2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week eight: Mar. 2 – 8.
Stats
Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 5
Submissions Total: 8
Rejections: 7
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
My goals for last week were:
Submit critiques.
Start a new story.
It was a busy week outside of writing, but I’ll count both of these for partial credit. I did work on my Critters critiques, but I still need to get one more done before Wednesday. F-TIB is scheduled to go out for review this week, and I’d rather not have it delayed for a week while I get caught up.
Despite my noises last week about giving up on Out of Towner, I actually wrote six or seven more pages. I was able to employ that classing writing technique of just skipping over the part I wasn’t sure about. That means I’ll have to come back to that part later, but at least I can hope that I’ll have a better perspective on it when the rest of the story is done. That goal is a partial miss only because I’m still a few hundred words behind my self-imposed average daily word count.
Rejections
I marked down three rejections this week. One was from Clarkesworld, a magazine I love not only for the fiction they publish, but for their absolutely no-nonsense attitude toward submissions and crazy fast turnaround times for reading submissions. I send a lot of new stories their way, because I know I’ll get a response in a couple days; basically unmatched speed among high-tier pro markets.
Another of these was a non-response from a magazine whose Duotrope stats show it averages non-responses on 5-10% of its submissions. These are a thing that everyone who submits a lot will run into eventually, but it’s still annoying. I do my best to act professionally as a writer, and I expect the same from publishers I’m submitting to. On the other hand, it’s a real AI-slopfest-shitshow in publishing right now, and you never know what an overstrained, underpaid editorial staff might be going through.
Next Week
My goals for next week:
Get my Critters ratio in the green by Wednesday.
Catch up on my word count goal, and possibly finish the first draft of Out of Towner.
My writing time for the past few weeks has been focused on revision. My latest story, Red Eye, has now been reworked more thoroughly than any other short story I’ve written.
Does that make it the best thing I’ve ever written? No, not necessarily. There are a million factors that determine a story’s quality. What careful revision does is help make a story the best possible version of itself.
I think revision is not discussed enough. This is partly because there’s more romanticism to first drafts: the blank page, the whispers of the muse, and bringing a new piece of art into the world. The raw creative energy of a first draft.
But first drafts often aren’t that good. They can be misshapen and muddled. They may be missing pieces, or not quite sure what they want to be. Like the golem, revision takes a roughly shaped form and puts magic into it that brings it to life.
First, I’ll outline some basic principles. Then I’ll discuss how they played out in my revisions for Red Eye.
Principles of Editing
These are a few things that work for me. Use what works for you and ignore what doesn’t. I am never entirely consistent with this process. I’m always changing and trying new ways of working.
Each story also has different requirements. So even if you have a consistent general process, it may still need to adapt to each individual story’s needs.
Focus on the Core Concept
Unlike longer works, short stories don’t have much room for meandering and asides. They work best when they have a distinct core concept. This might be an idea, a plot point or twist, a character, or even the structure of how the story is told.
There are many different engines that can power a story and drive it forward. The core concept is often very close to whatever got me excited about writing the story in the first place, although some stories will turn out to have a completely different focus from what you expected when you started writing.
The core concept is the measure for everything else in the story. Anything that doesn’t strengthen, deepen, or explore the core concept should be questioned and considered for removal.
Get External Feedback
The written word is an imperfect communication channel. The author stands on one side, with an idea of the story in their head. The reader stands on the other. Between them: two cans connected with string. This is the story, and just because you think you’re sending it with perfect clarity over the wire doesn’t mean the reader is receiving it the way you want them to.
The only way to effectively reconcile the story in your head with the story the reader received is to ask them. If you aren’t used to detailed feedback, you may be surprised how many different experiences and interpretations a dozen readers can have with the exact same story.
The first challenge is finding those readers. Friends and family may be an option. Writing groups and online critiques are another. More is generally better, but the sweet spot is probably 5-15 readers. Fewer, and you’ll miss useful critique, more and it will become overwhelming.
