Shorter Fiction Forms by Allison Symes

 Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

I didn’t start out writing in the short fiction forms. I began by seeing if I could write a novel. I did. It went through numerous rewrites, had professional editing twice, and was longlisted in a Debut Novel competition. It remains unpublished. I became tired of the rejections  so I turned my attention to the shorter fiction forms. 

It took a long time for my stories to become publishable but I wasn’t surprised. I’d been reading plenty of sensible writing advice and still do. You are warned learning to get your work up to publication standard does take time. I saw this as fair game (and again still do).

I did find quickly one advantage to writing short stories was I could get far more written in the time it took me to write my novel, edited, reworked, edited again etc. I was also able to get feedback on the short stories which I used to help me improve. 

That eventually led to my first story in print in 2009 (A Helping Hand in Alternative Renditions by Bridge House Publishing, a volume which retold fairytales from alternative viewpoint characters).

From short stories, I discovered flash fiction and now have two collections out via Chapeltown Books with a third accepted. Flash has also led to me running workshops etc. All great fun to do.

This led me to accepting the writing journey is a long one. It isn’t straight forward. It’s okay to change direction too. Every writer can expect bumps in their writing road. 

I am not sorry for switching to the short forms of writing though I am revisiting my novel at the moment. I wish short stories were celebrated more. They are a wonderful form in their own right.  

I love reading many anthologies as well as enjoying contributing to them. I find them a great way of discovering authors new to me. If I like their short works, it is likely I will love their novellas/novels. I also like to read these things because it ensures I have a good mixture of short and long fiction stories in my “reading diet”.

There simply are some stories which work best at a lower word count. Equally there are stories which do need 80K to 100K words. But both are wonderful.

Another major advantage to the shorter forms is they do force you to focus on what does matter for your character (and therefore what the reader needs to know). Some great films can come from short stories too. I found The Birds terrifying as Hitchcock intended and that was based on a Daphne du Maurier short story.

It is good there are more short story prizes around now. I was pleased when The Bridport Prize added flash fiction to its categories but I would love more readers, when they think in terms of what book they’ll read next, to include the short story and flash anthologies in this, not just the novels.