I like writing short stories. I don’t have the attention span for most stories to carry on too long, not yet. I’ve written some long ones but even long ones for me are about 50,000 words. Beyond that, it’s a bit overwhelming and hard to keep together, especially when I don’t have a whole lot of experience writing them and I’m my own editor. It’d be nice to have a personal editor but any editor to find online costs around $2000 for a 50k word manuscript and while I’d love for the book to read smooth and be free of grammatical errors, I don’t have $2K to drop on a book when the book will likely not make anything close to that in royalties. This is why it’s the best bet to get a deal with a traditional publisher because they’d provide all that for me at no cost and market/publish the book but we’ll see if that’ll ever be in the cards.
I’m compiling a series of short stories, all crime based. I figured I’d write a number of stories from the different perspectives of different police officers and detectives on various calls and cases. It’s allowed me to keep the stories short and to the point while also forcing character development to occur within a few pages rather than me trying extrapolate everything over the course of thousands of words. I hope it will also give better insight into the mind of police officers rather than your typical TV drama which is usually riddled with errors.
I’m hoping they will help me develop my writing skills even though I’m kind of my own teacher in this sense so I’m probably going to have to read some books and learn some other exercises to put into practice but I’m hoping I’ll be able to see some improvement in my writing but unfortunately it’s difficult to be an impartial judge to your own work. I don’t see it as many other skills like playing the piano or playing baseball where you can more aptly see how much you’re improving. Because there are so many different facets to writing and developing a good story, it can be difficult as the writer to pick the necessary things out that you’re looking to improve because each story is different so you’re looking for the same pieces to the formula is different places and different forms. I’d love to have a writing group or at least a few beta readers to give me feedback but those are apparently pretty difficult to come by.
Drew Schroeder 