The second challenge is parsing the feedback. Put aside ego and be as open and honest as you can be. Some feedback you will disagree with. The reader may want something that doesn’t align with your core concept. The reader may identify a valid problem, but offer a bad solution. Individual readers will inevitably miss or misinterpret things, or get confused. This isn’t necessarily a problem if it’s only one reader in fifteen. If multiple readers have the same issue, it deserves scrutiny.
The final challenge is deciding what to change. It may be helpful to start with a list of problems, and then translate those into solutions. One change may be able to fix several problems, or one problem may necessitate several changes. I like to make checklists and take many editing passes, focusing on one or two things each time.
Big to Small
Try to make big, sweeping changes before line edits and more localized changes. It’s a waste of time to polish a paragraph if you’re just going to delete or replace the whole scene later.
This is something to strive for, but editing is an iterative process, so don’t stress over it too much. Sometimes an epiphany doesn’t strike until deep into the editing process. Don’t let the sunk cost fallacy discourage changes that will make a story better.
Cut, Cut, Cut
This was a hard lesson for me to internalize. If you have a naturally flowery or verbose style, it’s perfectly fine to run wild in early drafts. However, it’s important to cut that back as much as possible in revisions. Even first drafts written in a sparse style can often be trimmed significantly.
When cutting, look at what reinforces the core concept. Compare the trimmed and untrimmed versions of a sentence or paragraph. Be honest about what is really lost when removing a word here or there. Only keep what’s valuable.
Value isn’t measured solely in understandability of the plot. It may be critical characterization, or lyricism, or structure. You should be able to articulate why a cut doesn’t work, and default to brevity.
If you’re not used to ruthless cutting, it may feel bad at first. Short stories are an inherently tight medium, and given two versions of a story, the one that can say the same things in fewer words will generally be stronger. If you’re trying to get your work published or sold, there are simply more opportunities for shorter stories than longer ones.
Take frequent breaks when trimming. Once you’ve read and tweaked the same sentence a few times, it becomes hard to look at it objectively. Time is a necessary part of the process.
Example: Red Eye
Red Eye is a sci-fi noir short story in a future where a longevity serum extends lives. In rare cases this serum makes the person a “Red Eye,” activating a latent psychic power to see the future. These visions always come to pass so long as the Red Eye is still alive, and every Red Eye sees an apocalyptic cataclysm looming in the future.
The main character is a Red Eye police detective who catches other Red Eyes so they can be given a longevity-counteracting drug, in the hope that this will stop the collective catastrophic vision from coming to pass.
Red Eye is a long story for me, generally staying in the range of 6000-7000 words through many iterations. It is also an old story that stole ideas from things I wrote in my twenties. A version of it sat in a drawer for a number of years when I wasn’t submitting my work for publication. I revived it in 2024, and that is when I began editing it in earnest.
For stories I write today, I generally let the first draft sit for a couple weeks. Red Eye was an outlier in that regard.
Initial Revisions
My first editing pass is a gut check. I try to forget everything I know and come at it as a reader. What obviously works or doesn’t work? I try to find my core concept. At first, this was the idea of the psychic who locks the future in place by seeing it.
I also noted right away that the story was long, and I wanted to trim it down significantly.
I made some initial changes, fixed obvious problems, and did my best to trim. My goal at this early stage is to have the right scenes in the right order and rough shape. (Realistically though, things can change.) Then I take a light polishing pass where I check spelling, grammar, and flow. Much of this polish will be wasted, but I do it to avoid distracting first readers with small errors.
First Feedback
My first audience is my family. They are avid readers in various genres. At face value, they are not necessarily the “perfect readers” for my work, but that’s fine. They are kind enough to give me their time and energy, and they’ll be somewhat gentle with me while pointing out any major flaws.
With their initial feedback, I hope to catch anything egregiously confusing, any plot holes, and a handful of random smaller problems. They may also bring ideas or suggestions.
For Red Eye, the feedback told me that this is a complicated plot, and it was hard to relate to the main characters. That meant I would need to make it easier to understand what was happening while simultaneously putting more of the characters’ feelings and motivations on the page. And I still wanted to make the story shorter.
I made some changes based on this feedback, and jotted a few notes for later.
Detailed Feedback
Next, I submit to Critters, which is an online writing group designed for getting feedback on works in progress. It takes a story a couple weeks to get through the queue, which provides another natural break.
