Short Stories

:: Contemporary Stories
:: Supernatural Stories
:: Fantasy Stories
:: Faerie Stories
:: Tales from Carnia

Short stories used to be just something that I wrote to try and get over writer's block, hoping that a change of scenery and characters would make it easier when I was stuck with my various novels. But these days I find that short stories have a place and purpose of their own. Not just to act as credit in the hope of making a name for myself as a writer! No, now I find that sometimes I have an idea for a story that has to be told, or a simple idea that I want to explore, but which I don't feel has the ability to become a novel. Novels are still what I prefer to write, as I enjoy submerging myself more fully into a world and into the characters that live there, but from time to time I will indulge myself in a short story.

I like to keep my short stories simple, finding that it works best with only two or three characters and a linear plot. My short stories tend to be an episode in the life of one or more of the characters. I do not bother with a lot of background information, unless it is important to the plot, as I feel that too much information can detract from the story and I want to keep it simple. I also seem to have a penchant for darker stories, with a twist ending, although this is often not intentional, it just seems to be the way that I work best. In fact, I can often find it difficult to write a short story if the ending is one that I perceive as happy or too obvious.

I draw my inspiration from all sorts of random places, songs, tv shows, or just out of the air. It is usually the end that I think of first and sometimes I find it difficult to put a story together that will get to that end, which is why I find it easier to work on longer pieces of work as I work on those in a different way. I tend to plan short stories out rather carefully, into a series of episodes and only have a few characters and an unhappy or macabre ending. It’s strange but, when I plan a happy ending, I find the story almost impossible to write to my satisfaction. I am not sure what this says about me, as a person, but I definitely prefer exploring the darker side of human nature, magic and the unknown, rather than the safer situations where everything works out in the end. I try not to have twists to my stories either, for me they are going in the only logical direction, but I have been told, by others, that the end is a surprise to them! This only shows, I guess, that what is obvious to you isn’t always obvious to everyone else!