We've been working on short stories for a couple of months now. While we've been discussing different stories and their structure for a while, I could never really apply those concepts into my own writing until recently. My short story writing process really happened in two parts, since I ended up rewriting the story last weekend. The first story consisted of a small spark of an idea that I had when we started writing, and I wrote a few drafts based off of that. But eventually, I got stuck. I realized that my story wasn't following the correct short story structure and I didn't really push my character to actively do anything. The story basically fell flat, and I needed to try something new. And while it's pretty frustrating to realize that the story you've been working on isn't really going anywhere, I decided to take it as an opportunity to start over. I took one concept that appeared in the beginning of my first short story, and used it to create a new one.
Basically, I wrote a whole new short story in one weekend. As stressful and nerve-racking as that was, it really forced my mind to go into deadline mode and start spitting out ideas. Instead of starting to write my story in actual-short-story-form, I took a different approach and just outlined what would be the beginning, the middle and the end. This prevented me from going off on tangents and being unspecific, which is what ended up happening in my first short story. What began as an empty concept (about an unsuccessful college grad) started growing and stemming, and eventually, I had a full short story outline in front of me. It was pretty surprising to see that my mind could work and come up with story ideas, even when I was pretty sure that pure exhaustion would hinder any creativity. Once the ideas started flowing, it was actually fun to decide what I was going to do to my characters.
As the weekend went on, I finished the first draft of my second short story. Already, I could tell that this story was much better than what I had written in the first on. I pushed the characters more, I forced my main character to make decisions and mistakes, and most importantly, I had a clear beginning, middle, and end. But the problem with this draft was, not shockingly, the end. In the first draft, I had my character mention suicide, and ended the story ambiguously, never specifying whether he would follow through with his plan or not. When I finished writing the ending, I felt as though I was finally finished. I let myself feel triumphant for a few minutes. But I learned that using ambiguous suicide as an ending was taking the easy way out–I could, and needed to, push the character into a different situation. There needed to be at least some feeling of resolution, and there needed to be more relief. So I changed the ending. It relieved some parts of the plot, but certainly also let the reader make their own questions and assumptions about other parts.
By the time I finished the second version of the second short story, I honestly felt very happy with it. It felt a hundred times more developed than my first story. I was proud of the ending. Altogether, it was just better than the story I had started off writing. It probably would have been more convenient for me to realize that my story was stuck earlier in the writing process, but in all honesty, I don't know how well my story would have turned out. It's incredibly interesting to see how the mind works under pressure so close to a deadline.
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