There have been times when I wanted to write something but didn’t know what. These are the days when I reach a point where I have nothing useful to add to my still-unfinished novel.
I am not the only person who experiences these moments of low creative energy. When this happens, I set the longer work aside and go rogue—I write poetry and drabbles and short stories.
And yes, cardinal sinner that I am—some of my poetry rhymes. I can’t help that I was raised on Lord Byron and W.B. Yeats.
There are times when I want to write but have no solid idea what the story could be. Maybe it’s this, or perhaps it’s that. Those are the days when I turn out short stories. For me, writing short stories is like shopping for clothes. I need to try them on to see what fits before I buy them.
Maybe you are writing, but so far, you have written nothing novel or even novella-length. Perhaps you have been writing a little of this and a bit of that, and now you have a pile of disparate, exceptionally short fiction, and you don’t know what to do with it.
Two well-known and respected contests that I regularly submit work to are:
- The 100-word Microfiction Challenge — nycmidnight – opens April 19, 2024.
- The Lascaux Prize in Flash Fiction – 1,000 words or less, currently open, closes June 30, 2024.
A drabble is a microfiction. It is exactly 100 words long.
Extremely short fiction must showcase the same essential components as a longer story:
- A setting
- One or more characters
- A conflict
- A resolution.
We have a lot of information to convey and only 100 words to do it. To that end, we must show our story to the reader the way an impressionist paints a picture.
- We choose nouns and verbs with the most visual impact.
Microfiction is the distilled soul of a novel. It has everything the reader needs to know about a singular moment in time. It tells that story and makes the reader wonder what happened next. Each short piece we write increases our ability to tell a story with minimal exposition.
For a longer post on how I write microfiction, see my post of January 31, 2024: Discipline and Micro Fiction #amwriting | Life in the Realm of Fantasy (conniejjasperson.com)
Here are two reliable platforms that list a wide variety of publications and contests with open calls:
Some magazines have open calls for short (well under 4,000 words is best) stories:
There are also opportunities for the visual arts as well as written work:
Submitting to contests is a different process than submitting to magazines and anthologies.
When submitting to a publication, you send your work directly to the publisher. In return, you can expect to receive a communication from the senior editor, either a rejection or an acceptance.
Most rejections arrive in the form of impersonal emails or (rarely nowadays) letters: “We are not interested in this work at this time. Thank you, and keep writing.”
Contests are large, amorphous entities with a group of writers who have agreed to be readers. They judge submissions based on technical skills as well as creativity. Many contests must charge a fee for submissions.
I’ve said this before, but it bears mentioning again. You have wasted time and money if you don’t follow the prospective contest or publisher’s submission guidelines, which are clearly listed on the contest page or on their website.
We demonstrate our level of professionalism by strictly following submission guidelines. Editors at magazines and publishing houses receive hundreds of unsolicited works each week and have no time to deal with unedited, improperly formatted manuscripts.
Editors (or, in the big houses, their interns) look at the first page and immediately know what they are looking at. They reject the poorly written, unprofessional messes without further consideration.
To wind this up—take another look at that backlog of short work. Edit it, read it aloud, and edit it again. Then, consider submitting that work to a contest or magazine. It’s good experience for indie writers, but more than that, you might hit the jackpot!
To paraphrase an old joke, “to win the lottery, you must first buy a ticket.” This is especially true if you want to be published.
Credits and Attributions:
IBM Selectric, By Oliver Kurmis (Self-photographed) [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons, accessed Apr. 6, 2024.
Finnish Lottery Tickets, Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Veikkaus Lotto.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Veikkaus_Lotto.jpg&oldid=632154033 (accessed April 6, 2024).
I do a lot of rambling in my first drafts because I’m trying to visualize the story. While I try to write this mental blather in separate documents, the random thought processes often bleed over into my manuscript.
40,000 words in fantasy is less than half a book. That makes it a novella. But I send it to my beta reader to see what she thinks. If she feels the plot lacks substance at that length, I let it rest for a while, then come back to it. Then, I can see where to add new scenes, events, and conversations to round out the story arc. That might bring it up to the 60,000-word mark.
In the second draft, I will discover passages where I have repeated myself but with slightly different phrasing. My editor is brilliant at spotting these, which is good because I miss plenty of them when I am preparing my manuscript for editing. I wrote that mess, so even though I try to be vigilant, repetitions tend to blend into the scenery.
I have learned to be brutal. I might have spent days or even weeks writing a chapter that now must be cut.
Even if this story is one part of a series, we who are passionate about the story we’re reading need firm endings.
The Emperor’s Soul, by Brandon Sanderson
When we speak aloud, we habitually use certain words and phrase our thoughts a particular way. The physiology of our throats is unique to us. While we may sound very similar to other members of our family, pitch monitoring software will show that our speaking voice is distinctive to us.
