{"id":9682,"date":"2022-04-21T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-21T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9682"},"modified":"2022-04-21T08:04:45","modified_gmt":"2022-04-21T12:04:45","slug":"more-short-and-sweet-tips-on-effective-prose-in-short-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9682","title":{"rendered":"More Short and Sweet: Tips on Effective Prose in Short Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Last week Sisters in Crime sponsored another of its \u201cShort and Sweet\u201d webinars about short-story writing. Talented author Art Taylor again hosted, along with award-nominated Ed Aymar, to talk about constructing a text. There’s a great satisfaction in doing it well. As Brendan DuBois said in the current issue of The3rdDegree<\/em>, there’s a “satisfaction in seeing how an author can tell a gripping story in the confines of a relatively small playground.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prose\u2014that is, the words on the page\u2014are not just a delivery vehicle for character and plot, Taylor said. How<\/em> a story is told is its own experience. If it\u2019s told in a style that makes you think of floating down a lazy river on a summer day with the insects buzzing and the green smells rising, that\u2019s a different experience than a style like a machine gun\u2019s rat-a-tat-tat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, you can have both. If you lull the reader with a warm, sleepy meandering text until unexpected events cut it off with the rat-a-tat-tat of hard consonants and short sentences, that wakes the reader up. In my writing, I default to long sentences, chains of clauses linked by commas and conjunctions. I have to remind myself not to write a fight scene that way! Make it punchy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m sure I was nodding when Taylor said, \u201cLet the reader do some of the work.\u201d Over-explaining is annoying. Trust that your reader is following along and understands some things without explanation. \u201cShe started making dinner, so they would have something to eat that night.\u201d Clearly, everything after the comma should go. If you can envision your readers saying, \u201cI get it, I get it!\u201d then cut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Short stories, especially, benefit from pruning everything unnecessary. Taylor called this \u201ceconomy, efficiency, and an unrelenting focus.\u201d Nothing should be in the story that doesn\u2019t serve its purposes. Taking this a step further, he suggested that each line of a story ideally should accomplish several things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A recent short story described a journalist and his investigations of hazardous jobsites. He takes a woman to dinner and, in the middle of their evening, a terrorist appears and shoots a dozen people. It was like walking into another story. Perhaps the author used the crusading journalist trope to make readers sympathetic to the murdered man, but weren\u2019t there more integrated ways to accomplish this? It\u2019s as if the story wore a plaid skirt, a striped blouse and a polka-dot vest, when what it needed was a dress. Fancy, sure, but One Thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was relieved to hear from Ed Aymar that he writes lots of drafts. Me, too. And he endorsed the idea of reading work out loud, especially dialog. It\u2019s one of the quickest ways to spot where the text isn\u2019t working. Another of his good ideas is to rewrite your text a bit when using it for a reading. The pacing and emphases may need to be adjusted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sisters in Crime<\/a> has archived the video of Taylor and Aymar\u2019s presentation for its members. \u201cCrafting Prose in a Short Story\u201d is full of additional writing tips, too. Join?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: the 3D printed dress at Selfridges Department Store, London, was photographed by Bradley Harper<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week Sisters in Crime sponsored another of its \u201cShort and Sweet\u201d webinars about short-story writing. Talented author Art Taylor again hosted, along with award-nominated Ed Aymar, to talk about constructing a text. There’s a great satisfaction in doing it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Economy, efficiency, and focus are essential to an effective short stories, say Art Taylor and Ed Aymer.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,185,120,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-language","category-short-story","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2wa","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9682"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9691,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9682\/revisions\/9691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}