I love to write. It is without a doubt my dream. But I have a problem, every idea I have is some new great big epic story which as a young writer I will obviously struggle to do. I cannot seem to come up with short story ideas which is obviously where I should be starting. Does anyone else have experience with this issue? Is there any advice I can get for trying to find short story Ideas? The main thing I have trouble with is trying to cram any sort of a structure into a short story.
Well, that depends on what you mean by a short, simple story. How are you differentiating a "great big epic story" from a "short story?" I mean, other than length, obviously. Is it that once you start writing, you can't stop, and end up making the story way longer or more intricate than you think it should be? It sounds, maybe, like your issue is in revising & editing and not drafting. Are you afraid to get rid of certain parts of the story or something? It would help if you could expand on this here so I can understand exactly what you mean. Thanks.
I dont know who said you need to start with short stories. Better off if you just start writing. Big idea? Big goals? Not gonna get done waiting around to do something smaller or what you believe you need to do first. How about you get your big work off your chest, then when you need some breaks or are wore out, launch a couple little ideas out there. Also, spend some time giving serious critiques of others work and a lot of reading. Good luck and have fun.
Think in terms of scene. A story contained in a single scene will land somewhere between flash fiction and a quick short (<1500 words). With two scenes you'll have enough for the typical 3k word submission, and three scenes will skate close to the 5k-6k word target (the typical max for a submission). Of course you'll need to know your tendency for scene length (mine's 1500 words, obviously) and you'll need an understanding of what your scenes require; i.e., will each scene run long or short? You don't have to plot to know that. You can feel the proportions of each scene just by knowing what you're trying to do. You don't have to move linearly through those scenes. You fill in the necessary bits you omitted when you crunched the story down. This way you can pull a bigger story into a smaller one while keeping it contained. The scene has a rise and fall too, just like a novel, though you'll have to make sure its tension is enough to carry the story. A really good fan-fic exercise is to choose a tense scene from a novel, read it once to familiarize yourself and then close the book and rewrite it with adjustments so that it's a self-contained story. As examples, let's say, Gandalf 'dying' to the Balrog, or Sam and Frodo climbing Mt Doom. You have to be selective with what backstory comes into those, but with a bit of creativity they are both perfect potential short stories. It's an epic scope through a narrow view.
Short stories aren't novels that are short. Short stories have a different purpose as well as length. If you're not at heart a short story writer, you'll be kinda wasting your time ...or not so much wasting it, as diverting it. I agree with the others here that you should just start writing the story you want to write. Even if it's an epic. But do start writing it. And stick to it. Don't go hiving off into a different epic every time a new idea pops up. To write well, you have to discipline yourself to stay on track. The good news is, you don't need to start at the beginning of your chosen epic. Instead, write a scene that you've already envisioned. What's the most interesting or exciting scene you've imagined thus far? Write it. You can fit it in later on, to your overall plot. But just assume, for the sake of this exercise, that you don't need to explain anything in this scene or get anybody up to speed on what happened before. Just write it, as if you've already written all that preliminary stuff. Get a good, richly imagined chapter down, to where you can see it, read it over the next day, etc. Then think about where it leads. And write the next chapter. OR think about what came just before that scene and write THAT. Each chapter you write, in whatever chronological order, will get you closer to the core of your story, and it will not only become easier to write, but a lot more rewarding than sitting and thinking it can't be done. Don't make it a huge deal that discourages you from the start. Just start with one scene. And then another....
Maybe find a short story collection that will give you some inspiration. Mine was Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier until then I really didn't see any short stories I could relate my writing style to. Take note of their use of structure though mostly I find short stories tend to write themselves so long as you have a simple idea. Not even really a plot. Just an idea … say a woman gets trapped in a telephone booth with a vicious dog waiting outside it. The idea isn't really a plot and it doesn't need to be expanded past ten pages. Once you start coming up with ideas that don't need a huge cast of characters, have a small but interesting theme you can try something out. And even if you don't go the short story route just write something that interests you. It'll be easier to write four hundred pages if it interests you than ten if it doesn't.
