The Fall

Last but not least in the topics I think are far too big to be covered in a short story, is one many of you will disagree with me on.

Falling in Love

See? How many of you disagree already? I see you nodding. You think it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to cover in a short story, and that it’s not that hard to do. But I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. Falling in love isn’t an easy thing, it’s not an act that can be completely covered in 6,000 words or less. There’s too much involved with falling in love, too many things that have to be explained and dealt with. 6,000 words isn’t enough for two people to really get to know each other, to truly fall in love.

But you’ll say that people do it all the time, so why do I think it can’t be done. I’m nearly positive a lot of you are thinking that right now. So I’ll tell you.

A lot of short stories deal in lust, in infatuation, not in love. Love takes time to develop, it takes effort on the part of the writer to take two characters and put them together, to allow them to develop naturally into that sort of relationship. Even now, even after writing so many novels and short stories that I can’t always keep them straight, I can tell you that it took more than a little while to learn how to make two characters fall in love—and how to let them fall in love, when it wasn’t what I was expecting.

Love is a topic that spans a lot of detail, a lot of time. That’s been the ongoing theme of this series, that these are all things that just take way too many words to cover in a short story, but love is the biggest of them all.

If you want to talk about love in a short story, if you want to write a love story, then I’d suggest doing one of two things. Either write a story about two people who are already in love, or write a story that focuses on how two people meet (the meet-cute, you might say) and how they become close enough to each other that they might fall in love at some later date, off the page.

Next week, things too small to stretch out into a novel!

[love]

{Rani}