A story a week

The great science fiction writer Ray Bradbury advised writers not to start their careers by writing a novel.  He advised cranking out "a hell of a lot of short stories".

His suggestion was to write a new short story every week.  He said that it simply isn't possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

I'd forgotten about this piece of advice until it popped up on the Internet a few days ago.  And it reminds me how I've gone about the business of writing the wrong way round.  Instead of doing the sensible thing, I've spent a number of years writing novel after novel (over twenty of them now).

In my defence, I was having great fun, and I was learning how to write.  Of those novels, I'd estimate around a dozen are publishable standard, and most of those would need a major rewrite before submission.  I spent several years practising my craft without submitting anything.  When the occasional submission resulted in rejection, I just stopped submitting, and kept on writing.

But this year I know better.  I've changed my objectives.  I set an intention in January to sell one short story to a professional magazine this year.  And I also committed to making 100 submissions during the year.

Then I started to look at my stock of stories and realised I needed some new ones.  There are stories I really believe in and am certain are good, but they've been rejected by a lot of markets and I'm running out of places to send them.  I needed a new batch of stories. So I also set an intention to write 50 new short stories this year.  So far I've stuck to this target from the start of the year.

Some stories are easy to write, and some I've really struggled to finish.  Some aren't brilliant, but some I do think have a spark of specialness about them.   The discipline of finding new characters, settings, and plots every week has turned story writing into a process that's almost mechanical.  

But it gets the work done, and prevents me becoming precious about the story.  And I'll end up with fifty new stories to use to reach my 100 submissions target.  A win all round, I think.