If I have major concerns from my initial edits and first reader feedback, I may include a question or two along with the story. Often I do not. I find that including specific questions will cause many readers to focus solely on those concerns, and I really want this feedback to clue me into any problems that I’m completely unaware of.
The Critters critiques will dribble into my inbox over the course of a week. I usually read each one the day it comes in, but I do nothing about them at first.
Reading feedback from strangers can be emotional, depending on how effective they are at constructive criticism. I have received a good amount of critique and I like to think I’m even-keeled about it. I still think it’s normal and expected to feel good when a reader compliments your story, and bad when they dislike it or are confused by it. Reading feedback as soon as it comes in gives me space to feel any of those things without the need to take any action. It lets some of that feedback lodge in my brain and start to marinate.
When all the critiques are in, I go through them again, systematically. Any initial feelings I might have had are now blunted and I can take in the critique more honestly. I respond to everyone with a brief thank-you email. This isn’t strictly required for Critters, but it’s polite, and it forces me to consider the feedback. I’ll often write a sentence or two in my email in response to what was said.
While I’m doing this, I copy all the feedback into a single document. I may do some light organizing, like putting similar feedback together or trimming out empty pleasantries and suggestions or complaints that I’ve decided to ignore.
The feedback for Red Eye reaffirmed my concerns about plot and characterization, and provided a lot of good smaller-scale line editing suggestions. Interestingly, while I was worried about the story being too long, my readers really didn’t think it was.
The Hard Edits
This is the toughest part. I have a story and a ton of feedback. Now it’s time to make it better.
Since this story was longer than I’m used to and I received a ton of good feedback, it took me a long time to organize my document of problems, and a long time to decide how I wanted to try to solve each of them.
For this particular story, I created a reverse outline in the form of a list of scenes. I gave each scene a descriptive title and noted the pages it started and ended on. Red Eye had eleven scenes ranging from less than a page to seven pages.
I also listed all my characters. This can help to see where whole characters can be cut or combined, although I didn’t do that with Red Eye.
I then looked at my checklist of problems and solutions and placed them under the scenes where I thought they made sense. This included big things and small things, with the big things first. Some bullet points migrated between scenes as I worked.
This is the grunt work, simply going through one problem after another, sometimes finding that your idea for a fix doesn’t work and finding a new one, and rearranging, adding, deleting. This is usually where my opinion of my own writing is at its lowest, because I am working through all the worst parts of the story. It’s important to remember that the end is near, and the story that comes out of this process will be the best it has ever been.
Additional Rounds of Feedback
I will note here that you may choose to make major changes to a story, and then go back for a more rounds of feedback to get an idea of how well those changes worked.
I did not do this with Red Eye, but I certainly see stories go through Critters multiple times. It all comes down to how worried you are about the shape of the story and the changes you’ve made.
I also think that there comes a point where it becomes more valuable to move on to the next story than iterate yet again on the current one. This is just something you have to feel out and decide for yourself.
Polish and Cleanup
When the big, sweeping changes are done and I’ve addressed the major problems, I turn to polish and cleanup. The scenes, characters, and plot are solidified, and I look at the individual sentences and words. First I address small items from reader feedback. Then I read through each scene several times to find anything that sounds off.
Haruki Murakami says that you know you are nearly done with editing when you find yourself adding words or punctuation in one pass, then changing it back in the next. Some changes will come down to your current mood and the time of day.
My final step, again, is to cut, cut, cut. Tighten all the screws. Get that word count as low as it will go. For Red Eye, I allowed my word count to creep up by nearly a thousand words throughout the process of fixing all the bigger issues. Then I trimmed about the same number of words out again.
That might sound pointless at first, but it’s actually fantastic. I was able to effectively replace something like 10-20% of my words with better words! That’s what editing is all about.
Take a Victory Lap
If you get to this point, all that’s left is to put your manuscript into a word doc with standard formatting. Add the author info and title and page headers. Add the word count (and see if you can shave off another fifty or hundred).
