The long and the short of it

[John Dean]

All writing is about every word doing its job. It’s true of novels but becomes an even more pronounced skill when you are writing something short, like a poem or a short story.

My company Inscribe Media used to run a short story competition and we used to receive entries which were not the top limit 2,000 words long but 200 words instead (flash fiction length).

The length meant that the writers had to make every word do its job and discard every word, every thought, every element of the story that slowed it down. Those stories were stripped to their basics.

Did they lose anything for that? Not necessarily. The good ones may have left the reader to work out a bit more but many of them remained powerful pieces of writing.

So when people sent in requests asking how long their story should be, we always reminded them that our top limit was 2,000 words (for ease of reading by our judge) but as to the bottom limit? Well, it is how many words you need to tell the story. That’s true storytelling and always will be