NEW STORY: “The Whole Beast”

 

If there is one writing-related thing I consider myself especially bad at, it’s very short stories. I’m accustomed to having lots of room to describe and elaborate, and my least favorite published works are always the ones that have had several hundred (or thousand) words trimmed because I couldn’t keep my descriptions in check. I’ve admired other people’s ability to get the job done (Andy Farrant and Dan Long being two specific examples), but save for a piece of flash fiction in Build High for Happiness, I haven’t tried to wrangle a super-short story in quite some time.

So that changes with “The Whole Beast,” my first (and hopefully not last!) story published by Dream Theory.

I wrote this one back in December during my most recent trip to the UK, partly on the plane and partly in a Costa Coffee before going to see The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s a kaiju story, of a sort. And to me, the best kaiju stories are those in which the big monster gets to be a metaphor. I wanted to play in a world that developed a unique relationship with the creatures that terrorized them, but I didn’t have many words with which to build that world.

Writing this story was an exercise in trusting the reader and trusting myself. How much worldbuilding could be inferred through common experiences? How much could I rely on action and description to get the job done for me? How much does my narrator even need to say (or think) to make her point? Most importantly, what’s the one thing I want the reader to leave with, to the point that anything else is superfluous?

In retrospect, I'm pretty sure a lot of my ability to write more compactly comes from spending the last few years helping others do it. Medical school applications run the gamut when it comes to essays, with the shortest giving you only 1,000 characters or so to describe formative experiences. I've had to learn how to help others fit important, real scenarios into small spaces, and I guess we're to a point now where I'm putting that into practice myself.

(That said, my current WIP has a ceiling of 10,000 words, so it's not like things are changing broadly going forward.)

While I still feel most comfortable with bigger words counts, where I can really roll around in cinematic descriptions and develop multifaceted stories, I had a lot of fun with this. And I think I am maybe, possibly, over the idea that flash fiction just “isn’t for me.” But I suppose that will be up to readers.

Check out “The Whole Beast” on dreamtheory.media and let me know what you think!