This is more of a note to myself, on what I’m trying to accomplish with my experiments with Tiny Fiction, and may likely be very disjointed. The creative process for these things often starts with the first line of the story, and proceeds from there. Often, I’ll have no idea where the story is going to end up. Sometimes, I’ll have an idea of the tone I want to set (in Spies Like Us, for example, I wanted the tone to be bleak, and show how tired and worn Dmitri was by the process of being a spy). Also, in each of these little nuggets, I want the reader to hunger for more. I try to do this by including little interesting bits of detail, things I might reference in passing and never explore. I’m sure I’m breaking all kinds of rules, and if I had bothered to take any writing classes in college, I might learn the “right” way to do this stuff, but I’ve read a lot of books and short stories, and I know what I like and don’t like.
I also want to use these small pieces of fiction to explore character development, and dialog. I haven’t really had much dialog in either of them, but I’m going to work on that. Dialog is hard to do in only 500 words or so (my self-imposed limit to these stories), but I think that makes it more challenging — each word has to mean *just* the right thing.
This whole process has been interesting so far — now, all the time, I’m thinking up new ideas for Tiny Fiction. As I type this, I’m looking at 6 drafts that I’ve started, all in various states of completion. One of them only has a title “The Short and Tragic Life of Archibald Turner”. I have no idea what that story is going to be about, I just liked the title so I started a draft to capture the idea. I guess that’s one of the exciting parts for me, having a place to capture all of these ideas, and actually bring some of them to fruition.
I’m not doing so great on my goal of writing a “short story” once a month (i.e., something more substantial than Tiny Fiction). I have two ideas that I’m toying with for my first short story, and maybe I’ll just start throwing stuff out there for both and see what sticks. Both are perfect for serial fiction — they’re ripe with ideas and characters begging to get into a series of adventures and mishaps. Hopefully after next week things for me in my personal life will begin to “settle down” (ha!) a bit more into a pattern and I can figure out how to fit these activities into my life.
Ah well, enough blathering on. I’ll maybe work on a story now.