Is this idea going to be a book or a screenplay? An actiony crime drama or a thoughtful literary piece about a crime? A children's story or a grown-ups' one? And for poetry, there's a lot to be decided in terms of form. Have you ever had a conflict like this as a writer? Or maybe started with one form and tried to switch to another?
Oh gosh, yes! Dealing with this right now. I've explained this journey to Alatariel, so she's heard it before. So I wrote the rough draft of a novel about three years ago and even when I was writing, it felt like something was missing but I couldn't figure out what. Maybe the feeling was simply due to the fact that the draft was so EASY to write, and I'm not used to drafts being EASY but exceptionally challenging. Maybe it was really missing something. I pondered this for a year or so before I came across some advice that said "Make sure your setting is as unique as your characters." Well crap. I had some very unique characters but a run-of-the-mill English country estate for the setting. Blah. So I took this advice literally and chose a more exotic place for the setting: Egypt. Why not, right? So I got to writing the next draft of the novel, moving all these characters to the desert. GETTING them to the desert took waaaay too many words so that the main part of the story hadn't even started though I was almost 70k words in (I wanted the novel to be no longer than 100k). Obviously, I had a problem. Back to the drawing board. By this time, I had discovered Kate Morton's novels, which mix two timelines: NOW and BACK THEN. This FORM, I figured, would allow me to skip all the connecting tissue that was slowing down the narration, BUT I had to come up with a NOW, which meant a new subplot, which means more word count than I already had. HOWEVER! The exceptional challenge the first draft didn't impose is now fully upon me. I have to learn how to blend two timelines while keeping the word count down. And because of this FORM, I feel that the novel now has heart and depth and complicatedness that the first novel lacked. But it definitely took lots of trial and error to discover it. As far as "will this be a short story or a novel," I've only had one story surprise me, and that's my on-off again WIP "Anthem of Honor and Glory." I meant to write a brief novella length piece, but when the final word count was in, I had a short novel. |
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