"The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful."
-Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 and many other works
I have three more short stories to write before I hit 52, and I think this is as good a time as any to reflect on my journey which began in September last year.
It's easier, at least for me, to write in first person. I can see why Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote as such in his Barsoom series. Whenever I got stuck, I tried first to write a title, which was often a slight variation of a famous one. It seems TV show writers do this often as well. It's good also to have a minimum but not a maximum length. Let the story grow naturally. Writing at length, like everything else, gets easier with practice. This is especially true if you experiment with writing different genres. Last, the famous sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon said 90% of everything is crap. I'm sure that's true for me, but it's the other 10% that makes the effort worth it.
So far, here are my two most popular short stories:
https://platedlizard.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-call-of-patchouli.html
https://platedlizard.blogspot.com/2023/09/planet-of-triffids.html
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