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A Mini Epic
Saturday, December 5, 2009
We’re epic fantasy writers. We can describe the hilt of a sword in three paragraphs or more. We boast about our word count and the ability to use our novel (secondarily, of course) as a paperweight. We’ve been asked to write a short story. Short story? What—? How? It’s not that we don’t want to write it—we very much do—it’s just that we’re not entirely sure how. Is a fantasy short story merely a condensed version of a full novel, or are we to take a completely different approach?
At this time, we didn’t care. We were going to write what we were going to write rules or no rules. So, nyeah! Unfortunately, that sort of thinking is what got us into this mess. What mess, you ask? Our inability to create a short story we like. We know now that writing a short story is a craft unto itself. It’s a completely different animal from an epic tale—a whole new set of genes compose it. And so we’re struggling…rather, were struggling. We think we’ve found our way, but time will tell.
On our adventure at GenCon, we were approached by an Editor-in-Chief of a gamers’ magazine. Would we be interested in writing a short story for him that would appear in his periodical? Hm…ask a writer to write? For a legitimate magazine? And he has since become a friend, so we had no reason to refuse. In fact, we jumped at the opportunity to revisit our characters.
The story—which is to be between 4,000 and 10,000 words—is to be “relevant”. In our friend’s words; “something that deals with your current works and will be of interest to your existing readers. Ideally it is an element that has touched readers, based on your fan feedback. He went on to give us potential ideas, and we chose a story which bridges Raven’s Heart and our pending Black Earth trilogy. Even before GenCon concluded we decided upon a sound idea that we intended to have written well before November 10th—our personal deadline.
We hate to say it, but look at the date of this blog. No, we did not finish our short story in time. Thankfully our friend’s deadline is January 1st. We’ll need every day we can get. Not only is the short story a new experience for us, but, we are also extremely critical of our own writing. This simple venture has turned into a definite learning experience. We’ve since gone through two story ideas.
The third time is the charm…but it hasn’t been easy. Creating the basic plotline was simple enough, but fitting it into the grand scheme of our novels was the true challenge. We had to be careful with consistency in details, make sure the pacing flowed smoothly. Stef is writing the final pages as I type this blog, and we are pretty confident that we will succeed.
So while our short story venture has been a good lesson in a different writing sense, we understand that we are indeed epic fantasy novelists at heart. We love delving into detail and character development. We love world-building and intricate plots. We tried to condense an epic story into thirty pages. Did it work? You’ll just have to watch our site and find out.
-Matt
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