Jack Latreille

Hello all, 

Thank you for sticking with me so far. I hope that the blog posts and short stories already up have been entertaining. By tomorrow night, my next short story should be up. It’s an idea I’ve been working with for a while, and I’m really excited to bring it to you all. I wanted to talk a little bit about character development and how it works in the context of short stories.

The main difference between a Short Story and a Novel is, of course, the length. Many amateur writers, including myself, take that into account less than you might think. It’s easy to try and jump into a short story with the mindset that you’ll have enough time to develop as layered and complex worlds and characters as the Epic Fantasy novels that inspired you. In reality, trying to cram that depth into a few pages will more often than not create a half-baked, anti-climatic piece of work. I feel as though my short story A Greenfinger’s Lucky Day, is a little guilty of this. If you consider that story, it seems that Alex has no central conflict or character change, and it sort of gives the story a lack of character direction. 

Short stories are movies or hour-long TV episodes, while epic novels are a lot more like multi-season TV shows. A short story needs to have a concise conflict that drives a story and wraps up quickly enough for an ending with finality. I tried to do this in my short story Jayden’s Revealations. The story follows a delusional protagonist trapped in a shelter. The two men who are with him have killed themselves, but Jayden is so mentally lost that he cannot recognize this. Jayden is sure to starve to death in the shelter unless he does something. He tries to feed himself but is unable to, and he attempts to work up the courage to attempt to pull his way out of the ceiling hatch. However, his illogical fear of the outside takes control, and he stays where he is, guaranteeing a slow death.

While there are still elements of the story to be speculated on, the ending is more or less final. The fates of the three characters that matter to the story are set in stone, and we get in and out rather quickly. I made the world outside of the shelter purposely vague, both because it works for the misleading nature of the story, and because I wanted the worldbuilding to be brief. I knew what space I had to work with in my story, and any more world development would be unnecessary. The character of Jayden is also simple, with just enough development to hold up a bit of an arc. 

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that when you’re writing a short story, you need to know the limits of the form. If you master that brevity, you can do wonders with it. I’m still working at it, though.