CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Over the last two weeks, we've looked at the business side of why write short stories - something I hate doing. I'm a writer, dammit! I love story. I love seeing worlds unfold beneath my fingers, to watch characters come to life, to see the story unfurl - but, let's be real, business is important if you want to make a living from that kind of magic, so it needs to be looked at. This week, we get to look at something much more fun: the creative reasons to write short stories. This is one of those intangible things that writers need to grow and develop. It's hard to measure from a business sense, but it's there, and it's vital. To put it briefly, short stories are a way of discovering new stories, new characters and new worlds - in the same way I've found flash fiction can be - but that depends on your approach. Up until recently, my main approach was to simply sit down and start typing. If I was writing for a magazine, I'd make sure I was writing in...

Last week, we looked at the business return of writing short stories and publishing or selling them - but we only looked at it in terms of pure monetary earnings for time spent, and there are other business benefits that can be calculated, depending on why you chose to write the short story in the first place, since we can create with additional purposes to telling a good tale. We can, for instance, write for a specific market. An anthology opportunity might come up, where we get to work with other authors to produce a collection, either writing to a specific theme, or in a specific world or setting. Many of these anthologies won't pay a professional rate, and definitely won't be guaranteed an equivalent monetary return for time. You need to first decide if that's an acceptable trade, but you need to make that decision based on a number of other, both positive and negative, factors: the opportunity to be part of the anthology - since these don't come up all that of...

Last week, we took a brief look at how the accepted place of short stories in a writer's career path has changed, and highlighted a few of the ways writing short stories could be viewed, now that independent publishing has come of age. This week, we take a very brief look at writing a short story from a time investment versus returns perspective. The Cold-Blooded Business Perspective: From a business point of view, short stories don't seem like much of an investment. For one thing, you're almost certainly not likely to make your money back. If an 8,000-word short story takes a minimum of 8 hours to write (and that's if you do not outline), editing takes around another 2 (and that's only if you write cleanly), and formatting and uploading takes at least another 1 (if you have multiple platforms to publish to), you're looking at a basic minimum of 11 hours of work. At $50 an hour, that's $550 the story has to make back for you - plus the cost of ...

Short stories - until recently, they were the place new writers were told to cut their writing teeth, and make their writing debuts. In some circles, this is still true. The idea is that the process of searching out, writing for, and submitting to a short story market is a good way for writers - and all writers, not just new ones - to develop the writing habits and story-telling skills that will carry them through their writing careers. In many ways, this 'cracking the short story market' was seen as a vital apprenticeship in a writer's journey. With the coming of independent publishing, many newer (and successful) writers have bypassed the short story phase, and skipped ahead to write, and publish, their first novel.Some of the older hands would argue that skipping this apprenticeship stage has had obvious results in the resulting quality of independently published books. Others will point out that writing a short story, and writing a novel, are two different specialis...