Flynn’s style of prose is rapid-fire, almost stream-of-consciousness, and yet it is controlled and deliberate. She is creative in how she uses the literary device of narrative mode. Primarily, Gone Girl is written in the first person present tense. But sometimes Flynn breaks the fourth wall by flowing into the second person present tense and speaking directly to us, the reader.
“I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret.”
In my previous post, we talked about narrative point of view. POV is the perspective, the personal or impersonal “lens” through which we communicate our stories. It is the mode we choose for conveying a particular story.
When I begin my second draft, those weak verb forms function as traffic signals. They were a form of mental shorthand that helped me write the story before I lost my train of thought. But in the rewrite, weak verbs are code words that tell me what the scene should be rewritten to show.
The way we habitually phrase sentences, how we construct paragraphs, the words we choose, and the narrative mode and time we prefer to write in is our voice. It includes the themes we instinctively write into our work and the ideals we subconsciously hold dear.
If we move to a different window, the view changes. Some views are better than others.
Last week, I mentioned head–hopping, a disconcerting literary no-no that occurs when an author switches point-of-view characters within a single scene. I’ve noticed it happens more frequently in third-person omniscient narratives because it’s a mode in which the thoughts of every character are open to the reader.
I find that when I can’t get a handle on a particular character’s personality, I open a new document and have them tell me their story in the first person.
Recognizing where the real drama begins is tricky. Let’s have a look at the novel 
I admire the audacity of having Michell, a protagonist who considers his professional reputation as his most prized possession, commit such a catastrophic action as stealing those original letters. It proves there is potential for drama in the least likely places.
I’m not a Romance writer, but I do write about relationships. Readers expecting a standard romance would be disappointed in my work which is solidly fantasy. The people in my tales fall in love, and while they don’t always have a happily ever after, most do. The other aspect that would disappoint a Romance reader is the shortage of smut.
In his book 
When a beta reader tells me the relationship seems forced, I go back to the basics and make an outline of how that relationship should progress from page one through each chapter. I make a detailed note of what their status should be at the end. This gives me jumping-off points so that I don’t suffer from brain freeze when trying to show the scenes.
I think our characters have to be a little clueless about Romance, even if they are older. They need to doubt, need to worry. They need to fear they don’t have a chance, either to complete their quest or to find love.
But the scenes themselves are pictures within the larger picture of the story arc. Think of the story arc as a blank wall. We place the scenes on that blank wall in the order we want them, but without transition scenes, these moments in time appear random, as if they don’t go together.
Our bookend scenes are not empty words. They should reveal something and push us toward something unknown. They lay the groundwork for what comes next.
One of my favorite authors sometimes has chapters of only five or six hundred words, keeping each character thread separate and flowing well. A hard scene break with a new chapter is my preferred way to end a nice, satisfying fade-to-black.
In a novel or story, each scene occurs within the framework of the environment.
The Dragonriders of Pern series is considered science fiction because McCaffrey made clear at the outset that the star (Rukbat) and its planetary system had been colonized two millennia before, and the protagonists were their descendants.
The scenes we are looking at today have two distinct environments to frame them. In both settings, the surroundings do the dramatic heavy lifting. This chapter is filled with emotion, high stakes, and rising dread for the sure and inevitable tragedy that we hope will be averted.
Sallah enters the shuttle just as the airlock door closes, catching and crushing her heel. She manages to pull it out so that she isn’t trapped, but she is severely injured.
This is an incredibly emotional scene: we are caught up in her determination to seize this only chance, using her last breaths to get the information about the thread spores to the scientists on the ground.
So, let’s take a look at theme, the thread that binds emotions and points of no return together. It’s time to take another look at how 
Saunders gives us the character of Ray Abnesti, a scientist developing pharmaceuticals and using convicted felons as guinea pigs as part of the justice system. The wider world has forgotten about those whose crimes deserve punishment, whose fate goes unknown and unlamented.
Then there is the theme of compassion. Abnesti explores love vs. lust for his own amusement. The different drugs Jeff is given prove that both are illusionary and fleeting. Yet Saunders implies that the truth of love is compassion. Jeff’s final action shows us that he is a man of compassion.
A common theme in science fiction is the use of drugs to alter people’s behavior and control them emotionally. That theme is explored in detail here, ostensibly as a means to do away with prisons and reform prisoners. But really, these experiments are for Abnesti, a psychopath, to exercise his passion for the perverse and inhumane and for him to have power over the helpless.
This short story was as powerful as any novel I’ve ever read, proving that a good story stays with the reader long after the final words have been read, no matter the length. His questions resonate, asking us to think about our true motives.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 