There are some things you take for granted until you try to write them. Well, if you’re me, anyway.
There are two stories I’ve written recently which seemed like a grand idea in my mind, but in reality turned out to be a bit rubbish. This frustrated me into a sort of writer’s block which I’m hoping I’ve defeated through the realization I’m about to share.
The first story was for a university assignment. I had to write a Gothic and/or Sci-Fi short story for my course, so I decided to place a man from the 21st century suddenly in the 27th. The cities were larger – suburbs had become skyscrapers – and society was divided into those who worked for the dictatorship and lived in the houses, and those who were forced into cannibalism and underground living. Not the most original idea in the world, but hey, it worked. Until I went to write it down at least.
The second story was a personal project. Inspired by one of the smaller narratives found in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin – that is, the tale of Sakiel-Norn – I took it upon myself to create a world on the boundaries of a shrinking universe, a world which once held a mighty, Romanesque civilisation that had long since fallen to the madness of the void of oblivion above their heads. The main character was a boy from a tribe of surviving descendants who knew never to look up when the sky was dark enough to see “the Maw”.
The problem with these two stories is that not only did it require me to write about the tale of the character, but to write about this completely fictitious world in which they live. Which is fine, I can do that. But what I found was going wrong was that the wider social implications of what such a world would do to the character and the characters around him became difficult. Characters lost credibility. Settings required a distressing amount of narrative reinforcement. The story focused too much on dropping clever little hints about the wider world instead of what the focal point of the narrative is.
But most of all, I suppose, it’s perhaps just a little too much to ask to build an entire world and summarise the world in less than 4,000 words.
The main two things I’ve taken away from this is that writing Science Fiction perhaps isn’t my thing, and that I constantly have to be careful that my short stories don’t want to be novels instead. If you build an entire fictive world for one short story, that short story is going to think it’s too big for its boots and try to outgrow them. And then everything just falls apart.
Well, if you’re me, at least.
The most successful short story I’ve produced on my university course so far has been to do with a store robbery. The short story I wrote last night is about a cocaine addict, and it’s the first story I’ve been pleased with for a very long time. (This story can be found on my creative writing Facebook page from 7pm tonight, click the “Writing” link in the header.) What do these stories have in common? They’re about believable, flawed characters in the real world with real issues.
So I don’t know, maybe I’m just not experienced enough as a writer to tackle larger worlds quite yet. Maybe larger worlds just generally don’t fit into short stories as well as I expected. But what I do know is that for the first time in a long time, I feel confident in my writing again, and that’s all down to a change in subject matter. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of finding my own personal niche.
Perpetually Perturbed 