- Much of my work resembles that of Dan Brown or Chuck Palahniuk (according to I Write Like), despite the fact that I've never read either person's work.
- I've only written one story between 578 and 854 words. I'm not finished cataloguing, but I expect a similar situation to remain. The reason for such eludes me. Perhaps I should try writing some 700-word stories to test those waters.
- The quality of my prose drops off drastically below 270 words. I am not surprised by that. Anything shorter than 270 words has to be extremely simple to work, even with my brevity.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Things I've Noticed About My Fiction
I've written my fair share of flash fiction pieces. Some have been good, many have been passable, and a few have been near terrible. A while ago I started an Excel document listed things I've written along with (in its current form): genre, word count, personal rating/percentage, and I Write Like result. I've noticed a few things from looking at a list of forty-nine pieces.
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I have written so many posts about things I've noticed in my own writing, I won't take up space here reiterating :p
ReplyDeleteThe short version is, I'm hyper over-analytical, so give me a chance, and I'll dismantle, tear up, compress, delete, re-write, and re-build over and over again until I get it right.
For flash fiction, I also found it hard to write anything really short, so I wrote a bunch of 50 & 100 word pieces, over and over, until every word had to matter. It's great practice for figuring out where the natural padding places are in your writing style.
That's a good exercise. I just keep writing to practice.
DeleteI have written around 150 fiction pieces. I have a tendency to go way beyond the word count.
ReplyDeleteYes, I feel you should try writing stories within 700 words, that will ensure that each word earns it place in the story.
I'll try to get tomorrow's (Sunday's) piece to 700 words.
DeleteI usually don't write short fiction unless it's a prompt for an English class at school, but I've noticed that in my writing, all my ideas are there, the sentences are just choppy and don't make sense. Adjectives could always be replaced, phrases can always be combined, etc. I've also noticed that some of my characters' thought processes are overdone -- they think for way too long, and these paragraphs of thought should be replaced with dialogue. The final thing I've noticed, though, is that the majority of the time, I come up with tacky dialogue.
ReplyDeleteOh, well. Practice makes perfect, huh?
-Matt
Yeah, I try to keep character thoughts to a minimum. My main highways for displaying character are action, dialogue, and facial expressions, rather than description or thoughts.
DeleteI'm too wordy. It requires numerous edits to trim. Flash and very short fiction is a different beast. Practice does indeed make perfect.
ReplyDeleteMy general rule of thumb is that most sentences should serve more than one purpose. If a sentence serves only one purpose, it must be directly developing plot, setting, or character. You don't need to know that Tom's shirt is blue unless his shirt being blue means something or foreshadows.
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