Then stop and take in your beautiful story. Appreciate your hard work. Editing is all about finding the flaws—the negatives. Take a moment to feel the good vibes of a finished story. Be proud.
Then fire up Duotrope or Submission Grinder and find somewhere to submit that thing. And start working on the next story.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week eight: Feb. 23 – Mar. 1.
Stats
Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 8
Submissions Total: 8
Rejections: 4
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
My goals for last week were:
Submit stories
Submit critiques
Continue writing Out of Towner, or start a new story.
This week was a submissions week. I made two submissions for stories that have already been making the rounds, and another four for my new stories, Taco Cat and Red Eye. Those submissions get me back on track for meeting my goal of 50 submissions this year.
My inspiration for the story Out of Towner has fizzled, so I’ve decided to set it aside. I haven’t started a new story yet, but I’ve been thinking about punk stories, on two different fronts. The first is an idea for a punk magical community in late 1970s New York, and the second is a budding interest in the genre of Solarpunk. I’ll have more to say about that in a future post.
I continued to neglect my Critters critiques, something I’ll need to rectify in the upcoming week.
Next Week
Unfortunately, my wife injured her arm this past week, so I’ll be picking up the chores that require arm mobility and strength, and giving her some extra support for the next few weeks. That will cut into writing time, and I’ll have to make some adjustments to my plans and goals.
For now, my goals next week are carried over from this week:
Rod String Nail Cloth was a random library pick containing six stories and a poem. It’s slim enough that I read it in the span of a Saturday afternoon. When I grabbed it I didn’t know anything apart from the title, but I’ve been meaning to investigate Afrofuturism for a while, and a short anthology seemed like a good place to start.
As it turns out, T. Aaron Cisco was born and raised in Chicago, but now lives in Minneapolis, so there’s a hometown connection for me. It also turns out that this is self-pub, and has a whiff of punk-rock “zine” to it. Unfortunately, it also has something like 20-30 typos and formatting errors across its 150-odd pages.
These stories revolve around themes of time travel, racial injustice, environmental catastrophe, and transhumanism. There are some interesting ideas in here, and some sentences and paragraphs that really pop. However, I found some of the writing straying too far into the literary style that I most struggle with: pages spent on a character’s languid internal thoughts without giving me enough plot or setting to latch onto.
The first story, “Now, Justice,” is the biggest offender in this regard. It follows a Black inventor who creates a machine that manipulates people’s perceptions. He uses it to take vengeance on a policeman who shot an unarmed Black kid and dodged the consequences. However, we don’t get to the first mention of the machine until page 17.
The subsequent stories were tighter, in my opinion. “Thursday Addison” is a Shonen anime of a story where a cybernetically enhanced enforcer is sent into a violent, futuristic battle that she barely survives.
“The Hesitant Envoy” is a tongue-in-cheek tale where an advanced civilization pulls aside one human to ask him to justify the continued existence of the species. He has a hard time coming up with a good argument, and isn’t particularly inclined to try.
“Lydian Mode” is about a down-on-his-luck Black musician who travels back in time to 1960s Chicago. Despite the dangers of life at the height of the civil rights movement, he discovers that there are also opportunities.
“Captain Michaela” is a poem about the titular character (maybe?) saving the universe. I’m just the wrong audience for this. While I have my favorite poets and poems, I’ve never felt drawn to sci-fi poetry.
“Rod String Nail Cloth” is the stand-out story of the book for me, an epistolary story about a person sent far back in time to fix a broken world.
In “They Burn So Easily,” an apocalyptic virus turns people into still-thinking vampire/zombie creatures called Chalkies, more strongly affecting those with paler, less pigmented skin. It’s a story about choosing forgiveness and humanity even when it may be undeserved. The conflict in this one felt a bit rushed, and I would have been interested in a longer exploration of the setting, the premise, and the relationships between the characters.
Rod String Nail Cloth is, in parts: intriguing, goofy, and a little rough around the edges. It’s not going on my favorites list, but I’m happy to have read it, and I’ll keep an eye out for Cisco’s work in the future.
It also whet my appetite for more Afrofuturism, especially in short fiction. If you have any good recommendations, leave them in the comments.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week seven: Feb. 15 – Feb. 22.
