hey guys it's shaelin, i'm here today with
another writing video so today i thought i would revisit actually the first video i ever
made on short fiction which was my short fiction writing process. i first made that video in the
summer or spring it was like early summer of 2017, so four years ago, and at the time i was actually
so new to short fiction i had only written five stories, i had just finished writing i
will never tell you this, and now and i just counted it up i've written 30. i've completed a
collection i'm halfway through another collection i have much more experience to talk about in terms
of short fiction and i also have a much larger sample size so i think i have a better idea of
what my general process looks like plus my process has changed since then. now the thing that's
gonna make this actually a little interesting is the fact that i've written 30 stories and
no two were the same. the process is different every time. i wanted to make this video
because i do get a lot of questions about my short fiction writing process and to be honest
the process is different for every single story so i'm going to walk you guys through the general
steps that i do, but also talk about the ways in which it's different because a lot of the time it
just it's out of your control, it depends on where the idea started from how the idea is developing.
i feel like i don't write my short stories, they they kind of write me. it's kind of an
adventure every time i kind of never know what to expect when i start a short story or a novel
to be honest and a lot of the time it depends on how the idea naturally unfolds and develops and
sometimes that can create the beauty of it and sometimes that can create the headache of it.
before we get into the video i just want to be clear that this is my short fiction process, it's
not how you should write. process is so much based on how your brain works how your brain naturally
develops stories, not what is best practice to do. there probably are more efficient ways to write a
story, but they just don't work for me. your way of writing a story might be completely different
and that's totally fine, so i'm not trying to say in this video that this is the way to write a
short story it's just my way to write a short story. and of course before we get into this i
am gonna reference a couple stories i've written all of my published short fiction is linked in
the description. some of it is available to read online for free some of it does need to be ordered
through a print issue, can't win them all you know. no two ideas look the same, i don't have a
specific process for how i get for fiction ideas i rarely intend to get one. i talked about this
in my my other writing process video but i have this thing i call an idea barometer., i can
usually tell when i'm about to get an idea it's like i can sense the shadow of it but i
can't see the body that is casting the shadow yet, so i don't know what it looks like, i don't
know what it's about, sometimes i can see like a fleeting image that's out of focus or brief or
whatever or blurry. at a certain point the idea clicks, it comes into focus, and oftentimes it
clarifies into an image. i will often say that i'm an 'image-based writer' and the reason i say that
is because that's how a lot of my ideas start, is they begin with an image. and there's no context,
i don't know what the story is about. the image is deeper than just an image, there's also a feeling
associated with it, and a lot of the time i work backwards from that feeling to find the story that
evokes it., and so a lot of the time that image is actually the beginning of the piece. very very
often the image is the beginning of the piece and sometimes that image will be attached to like
a first line or a first paragraph and so what i'll often do is i'll sit down and i'll write the
first paragraph as it comes to me right away, and oftentimes that first paragraph stays the first
paragraph. the first paragraph of barefoot if you guys have read that one it's in the fiddlehead
that is where the story began was with that first paragraph. i will never tell you this began with
the first paragraph. ideas can come in many forms, sometimes they do come as concept, sometimes it
does come as 'okay here's a situation i want to explore or a character relationship i want to
explore sometimes that comes later sometimes it's an image first and then all of the context
character situation is built from that image, it really just depends on the idea. there's no
way to control this and a lot of the time it's not sparked by anything. i never have interesting
stories for where my ideas came from because usually they just kind of pop into my brain and
i'm sure that they are influenced by something, i'm sure that there's something that i encountered
in life, in a book, whatever that has led to this, but usually i can't really pinpoint it. i can't
trace it back. it feels like it's just emerged from nowhere. i doubt it has emerged from nowhere.
usually when i get an idea i start writing the story right away, especially that first paragraph.
there's a momentum that i don't want to lose. even if i don't go on to complete the whole
story right away i usually do at least write the beginning. often times i'll write the first
paragraph not knowing what the story is about, fun for me, and then i have to let it sit for
a couple weeks. it's very common for me to have opening paragraphs sitting in my unfinished
stories folder for quite a while before they develop into something else. this is also the
point where i usually name the characters, and naming the characters is actually very important
for me. recently i've been experimenting more with like anonymous narrators, so narrators where we
don't know their names or what they look like or maybe are lacking concrete detail about them.
if the story calls for names this early part is where i name them. so at that point in the
story i'm kind of like following the voice, following the images. voice is really important
to me, different characters have very different voices and that language is a very important guide
for me. as i have written more short fiction the writing process has definitely gotten quicker
and easier. when i first started it would take me on average a month to write a story, obviously
not working on it every day, but progress would be really slow and it would take a really long
time to figure out how to put all these pieces together and make it a story. now it's rare that
a story takes a month or over a month to draft, usually now i would give it, probably like
two to seven writing sessions i would say. i feel like how novelists often like get classed
into like you're a discovery writer or you're an outliner or like a plotter or pants or
whatever, i feel like you can also kind of divide short fiction writers based on those who write
their stories in one setting and those who don't. i'm 'don't.' my brain can't do it, i usually just
can't figure out what i'm doing solidly enough all at once. and i think that's partly because
of what my ideas look like. oftentimes my ideas are very abstract where there's a few really sharp
pockets of something, i don't know something that feels important to me, but i don't know what
it means and i don't know how it progresses, so oftentimes the first few pages are kind of
like the exploratory pages so i'll start with this opening paragraph i don't really know how it
fits into the grander scheme of things i'm just writing an image and following a voice. i don't
outline my stories in advance, i don't pre-plan them, unless they come to me fully formed. usually
when i first get an idea i write down anything i have in mind for it. if that's all the scenes in
the story, fantastic i have an outline, rarely that's the case, a lot of the time it's just a
few details. i've talked about in other videos how i like to be confused by my own writing.
for me confusion is the fuel. when my writing is confusing me that's what propels me forward
that's when i have to be observant. the way my stories develop is i write that first paragraph
and then i keep working at it and i kind of just follow what's there, not really knowing where
it's going, and then i'll write a line and i'll go 'wait a second that seems really important,' then
i'll write another line and i'll go something else a bit later and go 'wait that's really important.'
and that's where the core details of the story will emerge from. it's a challenging way to write,
the way i write kind of out of necessity based on how patchy my ideas can be. very rarely does an
idea come to me fully formed where i'm like 'okay so i have a story about this character in this
situation and these are the themes and they want this and this will be the plot development.' i
mean i wish. so instead it's like i just have like fractured pieces of the idea and i've got to work
on it to let it show me what it's about, so that usually takes around three pages of writing and
usually around three pages in something starts to click and i go 'okay wait this is what it's about,
this is the relationship this is the character this is where the story is going.' from then on
it's usually a bit clearer to the end, but not always some stories begin easy and then the end
is hard to write sometimes. i find when i know too specifically where a story is going it actually
gets harder to write. i start thinking about, does this all fit? like am i building towards
what i want to build towards? i have some stories that were exceedingly easy to write and some that
have been exceedingly difficult. some have really put me through the ringer they take a long time
they take a lot of thinking and unpuzzling and work and it's hard and others just seem to
emerge kind of fully formed. when i start a piece i usually have literally no intention for what i
want it to be, i don't know what i want it to say, i don't know what i want the themes to be,
i don't know what the character's arc is, i don't know what i'm revealing about the
character, literally nothing. i don't know what the symbols are. i would say 99% of the time
i'm not planning the symbols, i'm not planning the theme, and it's exciting when i'm halfway through
a draft or i'm revising a draft and i can go 'wait a theme!' i really can't plan for them. usually
i'll get to a point about halfway through the story where the events will click into place
and i'll realize how it needs to end and i'll realize what scenes i need and then i'll make a
very very brief outline just so i don't forget. it's more important for me to feel compelled
by the mystery surrounding the story, than to have a concrete plan of where i'm going.
it's not really necessary, if anything i'd say it's counterproductive for me to know exactly what
a story wants to be as i'm drafting. letting it unfurl i think is what it feels like. i rarely
feel like i'm making conscious decisions for my stories, i don't like to control my stories, i
don't like to feel like i'm forcing them to fit a shape or go a certain way, i like to observe them.
i like the story to kind of be in control. we talk a lot about intention in writing and i'll sit here
and admit that i often don't have an intention, at least during the first draft. this story knows
what it wants, i feel like the story inherently has intention, but i don't necessarily know what
that is yet. when i have a first draft that is usually very exciting. because i write with so
much confusion it is a big sigh of relief when i finish a draft because it's like okay, i took this
vague weird abstract kind of nothingness and i managed to turn it into a first draft. if i can do
that that's half the battle, right. i really like writing the first draft but there's always that
worry what if i don't figure out how to end this, what if i don't know how to bring it all together.
so now it's the editing phase. now because i write with pretty much no intention, sometimes i
have a huge mess on my hands and sometimes i don't. sometimes the pieces by sheer luck
are kind of already there. so it depends on the stories. i've written several stories that
have been published and are very close to the first drafts ,they've kind of just been tightened
and cleaned up, but i've still written many many stories that needed a lot of change, and that's
what happens when you write a story not knowing what you're doing. i write the first draft on just
unbridled intuition with no idea what i'm doing, and then i have to go back and ask myself okay
what did i just write? so often my editing process is streamlining the story, you know, sometimes
when you write without intention it's like towards that end point or sometimes it doesn't
even hit the end point. lift up the things that have emerged as important, cut the things that
don't contribute. a lot of the time i will have extraneous scenes or sections of scenes after
first draft because as i was writing i didn't know what the story was working towards, and so i write
a lot of scenes as a means of exploring the story that can just get cut. usually the first thing i
do when i finish a short story is go cut all the crap that i now realize is completely irrelevant.
so that's kind of the first portion of my editing process and that's the self edit. i finish
the story and then i do edits based on my own analysis, so once i finish the first draft i kind
of am like okay what did i just write? and what redirecting needs to happen? it's different every
time and this is just per my own judgment, my own intuition. if you watch my first video on the
topic i say in the video that i would do like 20 drafts and then i would do my line edits on paper,
both those things were true. i really enjoyed that process it was really great for me at the time,
but i don't do it anymore, just because my first drafts are cleaner. and yeah i would do i would do
like 20 drafts. now i don't think it's that many. when i reach a point with a story where i'm like
i don't know what to do with this anymore i know it has issues but i don't know what they
are and i sure don't know how to fix them, then i ship it off to my workshop, it's their
problem now. i have a great workshop i love them dearly and they never cease to give me fantastic
feedback to work with. after our workshops i have quite a lot of material to work with. i have the
notes that i took during workshop, i also have written comments from each person in my workshop
so three people those are usually about a page their written analysis and critique, and then i
also have line edits from three people, so it's a lot of material to work. with it's easily enough
to revise a short story., sometimes if we're not in the middle of a workshop i just give this story
to one person. i have had stories published where other than myself they were only edited by one
person one time. recently my workshop group has been kind of back in the swing of things,
we've been doing workshops regularly, so i've just been sending all my stories to workshop since
that's there and available to me as a resource and it's really helpful. whether i have a workshop
or just edits from one person it's basically the same process. now to get into a different
phase of editing. so first i have the self edit, now it's the post workshop edit. i have
recently kind of refined this process into a set number of steps that i've been following and it's
working really well for me. before i would kind of just approach it, i don't really know how. i've
kind of developed a solid process for how i do this and it's been kind of the same for several
stories. i've recently been trying to edit my stories quite quickly after workshop. usually i
give it one to two weeks, so if we have a workshop i'll either start the edits that weekend or the
next weekend, rather than letting it sit too long. if i let it sit too long i start to overthink
it. so the first thing that i do is i look over all of my notes that i took during workshop. i
make a list of points i want to address. since i have you know written critiques from three people
and i also have the notes i took during workshop, it's quite a lot of material. especially with
my workshop notes, it's just a transcript of a conversation so it can be quite non-linear, so
what i do is i take all that and i synthesize that into just the list of points i want to address.
so if i have something that i want to do with the main character's goal i have a note that says main
character school and then everything i want to do with that. then what i do is i translate that to
a list of scenes, and then i note all the changes that need to happen, sometimes i need to add
scenes or delete scenes or move scenes, sometimes we're just mostly working with the structure that
was already there. so then i have a list of scenes and every change that needs to happen in those
scenes and then i also have a list of things that just apply overall, so let's say there are some
edits to character voice. i would know that as an overall edit because it literally applies to all
of the scenes. i just started the first scene, i make all my edits the first scene i go to the next
scene and make all my edits to the next scene, let's say the third scene is a new scene
that i need to write, then i write the that new scene then i do the fourth scene
etc. and i just work through it linearly making all the changes i need to make. so this
is a combination of line edits and developmental edits, so i do line edits here and i make
changes to the line. because a lot of the time with a short story especially doing something
like integrating an idea or a theme patterning in something is on the line level, i mean short
stories only have a couple scenes, so a lot of your developmental edits happen in very micro ways
in a short story. say what i'm trying to do is clarify the character's internal goal. that's
happening on the line level even if it is a developmental edit, and then i also sometimes have
larger things to do. moving scenes, adding scenes, etc, etc. the other thing that i find i have
to attend to a lot streamlining the themes and purpose of the story. i have a tendency to be
way too abstract or subtle with these things even when i think i'm being overt, so that's an area
i usually focus on and usually i find that after workshop people have a lot of ideas and notes on
for me. so that's kind of what that editing looks. like so once i've gone through that i will read
it over once to smooth it out and then i will do my line edits that i got from my workshop. so the
way that i used to do this is i would go through one person's line edits at a time, but that takes
forever and it's harder to compare different people's line edits. so what i do now since i only
have line edits from three people so it's pretty manageable, i open all of their line edits and i
go scene by scene. so i start at the first scene and i look at person a's edits then person b's
edits then person c's edits and i make all the ones i want to make, and i go to the next scene
and i do the same thing. so i do everyone's edits then everyone's edits then everyone's edits, each
scene at a time, and that usually doesn't take too long.i don't actually read through the full draft
like every word. i have the person's line that it's open so i just go to their next comment and
then if i want to make that edit i make the edit then i go to their next comment if i want to make
the edit i make the edit and then i do that with the next person to the next person's that has been
my ideal system for doing line edits from other people. so now it's time to just proofread and
polish. i usually do three to four drafts here. so a draft at this point is fairly quick. i'm just
reading over the story paying attention to every sentence. my policy with line editing a short
story, and to be honest with a novel as well, is if i don't like a sentence either change it or
delete it. i don't let anything that bothers me slide if something is bothering me. it's gotta go
or it's gotta get fixed. the story is only what 4 000 words, might as well make sure everything in
it contributes and oftentimes here i'm able to cut a significant amount of words, trim several
hundred words, sometimes i find full beats of a scene just contribute nothing, so i delete it.
