The struggle is real, folks.

When I first heard that famous quote about long vs short letters and how long it takes to write each, I thought it was just someone being clever. Now, I think it’s truth. Writing books is easy for me. Writing short stories, on the other hand, is a real bitch.

Last week, I finished a story in the Gore Point world called Moloch. (It’s actually the “a group of kids find a wounded soldier demon in a cave with disastrous results” prompt I offered in the same group of options as Mine Zero, which was the one you chose for me to write). I wrote Moloch specifically for backers of my last Kickstarter campaign, but it was okay that only a handful of people would read it because I assumed writing it would be no big deal. It’d take me one day, maybe two days … but then I’d be done.

Wrong. It took me three weeks. The finished novella (not short story) is 17,000 words long: half the length of Fat Vampire and three times as long as it was supposed to be. Worse, trying to “keep it short” kicked me out of flow and made everything take longer. If I hadn’t tried to rein myself in, I could have written 50k in that same time.

I’m wondering now if I should just knock it off and always write novellas at least, if not full novels. They feel easier, they flow better … and apparently they take the same amount of time as shorts.

Why is that?

I'm just figuring it out for myself, actually. Here's what I've come up with:

Building a scene takes time.

When you try to tell even a simple story in a small number of words, you have to skip (or at least rush through) things that feel essential to me. I think that’s the heart of it.

Normally I like to build a scene slowly, allowing it room to breathe. If a mood is to develop in a scene, it needs time. If someone’s going to change their mind, it takes time. If we enter a creepy room, I can’t just tell you “this room is creepy.” The better way is to show you how creepy it is … which takes time. (The time itself helps establish real creepiness. Ever seen a suspense movie where people go from their everyday mood to suspense-ridden in a few seconds? Nope. You can get scared in a snap, but suspense is a long, slow boil.)

Common wisdom is to stick to a single, self-contained storyline when writing short, but that still doesn’t help me. You still need a few scenes to tell most stories, and my scenes need to percolate. Moods need to be set. Relevant elements need to be described or explained. Characters have minds of their own, meaning they can’t just spit out necessary lines without being nudged (over time) to do so.

Flow matters.

If I’m able to do all of the things I’ve just described (allowing a scene the proper number of words to unfold), it feels like I’m watching the scene in my mind and just describing what happens. When I’m able to take my time (words-wise), I ironically write faster because I enter a flow state.

But when I need to rush and use fewer words than I’d like (because I tell myself to “write less; this is only a short story), there’s no flow. I have to construct scenes instead of observing and recording them for you to read. Constructing is analytical and deliberate, whereas the flow state is creative and happens almost without effort.

So maybe the next time I want to write a bonus story for a thing I’m doing, I’ll plan on writing a full novella from the start. Instead of planning two days to write Moloch as a short, I could have planned two weeks to write it as a novella. Hell, if I’d allowed it to go as long as it wanted from the beginning, it might not even take that long. I can write a 20,000-word novella (or longer) in a week.

Why not? It ended up a novella whether I wanted it to or not. They always do.

So now that I've said all of that, I'm curious: Is this stuff interesting to you? Are you intrigued to read about my creative process, or not so much? Hit reply and let me know!

Thanks for reading,
JT