Stats
Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 2
Rejections:4
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
The goals I set for last week were:
Finish Red Eyes.
Finish Taco Cat.
Continue writing Out of Towner.
Get a new story in the Critters queue.
This week felt good. I am finished with Red Eyes, and I think I can safely say that this is the most work I’ve had to put into a story to make it work. It’s a relief to be done with it.
Taco Cat Employee Manual v7.1 (a much shorter story) made it through the Critters queue this week, and I received 11 responses—a pretty decent turn-out. It was mostly well-received, and only needed some minor tweaks. Quite a contrast between these two stories. I trimmed it down to an even 1,000 words so I can submit it to most flash fiction listings.
I already had another story, F-TIB, ready for the critters queue, so I sent that off and should get feedback in mid-March.
Finally, I sat and stared at Out of Towner, a story comprised (so far) of a single introductory scene, and felt completely indifferent to it. So that was the one goal I didn’t meet. This week, I’ll have to decide if I can find a spark of excitement in it, or if I should set it aside and pick something else to work on.
Submissions and Rejections
I received a response to the light rewrite that was requested for Incident at Pleasant Hills. Unfortunately, it was a rejection. This was a bummer, but they had very kind words for the story so I can’t really complain.
I submitted one story, Tom, Dick, and Larry, to a themed drabble contest. It has been challenging to find publications interested in drabbles, and they frequently don’t offer payment. (It’s pretty funny, since pro rates on 100 words come out to only $8.) This contest pays and the theme fits the story, so it’s a nice find.
I haven’t yet looked through the listings with Red Eyes or Taco Cat in mind, but I plan to send them out in the upcoming week.
Next Week
My goals for next week are:
Submit stories – at least three
Submit some critiques
Continue writing Out of Towner, or start a new story.
Reading the four-part Ender’s saga left me feeling skeptical of big, philosophical, late-80s sci-fi books. Now I’m going back to that well with Hyperion.
I’ll be honest, Hyperion feels clever and stylish after Children of the Mind. Then again, Ender’s Game was the first and best book in the series. Hyperion is also the first book in a four-book series. So maybe I’m setting myself up for heartbreak all over again.
Canterbury Tales, in Space!
Hyperion opens with a frame story. A man we know only as the Consul is given instructions to go to the planet of Hyperion along with six others, on a mysterious pilgrimage. He goes, and meets his compatriots:
Het Masteen, captain of the spaceship that will transport them, which just so happens to be a giant tree.
Father Lenar Hoyt, a Catholic priest in a galaxy where Catholicism is nearly extinct
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, a soldier of the galaxy-spanning Hegemony’s military
Martin Silenus, a centuries-old poet who has journeyed between stars and across time via relativistic space travel
Sol Weintraub, a scholar, who brings his baby daughter Rachel
Brawne Lamia, a hard-boiled private detective
When the pilgrims arrive at Hyperion and introductions are made, they come to an agreement: they will each tell the story of why they came as they make the long journey from the spaceport to their final destination, the Time Tombs. There, they expect to find the Shrike, a mythic creature made entirely of razor-sharp blades. Supposedly, he will choose one of them to grant a boon, and the others will be sacrificed.
As the journey gets underway, each pilgrim tells their story in turn. Between the stories, they travel across the planet toward their destination. It’s a bad time to return to Hyperion. The planet is poised to be the first front in the largest war humanity has ever seen, between the Hegemony and the long-exiled Ousters, who live strange lives in their deep-space ships. The Time Tombs—in what cannot be coincidence—appear to be opening, and nobody knows what will come out.
A Slowly Woven Tapestry
The structure of the book allows Simmons to expand the scope of ideas slowly. The unexplained and confusing in one story is addressed and answered in another. It allows the reader to assemble these small pieces into a detailed and rich setting.
