I have a new blog in which I am trying to teach myself how to write very short pieces,http://zebrareadersshorttails.blogspot.com/. I have written only two so far and a friend of mine who is a published writer has been helping me with the editing. When I can do it right, I will take it down as there is very little copyright protection and I normally don't put my work on the Internet. It sounded to me, at first, easy. Well, it is not.
The pieces are still too long. I am trying so hard to get them down to three or four paragraphs. I went into writing as a novelist. Writing short stories was very difficult for me; but to condense things even more is proving to be so darn hard.
The editing of "short tails" is even more difficult. I thought I had my editing down pretty good. I have learned that I don't. My friend who is a whiz at it has been teaching me even more. For one thing every single statement in the piece must be justified by another. For instance, I put down that a character was good in management although he hated people. I had to say why and how. I knew the answer in my head but I had to put it down as briefly as possible.
I have a tendency to be wordy. I am learning to throw out the extra words even if I am in love with a phase or a sentence. I love words and fall in love with sentences all of the time. I am learning to throw them out. It hurts, but it is necessary.
So far, no one has been reading the Short Tails and that is fine. One has a lot of freedom when the only reader is the self. My friend who has been helping me is thinking about trying his luck in writing them too. He said they are fun because of the amount of freedom in plot and viewpoint since research is at a minimum. I don't think he will try them out on the Internet but in his notebook.
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