Coming Home

It can be hard to take a break to work on a short story when I’m already involved in a longer piece. But it can be harder to turn my back on a good idea for a short story. So what’s a guy to do?

When story ideas come to me, I usually have a pretty good sense of what format they’ll take. My guidelines are pretty simple: if the story is about a single character taking place over a limited timespan, then it’s a short story; if the story is about multiple characters and or taking place over a longer timespan, then it’s probably a novel, though not necessarily.

My story, “Experiment: Schrödinger,” is about one character in a fairly limited timespan, ie from when Sal, the main character, wakes up in a robot’s body to about an hour later. Now of course, there are digressions and internal narration, but it’s pretty straight-forward.

My novel, Clean Freak, takes place over the course of a week and, though it’s about Clarence and Lucy more than any other characters, there are scenes that propel the story forward that happen without our two main characters. Additionally, the story uses more frequent flashbacks to (I hope) add depth to the Clarence’s and Lucy’s characters.

I knew from the first notes I jotted down for Clean Freak that it was a more involved story, needing a longer format to tell it. In the same way, though I had the idea for the world of “Experiment: Schrödinger” far in advance of writing the story, it was Sal’s character that gave me the story, one that I knew I only needed a few thousand words to tell.

I have other story ideas that will probably need a novel to tell them kicking around in my head other than Codename: Fairyland, but I don’t want to start any until I’d finished a first draft. That way, I don’t end up unintentionally abandoning Fairyland for something else. It’s a vicious cycle that leads to unfinished stories. Since writing Clean Freak, I’d started half a dozen longer projects in a series of “Hey look something shiny!” bursts of creative energy, followed quickly by sputtering out. Until, that is, I finished Codename: Memories last year, proving to myself that I could still finish longer stories.

But short stories are a different matter. Because I can usually tell how long of a story it’ll be based on the idea, short stories are a great chance to break what can be monotony, working on the same story for months.I like to think of them as creative cross-training. It’s all well and good to ride my bike as my main source of exercise, but I do also like yoga or getting out on my stand up paddle board.

So, I’m picking up my notes to Codename: Fairyland again. And it feels like coming home.