Through the pilgrims’ stories, we begin to understand the galaxy they inhabit and the ways their paths have crossed Hyperion and the Shrike to bring them to the current moment. From Silenus we learn about Old Earth and the Big Mistake, a man-made black hole that slowly (and then quickly) devoured the planet, forcing the Hegira to many worlds. From Father Hoyt and Saul, we learn about Hyperion, it’s inhabitants, and the Time Tombs. From Kassad and the Consul, we learn about the armies of the Hegemony; the many rebellions quashed and small wars fought by a supposedly peaceful and democratic government. From Brawne, we come to understand the vast web of farcaster portals that allow instantaneous travel between Hegemony worlds, and the mysterious society of AIs who control them and remain apart from humanity while ostensibly guiding and helping them.
The book paints rich portraits of a handful of specific worlds. Dan Simmons manages to make almost every setting in the book genuinely strange and interesting. A planet wracked with storms, a sea of grass navigated by gyroscopic sailing ship, a 1.3g planet where the people live in vast arcology-like “hives,” a bus-sized cable-car over snowy mountains, an ocean world where people live on island-sized migratory creatures, and a vast capital city where the rich live in houses where every room is a portal to a different planet.
This feels like a universe with a history, a big universe populated by billions of people across dozens of worlds, and all the diversity that represents. It’s full of beauty and weirdness. And yet, the same human sins and weaknesses are still there, still causing problems.
Each pilgrim brings a different perspective to their story, which allows Dan Simmons to shift style and tone throughout. Kassad’s story is full of sex and violence, a pastiche of military sci-fi, while the Consul’s story is more of a historical documentary. Brawne’s story is a cyberpunk noir where the detective inevitably falls in love with her dangerous client. Sol’s story is that of a father desperately trying to save his sick child. These different styles help to keep the book constantly fresh, and each reveals new pieces in the puzzle of what’s really happening on Hyperion.
In the Ender Saga books, the relativistic effects of space travel were a promise that never really delivered. Nobody apart from the main characters traveled between worlds, and it seemed that nobody could even imagine that someone might live for hundreds of years by traveling between stars while time passes by.
In Hyperion, relativistic space travel is a part of life. The Web of Hegemony worlds are connected instantaneously via farcasters, but each world starts as a colony whose inhabitants took a many years to arrive, and even longer to build their first farcasters. Conflicts often arise between the original settlers, or indiginies, and the flood of tourists that inevitably come with joining the web.
Style Plus Substance
Ultimately, I think a lot of what I enjoy about Hyperion comes down to Dan Simmons’s writing style. It incorporates literary flashes and delightfully crafted language, while maintaining the workmanlike plotting and characterization that a mainstream science-fiction audience would expect…especially in the late 1980s.
For a thirty-five year old novel, Hyperion still feels fresh and interesting. It’s doing a lot, and doing most of it well. If there’s anything to critique, it’s that the book sets up some big mysteries and leaves the biggest ones unresolved. I believe the four books in the series are really a pair of duologies, so I expect to get most of the answers in the sequel, The Fall of Hyperion.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week six: Feb. 8 – Feb. 15
Stats
Stories Finished: 1
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 3
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
My goals from last week were:
Finish revising Red Eyes.
Start the first draft of a new story.
Although I’ve been generally keeping up with my self-imposed quotas for writing and editing, this week marks the first time where I’ve gotten ahead on both.
I started a new story with a working title of Out of Towner. I hate this title and it will change. I’m not sure how I feel about the story itself. I’ll give it another week to see how it shapes up.
I made a couple of breakthroughs with Red Eyes revisions this week. First, I found a motivation for my main character that connects several aspects of the story and helps to explain why he finds himself in his current predicament. This also gave me a reason to make a change to the ending—not really changing the outcome of the story, but replacing some dialogue between two characters that I always felt was not up to snuff.
In the past couple weeks, I’ve addressed about two pages of bullet point notes, with some content migrating across several scenes. I believe I’ve reached the point where I added and clarified everything I wanted to. Unfortunately, that process added 600-700 words to a fairly long story. I’m refusing to call it done until it gets another one or two editing passes, mainly to trim, trim, trim.
As I finally wrap up this story, it’s really apparent that I’m just not as good at editing as I’d like to be. It’s slow, painful work to slog through. The writing is breezy in comparison. I’ve been able to get away with it, to some extent, by writing shorter stories that don’t have as many complicated, moving parts.
