The long and the short of it

Fresh from my marathon hothouse writing session of turning two short stories into novellas, this week I've taken on the opposite challenge.  I'm writing a story that has to be no more than 500 words long.

I'm already on the third re-write, and I haven't started the real editing yet.  Writing a complete story in such a short word count really focuses the mind on the essential story.  The story in its first incarnation was about my character not being able to escape the long reach of her violent husband, even when he'd been dead for a year and she'd moved to another planet.

The challenge was that the story had to reflect the theme of 'fright'.  Yes, I needed some details of her flight from her violent ex to explain the source of her fear, but I needed to focus on what really frightened her.  And that led me into the realms of ghosts and spirits.  It also gave me the idea for her  saviour being another ghost.  With such a short word count, I had to ditch most of the backstory I'd  written to discover my main character and her history.  I had to start at the point where she meets the ghost.  I had no words for lengthy scene-setting, so I had to tell the reader where she was as part of the ongoing action.

The novellas gave me the opposite challenge.  I was presented with two long short stories, both of which were several years old.  The writing was very clunky, just a collection of disparate scenes, some with disorientating jump-cuts between them.  And I hadn't put in the work to describe my worlds properly.  But what I did like were my central characters and the situations I'd put them in.

In Water Moon Down I loved Alenis's spiky, suspicious relationship with the military commander.  But in that old version I hadn't decided what her project was studying, and I needed to add those details.  After a little Internet research I decided she was researching seaweeds for Omega oil production.  

I also needed to spell out the alien Dela's situation more clearly,  I added more sections in the viewpoint of the Dela administrator.  I also racked up the tension by saying the Dela and humans had fought a war against each other before.  So when things blow up on this world, both sides are determined not to start another one.  That story went from 9,500 words to 22,000 in two weeks, and showed me how much I've grown as a writer.

I now know I can tell a story in any length, from a tweet to a 500 word story, right through to a 100,000 word novel.