Short Stories - Two Lessons I Have Learned

The two things you need to remember about writing short stories:-

- They have to be self-contained; nothing has to refer to an outside story. If your guy has superpowers, reveal them early or show him resolving the problems without them; if there is a gun, it belongs to that Russian guy from Star Trek and it has to be fired at least once before the end of the story.

- Closures all around. Whatever happens in the story ends in the story. It might be canon, but there has to be a sense of normalisation at the end. You don't get to write a short story whose ending leaves open a loose thread which opens in another short story or even main sequence novel. If there is a loose end, it dies when the story ends and it is referred to never again, save in discussions at author panels at conventions or down the pub.

Of course, now I've outlined these two cardinal rules which I will never break ... I'll try to break them good and hard across the knee some time.

Short Stories

Since I joined the Fang Song Fantasy Writers' Club in Chester Library, I've written a number of short fantasy stories from at least two settings.

"Sanna's Sentence" and "Scarred" are set in the world of my novel, The Silver Touch. In another world, "Nobody's Perfect" and "The Treasure of Ages" feature the protagonists Arven - an elf - and Inkblot - a walking shadow, summoned from a plane of smoke and shade.

Meanwhile, I still have "Island of Stars," my second Paleborn story, sequel to "Inheritance," a short story I wrote a few years ago.

"Let me take you to the days of high adventure ..."

Short Stories

I'm writing the first of a series of short stories spinning off from The Silver Touch, The Gilded Saidara and The Shadowed Art.

The background is that I have become involved with a fantasy writers' club in Chester, and I have a set exercise each month to follow. This month's theme is "Shapeshifters."

I swore that I would write not one, but three, fantasy stories around that theme. One would be a sequel to last month's short story entry "Nobody's Perfect," featuring Inkblot from that story; another, an original fantasy not connected to any setting; and then, there is "Increments," this story - tied intimately to the setting of The Silver Touch, and featuring settings, backdrops, characters and props from that novel.

In a way, "Increments" could easily be your gateway into this world. But it won't be the only gateway.

As long as there are assignments for this club, there might well be a steady stream of short stories like these. And I can happily turn them all into an anthology, or tack them to the end of a novel-length story. I might even consider writing a novel and adding at least one short story to the end, as a sort of "appendix."