By Steve Pease/Michael Chandos
I am mainly a short story writer. I like the format of a 30-40 minute story and I like pulling the puzzle pieces together of plot, character and structure. Short stories (3500 to 6000 words) are concepts, metaphors. They can be stylish and can comment on life, like using Lilliput to comment on Government.
I use many story-starters: a theme, a scene in my imagination, a title, a character, an observation. I've thought about how an airport boarding gate would look if we were boarding for a scheduled to Mars rather than to Chicago. Some of my stories have started with a daydreamed character "talking" to me.
BTW Those who dream during the day have an advantage over those who dream only at night.
The writing might start with just a scene, maybe a page of notes, some internet images, or even a song lyric. Often, a working title suggests itself as the label for the story concept I'm chasing. The title may change later. Everything goes into an electronic folder and often a real one. I have stories that started with one title and a few pages, but then a better story concept developed from that early writing, so new text files under the new title go into the same folder, which now carries both titles. I do research on Wikipedia and elsewhere on the web. I file technical reports, videos and artwork in the folders.
I throw nothing away.
Often, I have a market in mind. A themed anthology? Maybe this story is #5 in a story series. Sometimes, a story will be edited/rewritten to meet a specific Conference contest or anthology call, like Bouchercon. Most folders hold multiple versions of the same story. My latest published story, "Dinky Dau", was first written around the history of Vietnam War slang that I ran across during research about something else. I have written and rewritten that story a half dozen times over 5 or more years as I submitted it to various markets. I have all those different versions of the story. It improved, and it's now in "Mickey Finn #5".
I want to rewrite and submit another existing story, "The Happy Ending", for Ellery Queen magazine. I couldn't find the latest version! I know I rewrote the middle of the story last Fall and I knew I needed to go thru it one more time before mailing it to EQ. I couldn't find that Fall 24 version anywhere. I hadn't followed my own rules on folderizing everything. Versions of the text were spread over two computers, some saved under non-writing labels!
I had to go to an email from last Fall when I sent the story to an anthology call. The Fall 24 story was attached. I wasted time and raised my anxiety unnecessarily. I need to organize better.
The base element to good writer organization, for me anyway, is saving with a meaningful file name. I have hundreds of images, maybe thousands, with non-sense numerical file names as downloaded from a source. I have versions of a story saved just under the title, ie Hamlet, but I needed something better, like Hamlet 2023 EQ. I have stories with all attribution removed for award consideration. There's no reason to do that task twice.
I'm going thru gigabytes of data on my writing hard drive creating better file names and folderizing the result. Yes, there are Many folders on my hard drive, so the folder names are short but descriptive too. Confusing file names get changed if they don't work. Discipline.
I'm finding things I didn't remember I had. Sometimes my writing mind is intrigued. I make a side note to go back later.
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