Except in novel writing, I am a man of too many words. Sure, I can plow through a scene in less than five hundred words (not a good thing). But give me a short story and a limited word count and watch me plow through with too big of a story.
Flash Fiction Fiddling
Last winter I participated in NYC Midnight’s 250 word challenge. Because I made it to round two, I wrote a story for each. In both cases, I ended up a hair over the limit. Now in flash fiction, you’re already choosing words carefully, and aiming for brevity to set enough scene and deliver the punchline.
The fix in this tiny fiction case was to comb through and remove filler words like “just” and “very”. I also tried to rephrase bits into shorter variations of saying the same thing. For instance, there’s short ways of saying the last two sentences. But I don’t have a word count limit and it reads fine enough.
Part of the word reducing goal included getting enough free words to rework or enhance weak sections. Which worked well enough I made it to round two. So there’s that.
Short Story Stress
Last month, I picked up a call looking for stories about body autonomy for a charity. An idea hit me and 8047 words later, I had a first draft. Too bad the requirements included a 7500 word limit.
Ouch.
Like before, I scrolled backwards through the story, analyzing each sentence, looking for extra words or alternate phrasings that lowered my word count. Going through the whole document netted 50 words under limit to work with. Not bad.
Then feedback arrived, confirming what I thought. A rushed ending, and some parts that didn’t resonate or dive deep enough into the moments. Well yeah, my scenes were short to cram all that story into the box.
Now part of my story followed the MC through seven class periods. At least one of them felt pretty weak, so I merged it with the next stronger class and arrived at 200 free words.
Yeah baby!
Based on the feedback, I marked the weak spots and used a hundred words to improve five or six spots. That left me the other hundred to fix the ending. Which consisted of another 70 words.
Snip. 170 words to write an ending felt like enough elbow space.
I still needed to rush through, but instead of purely telling the outcome of the day’s drama, I could slip into Show Mode and summarize a little while also presenting a last bit of drama and feeling to resolve the character’s thematic issue.
I let it sit until the night the submission window closed
The Last Last Cuts
This may surprise some folks, but I have friends. One of them got back to me a few hours before I needed to mail the story off. Their key advice, cut the beginning so it would start as close to the action, the fight with another kid. And, kill the twist ending at the company lab.
That netted me 1600 words. I liked those words, but wow. Am I a hundred percent confident in those final cuts? No. But could they be cut, yes. More so the beginning. It was too much of the MC filling the reader in on the situation. I liked the twist ending, but once again it felt rushed. I might’ve chosen a middle ground using the words from the front to improve the back if I had more time.
But that’s how it goes. And the important lesson is that even when you think you can’t cut or rework something, you can. It might be better. Or worse. But you can cut more than you think.
Future Expansion?
A potentially bad habit I have is not doing full 1000 word scenes in stories. Note that 1K is the average scene length in novels. Honestly, I don’t know if other writers do that in short stories, either, but you can imagine writing too short of scenes really leaves a lot out. It’s why I worked so hard on not doing that in the rewrite of the novel WIP.
I really like my short story. Maybe not all the current words, but the idea of it. It’s maybe fifteen scenes. If I rewrite it with average scene lengths, it might pack more punch. Not just filler words, but actually spending more time in each moment. There were feelings I left out in that first draft.
Now, maybe the longer version will be harder to sell to a market. But I’d be closer to having a collection’s worth of my own stories. There’s always something to do with another story.
How I Really Feel About Limits
I’m not one of those “a story is as long as it needs to be” guys. Sure, you can’t cram The Lord of the Rings into a thousand words and retain the soul. But it also didn’t need to be a thousand pages long.
My own writing foibles aside, it takes skill to land a plane on a small runway. Each word limit requires a different approach to detailing, pacing and voice to fit. That’s kind of why these limits exist. I find it valuable to try them out, and learn something from the attempt.
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