Do you find your short story too talkative, too smooth or monotonous? Often it’s a question of length. To rework it, follow the example of the “grown-ups”.
The great authors have understood this well: often, it is by cutting that we make a text stronger. Cut, yes, you want to, but what? How?
Follow in Chekhov’s footsteps
Do you like the story you tell, but find your short story a little flat? Chekhov had a radical method: to give more intensity to his stories, he systematically cut the beginning and the end. Also try affordable writer in US the first five and last five lines of your short story, then reread it. Were the deleted passages really essential? If so, can you rewrite them with half as many words?
Reread Hemingway
Are you looking for how to awaken the reader’s curiosity? Do like Hemingway: let him understand that you have hidden something from him! Concretely, take a significant episode from your short story and delete it, then adjust the text, checking that it works in this way. It may be necessary to slip in a clue, a “detail” which, without saying too much, will make the reader feel that you have hidden an important element.
Adopt the Stephen King formula
Stephen King doesn’t beat around the bush. For him, the only formula that works for reworking his text is: final text = initial text minus 10%. And this applies as much to the short story as to the novel. If you are reluctant to cut to the chase, try the gradual method. First step: summarize each paragraph of your short story in one sentence. Second step: put the resulting sentences aside and rewrite each paragraph, reducing it by half. Third stage: compare the reduced texts and the sentence summarizing each of them. If the reduction has altered the meaning or removed essential elements, reinstate them without elaborating.
How to write more often
Difficult in a 24-hour day to manage to sit down and write. How to get organized? How to create favorable conditions for writing?
Unplug!
Have you thought about disconnecting the internet? “I only tweet half an hour a day,” says Joyce Carol Oates, “because I’m busy writing every day from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. » Even if you don’t claim to write a bestseller per year, try to cut yourself off from social networks for even one hour a day… If you can’t do it, review your priorities.
Set writing goals
You can decide to write a certain number of hours per week or a minimum number of words per day (600 or 700, for example). Don’t be bigger than your stomach: if you can only spare an hour or two a week on Best Book Marketing Companies, don’t start writing a saga! Set realistic goals, otherwise you risk feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the project and tempted to give up!
Fight against procrastination
TV or social networks aren’t the only things that are time-consuming! Take stock of the time spent daily for each activity outside of your professional activity: you will find a way to save half an hour to write, at least if you really want to. And if you’re cracked, read this article from the journal Sciences Humanizes: proof that, throughout time, writers (and not the least) have invented all kinds of rituals to delay the time to get to work!