Why I'm not writing tonight

[truepenny]

Short stories are like an itch.

Novels, they're just there. It's what I do. If I'm not doing something else like eating or sleeping or running errands, I'm either writing a novel or I'm procrastinating on a novel. It's my default setting.

But short stories ... It's an intermittent, deep-seated, and frequently unscratchable itch. And it doesn't necessarily have a thing in the world to do with having ideas for short stories. It's just this urge. Something short, pithy, and with claws, please.

But getting from there to a local habitation and a name is ... I need my backbrain to give me something: a bone, a scrap of lace, anything.

And it just sits there and says, Short story please! and gives me the wide-eyed unhelpful stare of a cat who knows you ought to know what it wants, and it's your fault you don't.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

When I feel like that, I do the thing I just did on nineweaving's journal actually, and deal myself nine random Everway cards, or that would be nine random fantasy art cards, or for that matter nine random cards with phrases on like my storytelling cards, and read them.

Doing it with pictures, if I read them like a tarot spread for an unknown person in an unknown world, almost every time someone comes out of the shadows to have them read, dragging their world behind them. They have things in their present and future to be afraid of, that will help them, that oppose them or support them.

I rarely get short stories by this method, though it has happened, what I get is what I usually get, beginnings for novels. (You do not want to know how many novels I have the first 10 kwords of on my hard drive.) I also get NPCs and context and worlds for roleplaying games -- this is in fact what I started doing this for.

But it's what I do when my mind is itchy that way, so I thought I'd mention in case it helps.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That does sound like a cool and helpful technique.