Short Fiction

If an author is too long winded in his number of words he generally is too wordy in his imagery. The patterns of light and dark, the colors that the author chooses to show the reader in any story helps define the setting, the characters, and the tone of the story. In novels, the description of a scene can be played out as if a painter is carefully brushing in his colors to blend them naturally and make the portrait whole and complete. The author of the novel cannot waste room on over creating the scene, or he will lose his reader quickly. However, he does have the time and pages to develop it enough that the reader can enjoy the details. In the short story, the author has no such luxury.

By its nature, the short story is much shorter and the use of description must be only as needed. This is not to say that description should not be used in a short story. On the contrary, this is to say that the author has an economy of words—only so many marbles can be used to fill a jar and still be able to screw on the cap. He must be careful with his choice and use of description and dialogue. In order to conserve the amount of words, he can do a number of things:

1. He can use archetypes. If the character is sitting in a chair, the author can easily say he is sitting in a chair. He does not need to go into detail about the chair—the type of wood or metal, if it is an overstuffed leather chair or if it is a barely padded office chair. This does not need to be described unless it is crucial to the plot, the character, or sets the tone of the setting.

2. Use the element of time to create description. Fashion, furniture, technology, transportation has all changed through out the centuries of man’s existence. If you are writing a story set in 1910 or 3010 and want to describe a cruise ship, you do not need to do much to describe the ship. You do not need to go too deep in your description of a lady’s dress or a man’s suit. Your reader should have an image in their mind of what you are describing. It may not fit your exact picture, but unless it is critical that the reader see it exactly as you do it is not important.

3. Conserve your words when creating the setting. You do not need to describe how cramped or cluttered or wide and free something is to use space to describe the image you are creating. Allow the setting to describe the image instead. For example, let us propose that you are writing a short story set in the old west. If you wrote: “The prairie grass was thick and wet. The horse’s hooves squished into the mud as Jack rode between the hills with no town in sight.” You do give a description that can set the tone of for the story. Re-read these sentences for a moment. There were 28 words in those two sentences, that is 28 words that the author cannot use elsewhere in his story.

As an alternative: “Jack rode through the open prairie, the only sound was of hoofs sinking in wet mud.” Notice, the setting space is identical. It is a wet open prairie and Jack is riding a horse. The reader may presume he is a cowboy, but that may be in error and the author can show that soon enough. Read the sentence again. It is 19 words, instead of 28 and creates the same feel and setting as the first one.

The author of a short story only has a certain amount of space in which he can write. While every story should be edited down, dropping unnecessary words, the idea of word conservation should guide the writer in his use of imagery.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more articles, blogs, poetry, and stories that I write.