The long and the short of it

Over my writers' retreat weekend I had two tasks to achieve.  The first was to write two short stories for spoken word events.  The second was to make a start on turning a short story into a novella.

I did get the first drafts of both short stories written that weekend, and I made a start on the novella.  But that was only the start of the work for all these pieces.

What I  was doing that weekend was working at the two extremes of short story length. The spoken word pieces had to fill a time slot of five minutes.  That's about four pages of double-spaced text, and around 900 words.  We're in the realm of flash fiction there.   And one of those stories needed four sections. It is a spooky tale, and in three sections the spookiness had to increase on each visit of my character to that place.  But fitting four sections into four pages was a real challenge.

I needed to keep certain details in to creep my character out, and that meant I had to cut out most other descriptive details.  The challenge wasn't helped by the fact that, for most of the story, we're  following one character, so there's a fair bit of tell in this story.

The second short story had the opposite problem.  There is lots of dialogue in it, but a big part of that needed to be a recitation of the colony's history.  The listener needs that detail for the theme of the story, but the challenge was to avoid the dialogue turning into one long, lectured, info-dump.

I had a real challenge editing both stories down to size, but I've given myself the opposite challenge with the novella.  The original short story I am working from was only 2,500 words long.  And when I read my two versions of that story I realised how sketchy some of the details are.  So this time the challenge was to add detail, to fill out the story.

I added details of the main characters' back histories, and again, I have a long dialogue piece between two characters about the colony's history.  (I seem to be making a habit of those).  The challenge in this case will be to describe everything fully in rich detail.  And part of the changes will also involve adding more viewpoints, including one of  the villain.

Both challenges stretch me as a writer, and improve my ability to write to a brief.  And to date I've written 10,000 words of that novella.   I'm half way there with it.