Short form ambivalence
Short stories aren’t my thang as a reader or a writer. Which isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed them; The Rule of Names is a terrific short story. More often than not, I just don’t find them satisfying. To the extent that I can get invested in the characters and their worlds, that investment is short-lived. The plots are simple, out of necessity, even when the endings twist or sting. These issues bite me on the writing side as well. Building up the creative head of steam to write is harder to amortize when the story is short. Walking away from characters and worlds after less than ten thousand words is hard to justify. The ideas that excite me invite lengthy exploration. All that, and I lack the skill and experience to efficiently craft short fiction.
That’s something I want to correct, but not enough to abandon my novel-length projects. Or so I thought…
Roadside targets of attractive opportunity
I didn’t set off on my recent road trip with the intent of anything other than visiting friends I hadn’t seen since the Before Time. My journey took me to central Nevada, where I stayed several nights at the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah. The Mizpah is a grand old hotel, built during a silver boom in the early 20th century. The silver ran dry long ago, but US 95, connecting Reno to Las Vegas, passes through the town and life goes on. And so does the afterlife. The Mizpah is haunted.
Modern connectivity allowed me to share this interesting feature with a friend in a different time zone. The conversation went something like this:
Tonopah, NV. Rumored to be haunted. Didn’t see any ghosts last night.
You don’t see them when they possess you. Any missing time last night? If so might be time to leave town
Good point
And now that you mention it, I can’t account for most of the time between 10pm and 6am…
My friend had given me a rare and special gift: a story idea. Writers’ friends and acquaintances have no shortage of story ideas that they’re happy to offer you. Most writers aren’t wanting for ideas. Time, energy, and discipline to pursue their copious ideas tend to be what is in short supply. I can’t say for sure that my friend wasn’t deliberately seeding a story idea, but having this come up during our typical banter got the idea past the defenses I put up when someone says, “Hey, I’ve got a great story idea for you to write.” What made this extra special was that my gut told me I could turn this into a short story.
The horror, the horror
One of the challenges in fiction is building reader empathy for the main character (MC). You generally need the reader to like the character, even an anti-hero, enough to follow the MC through the story. Wide swaths of the general readership will tune out if the character is ‘unlikeable.’ And a fraction of those will take a dump in your Amazon reviews. It is what it is.
The rule is relaxed for short fiction. Perhaps even inverted. When space and time are in short supply, it’s a lot easier to get a reader to hate a character. The MC can be dastardly on the condition that he gets his karmic deserts at the nearby end of the story. Horror, macabre, and mystery fiction have exploited this since at least Edgar Allan Poe’s time. Tales from the Crypt and other horror comics from the 50s skated the censorship regime of the times by having bad people meet terrible, ghastly, horrific ends. It’s a morality tale about the wages of sin! See? No? Yeah, the ploy didn’t always work, but it did allow us to rationalize our sadistic glee by telling ourselves justice prevailed. Prevailed in the goriest, most ironic way possible. Yay, justice!
Rebecca’s Curse – The Short-er Story
The MC for my ghostly possession story is a bad man. I won’t spoil whether I deliver on, or subvert, your expectation of justice by the story’s end. What I will spoil is that I failed to write a proper short story. My preferred draft is 11,300 words long. I call this the Director’s Cut. That’s technically a novelette. There’s very little in the way of a market for a novelette. I did edit it down to a Theatrical Cut of 7300 words. That’s a beefy short story. It’s also not as good.
It remains to be seen if I’ll place the story anywhere other than this blog. When I know, you’ll be the next one to know. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading!