I woke up early this morning (for once) and decided to pump out some short fiction. Writing for these recent competitions showed me that I can get more stories down than I ever realized I could in a short amount of time. Some of them even turn out really good. I’ve always subscribed to the notion that quality beats quantity, but if I can write a lot, then I figure, why not try the opposite and see how it goes? The good ones I’ll edit up and submit for publication, and the bad ones, well, they can go sit in my slush pile. This has kinda always been my process when it comes to short fiction, but over a much longer period of time. I usually take a week or two to thoroughly edit a story even as short as a couple thousand words, but I’m trying to limit myself to a day to write and a day to edit to see how it goes.

And so far, so great! I got two stories written just today, about 3000 words total. Somehow, moving from one story to the next made the output feel much smaller than it was. Normally I struggle to get 3000 words down in a day, much less a few hours like I did this morning. I think longer stories are harder for me because it’s more difficult to wrap my head around the structure and see where exactly I need to go. I spend a lot more time thinking about what to do than I do actually writing. For this little experiment though, I’m trying to shut off my perfectionist brain and just go for it. The structure of these shorter stories like I wrote today tends to reveal itself after I get a few paragraphs down. As for what I ended up writing, I think the first story was really lame, but the second story may be one of the best I’ve written. At least, that’s how I feel about it right now anyway. I’ll read it tomorrow with some new perspective and see if I need to touch it up any further before submitting.

I’m between big projects right now, so I think I’ll take a couple of weeks to see just how many short stories I can get down. Most of my stories already end up in the slush pile anyway. Maybe this commitment to quantity will shake some ideas loose and bring out the best in my writing. I certainly never know what will, so it’s not like it isn’t worth trying. Should be a lot of fun too!

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley