Smoothing out the story

I've been doing a bit of clearing up and organising of writing stuff over Christmas, and one of the things I did was to pick up a pile of old unfiled short stories to review and rewrite.

What I find when I pick up older stuff is that often the story jumps from scene to scene.  I migh have some great dialogue and action in a scene, but as soon as it ends I jump-cut to the next scene.  Sometimes that makes the story seem disjointed, and it doesn't allow for any changes of pace.  I need to smooth the story out.

Also, in some of these old stories, I haven't really included much sense of the world they are set in.  I've realised that I don't put enough setting description into my stories.  I tend to skim-read that stuff in other people's work, and neglect it in my own.

Although I love describing dawns and sunsets, a long description of a whole page describing a character watching the sun go down would have me turning the page.  I'm very much action-orientated in my stories.  But I've learned that action takes place somewhere, and I need to describe that somewhere well enough to get my readers rooted into the story.

So on my rewrites of the old stories I'm forcing myself to slow down, and to think through the details of the places where my characters are, and to put some sense of that place on the page.

This was important in the case of my novel Genehunter, where human characters go to a word where the grass and trees have red leaves.  That world looks very different from Earth, and I've forced myself  to slow down and focus on the most important details.

Another kind of smoothing out I'm doing right now is turning a short story into a novella.  The story was a long one to start with, but turning it into a novella gives me the space to expand on the themes and the messages I want to get across in the story.  I'm off today on a writing retreat for the weekend, and this is the story I'm taking with me to work on.

I also write flash pieces for a spoken word group, and I've learned to smooth those stories out by ruthlessly cutting the story down to one idea.  I've found that smoothing out all my stories is essential, but that it can take many forms.