Catch the replay of me and Marya Brennan from NaNoWriMo’s Young Writer’s Program answering questions about short story writing!
Catch the replay of me and Marya Brennan from NaNoWriMo’s Young Writer’s Program answering questions about short story writing!
The only qualification to be a ‘Superstar” is a desire to write and support your fellow writers.
A supportive group of committed writers, who meet virtually, support each other’s efforts, and inspire each other.
Registration for 2024 open now-June 8, 2024
A 6-part journey through the short story.
Starts Jan 3, 2025
Thanks so much for clarifying. Makes much more sense now. I like the idea of spreading the edits out over the course of the year. Before, I thought you somehow wrote AND edited a short story a day for 30 days. Whew! Glad that’s not the case.
Also, thanks for informing me about Duotrope. Never heard of this site before, but it looks like a great deal for their subscription plans for all the features you get.
I left this comment on the video, but I wanted to ask you here to make sure you saw my question.
I can understand how you can write a story a day, but what boggles my mind is how you find time to edit all those stories without getting burned out.
Do you write during the day and edit during the night, or do you write all the stories during the 30 days then go back and edit them one by one so that you’ve had a month between stories to let them sit. If the latter, how do you keep from going crazy not writing new material for another 30 days while editing?
I guess what it boils down to is what’s your actual editing process for such fast-paced work?
Great questions, Eric.
To be clear, we don’t do this year-round. StoryADay runs in May and September, and I you could decide to do the challenge in a different month, but it is a limited-time challenge.
This one month is all about first drafts. I generally DO burn out, while writing these stories 🙂 Then I put them aside and slowly revise them over the rest of the year, if they seem worthwhile.
Some of them are not worth ‘saving’, but writing them taught me something: maybe I tried a noir story for the first time and discovered I loved them. Maybe I wrote backstory for a character from a novel I’m working on, and it informs a future scene.
Some of the stories are worth revising, so I tend to keep them on hand and revise them when i feel like it. Often THIS happens when i’m browsing Duotrope.com, looking at anthology calls for upcoming themed issues, or somebody posts a call for submissions on Twitter. A little voice in my head goes: Oh, remember that story you wrote during May? that would probably fit here. It’s MUCH easier to revise a first draft in the couple of weeks before the deadline than it would be to write a new story and revise it 😉
I’ve had some luck with this approach, placing a few stories on contest short lists or in anthologies.
So what’s the point in writing tons of drafts you’ll never use? Sometimes that exhaustion and burn out drives you to experiment reach in desepration for things you might not otherwise try. And THAT can be where the interesting stuff happens.