Conor Hilton recently asked on the Association for Mormon Letters Discord server about people’s process for writing short stories, specifically with the goal of having a regular process for producing work. My reply got a little long, so I thought I’d expand it further and turn it into a blog post.
I am still struggling to get back into a regular creative rhythm. Part of that is me getting too excited about all the different opportunities open to me and accidentally turning all my writing time into time confetti. But part of it is also that I am a baby fiction writer. In college, I developed a pretty good process for creating creative nonfiction on the regular (implementing that now is one of the aforementioned time-confetti creators) but developing fiction is a whole different animal.
With that caveat, for my last two short stories, my process has been something like this:
Start with a Call for Submissions or contest in mind. I have a hard time starting something new and the external motivation is helpful, even if I don’t end up sending it in. A little restriction in form or content forces me to get things moving.
Brainstorm a cool concept. Last September, I came up with a bunch of potential stories when I tried the Story A Day challenge. I didn’t end up with a full story every day, but the process did give me a backlog of interesting ideas. I also keep a filing system of all the random little concepts that strike me as well (what Julie Duffy terms “story sparks”), so I will also pull one or two things out of there. The concepts are roughly organized by type: for example, Concepts – Biology/Eco, Characters – Relationships, Plot – Solving Problems, Quotes – Humor. Filling up my story sparks folders is a lifestyle habit that means regularly pausing a movie to steal lines or characters, reading or watching non-fiction to borrow from, and jotting down crazy experiences I hear from friends or at church. I’m getting better at this, so I have a good amount of ideas to play with when I sit down to work on new things.
Figure out a character & story arc. Right now I’ve been liking the ABDCE structure. It’s been simple enough for my baby fiction brain to handle and helps me get to the end of the story. Stories where I don’t know where I’m going tend to crash and burn for me, so I tend to be a pretty thorough outliner. Occasionally, I will see that something doesn’t work halfway through and change it. My outline is usually a stream-of-consciousness version of the plot, as if I’m summarizing a movie to someone, though I’ll throw in good lines of dialogue if I think of them.
Write the dang story. I trundle through from beginning to end, writing in chunks until I get tired. I usually last 30-60 minutes a day. It’s very tiring. When I start a new session, I will generally do a light edit of the story up to that point to get back into it. This is probably why my endings are bad, since they haven’t had much love.
Revision? What revision? Depending on how much I hate the story by the time I finish (usually a lot), I might do some light editing (mostly finding artifacts from changing sentences around). But mostly by this point I hate my story and am convinced I should give up fiction entirely.
Let the critique group have it. I send it out to my critique group for comments. They surprise me by liking the story and suggest some now-obvious plot holes. Usually this gives me a second wind on the story, so I’m able to stand making some changes for a day or two before I hate it again.
Send it out! I really should do more revision first, but I just want it out the door. At some point, I plan to start revising every time a piece is rejected, but right now that hasn’t happened.
Well, it’s not a perfect writing process, but it’s mine right now. I’m trying to work on building up stamina so that my daily writing doesn’t feel so draining. Once that practice is solid, I want to work on good revision habits. But that’s all for the future.
I’d love to hear about your writing process. How do you get started on new projects and make yourself get things done? Shoot me an email or comment below.
