It's history

Happy Monday, everyone! I hope you all enjoyed last month’s series on Christianity. I liked getting to share some of myself with all of you, and I hope you felt like you got to know me a little better. This month, however, I think it’s time to get back to the writing. After all, this is a writers and editors blog. So for the next four weeks, we’re talking topics. Some things are just too hard to fit into a short story, and others are just too small to stretch out into a novel. That’s what we’re talking about this week.

Just as a side note, these will all be things that I can’t do. You might be able to. Who knows? Other people have, in times past. Me, I just can’t do it. And I'm going to tell you why.

To start off, let’s focus on short stories.

Historical Fiction

I can’t do it. History requires a lot of detail to make it work properly. It just does. And without all that detail, it’s hard to make sense of the story. So for me, historical fiction just can’t be pressed into a short story. Not one that’s short enough to be published in a magazine or some such small publication (usually under 6,000 words).

See, for a fully fleshed historical work, you need to go into the time period, the clothing, the style. You can’t just throw something together and pretend it’s accurate historical fiction—and you really don’t want to confuse your readers by throwing them into historical fiction without that detail and background. It tends to make things convoluted, and then nothing's working properly.

It’s not that you shouldn’t write historical fiction, or that you shouldn’t try to write it into a short story. It’s that this genre really prefers a novel setting. If you’re going to make it into a short story, you’ll have to be very cautious in how you do it, to make sure things aren’t jumbled and confusing. You'll have to put in a lot of time and effort, and you'll probably have to write it more than a few times before you get the right balance of story and background information. 

For me, that's just too much to do. I don't like to take the time to write a mass of backstory when I'm working on a short story. I'll do it for novels, no problem, but not short stories. Maybe that's just me.

You might be able to do it. You might. But you might also end up with a mess that’s just confusing and unpublishable. In my mind, that seems the most likely.

Me? I can’t do it. Cue, the Druid Novels. Semi-historical fantasy fiction. Woo!

[love]

{Rani D.}