It's all in the details

Re-writing my short stories recently has shown me how much I've grown as a writer, especially during these last five years.  I loved many of the stories I rediscovered.  They had intriguing ideas at their heart, and the writing wasn't bad.  There just wasn't enough of it, or enough detail.

The biggest thing I've learned in the last five years is how to edit my work.  I've learned how to pull back from a close association with the page, set aside the work for a while, then look at it from what business theorists call a "helicopter view".  I've learned to detach from the story and see it as a reader would.  And too often when I've done this for my old stories I've found a lack of telling details.  

One of the longer stories I've re-ŵritten is about the relationship between a human woman, Maia, and an alien telepathic big cat, Sha'ap.  The cat has a wicked sense of humour and the dialogue between the two characters was sparky and funny.  But there was a massive thing wrong with the story - it had no central conflict.  

What was the story really about? What was the problem/challenge the characters had to overcome?  I realised the story was about overcoming fear. Maia lost her parents in a starship accident when she was six, and she's afraid to travel through a Gate again.  But Sha'ap now has the opportunity to return to his home world, and Maia has a big choice to make: refuse to go through a Gate and lose her soul-partner, or conquer her fear and go with him.

Now the story has a purpose.  I hadn't explored the depth of their relationship in the original story, but now did.  I had Maia admitting that she loves Sha'ap.  If she wants to stay with her soul mate she has to overcome her fear.  That was much better, and made the story work well.

Other stories have needed the addition of "familiar strangeness', adding telling details of the future culture or setting that are everyday scenes seen through the characters' eyes.  I needed to describe the artificial wombs, and show how people reacted to them.  In one story the central character is a girl up a lookout tower, but I hadn't even told the reader that she was on a tower.

I'm happy with the re-writes I've done, with the depth and richness I've added to those stories. Now it remains to be seen whether the magazines I'm about to submit them too like them as well.