sentences or details that contribute nothing, and of course i just work on fine-tuning the language
so that every sentence is smooth, economical, and interesting, and clear. clarity is my achilles
heel. so yeah, for final proofread i usually do three or four drafts. for a shorter piece i'm able
to just do those in one sitting, like if it's a 2000 word story i'll read it over three times in
one day, maybe one time the next day just to have a breather, but for a longer piece i might only
be able to do one draft a day, it really depends. but all in all this whole process of the post
workshop edit usually only takes around a week. so the last thing i wanted to talk about is
just titles. i basically have three possible ways that that titles can happen, ranging from
this title is a gift from the heavens to i want to gouge my eyes out. so the first way is
when the title just comes inherently with the piece. i will never tell you this was
like this, it was never called anything else and the document was called i will never tell
you this before i even started writing. cherry jane in the garden of eden was like this, it was
called cherry and jane in the garden of eden from before i even started writing. barefoot was always
called barefoot. part of the idea may have even come from the title. i will never tell you this
partly started kind of as a title, and then there was an image attached to it and then there was a
story attached. so that's when i love my life is when there's immediately a title. then there's
the next option which is where as i'm drafting then i'll figure out the title. i always give
my documents a working title because i just need though i can't just write if it's called like new
story, i hate that. usually when a title emerges as i write the way i find the title is i realize
that there is an important concept or element of the story and then i try to find something related
to that content concept that speaks to the story. i recently wrote a story called tabula rasa, the
story had a working title it was called marcella which is the name of one of the characters in the
story, but as i wrote i was like, this is not the best title. one of the characters in question,
actually marcella, it's mentioned that she has half a degree in philosophy, and she talks
about philosophy at a few points and so i thought it would make sense to have a title that is a
concept of philosophy and the one that i felt best spoke to the story was the concept of tabula
rasa which is mentioned at one point in the story. that's kind of the second way to get a title
and that happens while drafting and it's usually fairly painless. the third way is the way of
pain. this is when a story just doesn't want to be titled. the hardest story to title that i've
ever titled was hold me until i see the light. i changed the title of that document every
single time i opened the document. it was called a million different things. it was
absolutely painstaking. this is when just nothing seems right, the longer i go without
titling a story the harder it feels to title. if i title it early in the process the story
will mold to fit the title but if the story is already written you've gotta pick something that
perfectly fits what you've written rather than writing the title in, so it's very hard. i've only
got a few stories where i couldn't title it till after but my god they were painful and the hardest
was definitely hold me under till i see the light. i changed the title of that so many
times. eventually i settled on calling in utero but that is a nirvana album so kurt
cobain has once again personally attacked me and so i didn't want to call it that because of the
implications because it's a fairly famous album. that story was called so many things. eventually
i settled hold me on until i see the light. i think i used this technique that a professor had
suggested where you find a line in the story, rearrange that line into a title, and
cut the line, and for this reason i also rarely change my titles once a story is
titled. it's very hard to change it because you have to find something that perfectly fits
the story rather than allowing the story to grow to fit the title. after all of that is
said and done it's time to submit the story. i have definitely shortened my first draft to
submission pipeline, it used to be like a year. i have many stories that in the earlier days
of me submitting i would write and i wouldn't submit them until six months a year over a
year later. with i will never tell you this, i workshopped that story in february or march of
2018, and then i edited it for the class so it was revised by april, and i didn't start submitting
it until like november. now if i decide i want to publish a story i like to just compress that so
it's it's it's more like boom boom boom. that used to be a big problem for me is i would get stories
workshops and not edit them and then i'd have so many sitting around it was just overwhelming, so
I try not to do that, trying to edit them right away. okay so that's how i write a short story.
that's all for this video thank you so much for watching if you have any questions you can
always send me an ask on tumblr and i'll see you
