Short Stories

[Nihilism]

Did you write short stories to get better at writing?

 

[Western42]

...That's....a good question. I mostly just never finish my stories, and just work on something else when i get a new idea.

 

[CarburetorThompson]

I’ve found I just like writing short stories better. A story doesn’t need to be long to be good.

 

[Linko]

The first stories I wrote were short stories. Transitioning from that to a novel has been a challenge.

 

[BlackKnightX]

If you count each chapter of my series as a short story, then I’m sure I’ve written a few.

 

[Bartun]

Yes, I've written a bunch of short original and fan fiction stories that I never published before writing my story proper.

 

[BenJepheneT]

I don't usually write them but when I do, I write them as a sort of marker for a milestone. Since my short stories are usually 6+ months apart, I always compare my latest short story to the one before it, and see where I've improved/degraded.

In terms of improvement, I've gotten better at planning my stuff and shortening the word count. In terms of degradation, you can say my prose have gotten a lot drier, and that I'm starting to focus heavily on dialogue, and that every paragraph oozes at least some semblance of horny. If you fed a goat a page from my recent short story you could impregnate it.

 

[K5Rakitan]

When I was a kid, yes.

 

[Toripuru-S]

Technically any writing I do has a goal of me wanting to get better somewhere at it's core, but whenever I write short stories it's mostly just to have fun in a pressure free environment.

If it turns out those short stories are unknowingly making me better at something, I won't complain about that .

 

[Paul_Tromba]

I don't like writing short stories because it requires a different mindset than writing long books as you need a beginning, middle, and conclusion all within a very limited number of pages. That said, any form of writing is practice for writing so it's not bad but if you want to write novels then you should practice writing novels rather than short stories.

 

[lambenttyto]

Did you write short stories to get better at writing?

I've never written shorter stuff to get better. My favorite length is the novelette, which is between 7,500 words and 17,500. I prefer the longer side. Novellas are nice too, but I hate calling them that. I call them "short novels," which go from 17,501 words to 39,999 words.

I don't like short stories. 1,000 to 7,500 words. It's a chapter length to me and doesn't have the structure of a complete story. I think shorter fiction, barring short stories, is in some ways, superior, because you can hold the story in your head, you can talk about it better. A novel? It's too much information. A novel is basically an "epic" which gets the definition based on the need to take breaks before finishing.

 

[Deleted member 57675]

Motivation flattened, no long stories. Short it is, if there is one.

 

[RavenRunes]

Other way around for me, started with short story and novelette, now writing novels. It seems I can either write 10k-20k stories, or 500k ones, nothing in between...