Writer's Block Daily

I would say that the reverse is the norm, really: Short stories lend themselves far better to character studies and sketches of places and situations than to straight (conventional) narratives in my experience. "Puzzle-box" narratives work equally well in short story and novel form (see Machen, Danielewski), but "story-stories" breathe better in novel form.

Great story. Very, very funny and weird.

Speaking of "Lost in the Funhouse" (which is included in this anthology), I would strongly suggest that you check out The Treasury Of American Short Stories, edited by Nancy Sullivan and published circa 1987. It a great survey of the short story form with a whole lot of talented and peculiar authors to choose from; some very old, some relatively new, and many in between. I would also recommend Cerf and Wagner's 1944 doorstopper compendium Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, because I am a horror geek and that book is absolutely awesome.

edited 22nd Feb '13 12:02:53 PM by JHM

Oh, speaking of horror, I've also read a lot of Poe's short stories and Stephen King's. Didn't really like either of them.

@Cats: Things like place names and stuff like that.

My feelings about King are mixed. He's a good storyteller, but a mediocre horror writer, mainly because he almost uniformly flubs his endings. To my estimation, his best short stories are probably "Lunch at the Gotham Café", which is less a horror story than a very dark and absurd character piece; and "The Night-Flier", which is more about the reporter than the titular entity and ends... perfectly. His friend Peter Straub is much better and much stranger; he is also a fantastic character writer, albeit one with a fondness for sick, sad people ("The Juniper Tree" nearly made me throw up).

Poe is another matter. Some of his stories are pretty amazing—"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is incredibly clever—but he's very stylised and more inventive than he is scary. His poetry is really nice, though, if you like heavy atmosphere (which I do). Same goes for Lovecraft after him: While "The Rats in the Walls" is a great suspense yarn and "The Tomb" is beautiful, Fungi from Yuggoth beats most of his prose by miles.

My favourite horror writers are T.E.D. Klein, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Arthur Machen, Kelly Link, Algernon Blackwood (sometimes), Nathaniel Hawthorne and Neil Gaiman (when he's writing horror). Of those, I think that you would really dig Gaiman's short work, though you may well also like Link, Campbell and Straub. Henry James is also worth checking out—he's very psychological—but he's on the dense side, even for a fin de siècle author... and his best work is a novella; Clive Barker also does characters well, although he can be pretty grotesque and alienating. Similarly, I adore Ligotti, but he's more about atmosphere and concept than character, although "The Bungalow House" is a pretty compelling character study in its own right.

You might enjoy Jorge Luis Borges. He's whimsical, but not in a cloying, insipid way, but an intellectual one.

edited 22nd Feb '13 3:03:19 PM by JHM

Wait a minute, I haven't said anything about novellas. Novellas are things of wonder. They're great. Short stories are an entirely different beast than a novella.

Even if I did end up liking any of these things, you would still have to accept the fact that I do not like writing short stories and that I hate the advice that I should do it.

edited 22nd Feb '13 3:09:23 PM by ohsointocats

I've always thought of the novella as something closer in species to the short story than the novel itself. Ditto the novelette. They take some structural cues from novels, but the way that they treat their subject matter doesn't strike me as very novel-like at all. That said, they are wonderful. So are short novels, which are yet another thing; and vignettes and sketches, which are completely different in turn.

Here's a suggestion: I nstead of writing short stories per se, try writing novellas/novelettes (on the longer end) and vignettes/sketches (on the much, much shorter end) in between periods of working on longer projects. That way, you can explore ideas in a more economical format while not having to work consciously within the short story format as you see it.

edited 22nd Feb '13 3:43:39 PM by JHM

What is in-between? I have no understanding of this.

In between novel drafts and projects?

-goes back to brainstorming current project-

There is such a time?

Many people suggest laying aside a draft for a few days after completion before revision, and then there's that period when a projects finished and ready for submission/revision.

The thing is that today's market isn't the market of 2005.

I've never gotten to that point.

Also, as I said before, there is such a thing as taking a break, particularly before editing. Plus, if you ever just feel tired of working on big projects but don't want to stop writing, smaller projects are always an option, even if you don't end up finishing them. Again, it's about practice and relief.

I've never been able to experience relief.

The thing is that there are no revisions. As soon as I write something, it's permanently trunked.

That's more than a little counterproductive.

Really, you shouldn't do that.

I can't stand to look at my own work, so that's the only thing I can do, really...

Well, I hate to be harsh, but... woman up, Cats. You are a much better writer than you think you are, and given your sharp critical eye, I think that you could make a great editor. If you stopped freaking out about your own phantom inadequacies and turned your attentions to revising your own work and making it better, I think that you could be fantastic. Stop beating yourself up before you have time to write or edit and beat your writing into shape once you've finished. Your weaknesses can be strengths if you make them strengths.

Well, I mean, what I wrote in October, I just... I don't like it anymore. I had no idea where I was going with it and still don't. I don't think it would ever be adequate for any sort of exposure to anyone's eyes ever. I just don't like it anymore. It's like after you write it you realize you never even had any idea what you were talking about, why were you writing it anyway, it's just... no. I can't.

I just can't edit something that I don't remember why I liked in the first place.

Like there are so many writing things that say "hey just sit down and write your novel!" but they never tell you what to do when you have several trunked novels that you just can't bear to think about.

edited 22nd Feb '13 4:26:58 PM by ohsointocats

Interestingly, this morning (9-something over here), I downloaded a podcast on Tolkien and Old Norse- as someone whose fantasy project combines bits of Tolkien and his Norse influences (besides almost EVERY fantasy writer has a Tolkien influence), I'm always interested in his influences- and besides it's a damn interesting topic. Anyway, halfway into the podcast episode I've been listening to, on The Hobbit's character names, the "Dvergatal" is read aloud and you actually get to hear how the names are pronounced, which is AWESOME.

edited 22nd Feb '13 5:10:19 PM by MorwenEdhelwen

After some thinking I decided to Retcon my story's year but just make a new place.

It would totally screw up all the interactions I did in CDT if I just retcon almost everything.

That's actually understandable, at least given a gap of a few months. But I'm not talking about giving up on something entirely; rather, I am taking about taking a calculated break while you still maintain some interest in a project in order to come back to it with a new perspective, at which point you can revise and complete the idea.

Hearkening back a page to the 30-day writing meme Hermiethefrog mentioned: I'm going to give it a shot, I think. I can't promise an update every day, but I'll try to be as consistent as possible. For those of you interested in hearing me natter on about my own novel, my Tumblr can be found here.

I have absolutely zero interest in my trunked novels, though.

So, my Sigurd adaptation's going pretty well. I'm up to the "Regin tells Sigurd the story of the dragon's hoard" scene and am surprised at how much it resembles the story as told in the Volsunga saga— shapeshifting relative is killed mistakenly (by a neutral Orc who mistakes him for a wolf) but I'm a bit stuck on one detail. The royal line of Nidavellir live in stone halls roofed with gold, deep underground. Would sounds from above actually echo underground?

EDIT: Never mind. Got an answer (they do, apparently).

edited 23rd Feb '13 1:57:00 PM by MorwenEdhelwen

I am referring to future projects here, not past projects.

What is the difference between past and future projects, truly?