So I have elected to work on that short story based on that dream. And I guess I should preempt the following entry with a note that I have a dislike for writing short stories. I realize how difficult they are to do, and I will admit how important they are, but as Cormac McCarthy said:
"Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
And I guess for me it’s if I’m going to take the time and strife and hate and self-loathing, I’d rather be doing it for long fiction as opposed to a 6 thousand word short story – or worse, a 1500 word CBC short story. 1)don’t even get me started on microstories. I love long fiction. I love the research, planning, notes and iterations that come from making something big. I absolutely loved the preliminary time of making a narrative level in games, and I loved the evolution my novel became over the 8 years I was figuring it out.
But I have, over the years, started to admire short story writers. Lynn Coady’s recent Hellgoing blew me away. And of course there’s Hemingway, who’s plethora of short stories I have been trying to catch up on in the last few years.
So, I’ll start this short story with a framework from a dream and just write. See where it goes. See how long it will be.
References
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