This isn’t a point of shame, but it does reinforce my determination to do a lot of editing this year so I can get better at it.
Critiques
It will be a relief to have Red Eyes done, because I’ve got another story coming down the pipe. Taco Cat Employee Manual v.7.1 went out for critique this week. The Critters week runs Wednesday to Wednesday, so it still has a couple days to go. I’ve gotten seven responses, which is not bad, but I’m hoping to get a few more.
Taco Cat currently stands at 1150 words, and a couple people have noted that it’s probably worth trying to get that down to an even 1000, the common cutoff for flash fiction. I expect the editing pass to be much shorter and less intensive on this one. Soon, I should have two more stories ready to submit.
As a speculative fiction writer, I tend to stay in the zones of sci-fi and fantasy. I don’t go across the tracks to horrorville very often. However, I’m currently writing a horror story featuring a monster who appears human. That got me thinking about monsters and how to write them effectively.
Despite my limited horror writing experience, I do read a good amount of horror and have analyzed a fair number of short stories through Critters critiques. As authors, we inevitably read far more work than we produce, so it’s important to learn not just from our own mistakes, but from others’ mistakes (and successes) as well.
In my opinion, horror is reliant on pacing and rising tension more than any other genre. While “conflict” and “tension” are sometimes used interchangeably, the difference is important here. Physical violence is common in horror (although it’s hardly the only form of conflict available). But too much violence runs the risk of verging into absurdity or action/thriller and losing those “creeping dread” horror vibes.
To feel like horror, there should be rising tension throughout, and outright conflict only at key “peaks” of the story.
Save the Reveal
Any connoisseur of monster movies knows that revealing the monster too early is a mortal sin. Mystery, uncertainty, and fear all build tension. So long as the reader and the characters don’t have a complete understanding of the antagonist, there’s always the possibility of something new and unexpected happening.
To this end, it’s important to slow roll the reveal. Dribble out information and understanding. The characters might think they have a chance against the monster when they discover that it’s blind. They’ll learn how wrong they are when they discover it has superhuman hearing and sense of smell.
The unknown is always more spooky. This goes for all aspects of the horrific. When describing the monster, give the characters and the reader glimpses, not straight on views. Show us a stray tentacle, a slime trail, a bloodshot eye through the crack in the door, or the sound of sharp claws scraping on the window.
If there has to be a full reveal, it should come close to the end. However, there doesn’t always have to be a reveal. Sometimes the story can resolve, and the characters can even win, without ever completely understanding the monster. Cosmic horror especially relishes the unknowable, and often outright refuses to fully explain its biggest bad guys. They are too horrific or mind-bending for mere humans to comprehend while staying sane.
Use All of Your Senses
Vision is the sense that able-bodied humans use most, and it’s usually the first mode of description authors reach for. Hearing is a distant second place. The rest of the senses are a lap behind on the track.
In any fiction it’s a good idea to shake this up. Hearing, touch, smell and taste can all add verisimilitude and depth to a story. For horror, this is even more important. Since mystery and the unknown are vital to creating tension, preventing characters from seeing the danger will ramp up that tension.
Since a lot of horror lives in the realm of speculative fiction, there may even be opportunities to include “extraordinary” senses beyond the standard five. Characters might get the feeling that they’re being watched, or the extrasensory certainty that something horrible is about to happen.
Using the full array of senses is an opportunity to make associations with things that cause discomfort—the feeling of bugs crawling over skin, dripping slime in an unexpected place, the smell or taste of rot, the sound of crunching bones. These kinds of sensory discomforts are another key way to ramp up the tension in a story.
Be aware that you may lose certain readers when you get into phobia territory. This is par for the course with horror, and audiences should expect a certain amount of discomfort, but you’re still going to encounter certain readers who absolutely can’t get enough axe murder and will still throw a book across the room when they get to the bit with the spiders under a character’s skin or the clown in the sewer.
Metaphor and Synecdoche
Another important way to maintain mystery and reveal without revealing is to use layers of indirection. Metaphor and simile can give a sense of what the monster is like, without providing the whole picture. Synecdoche substitutes a part of the thing for the whole.
We know the creature has a snout that snuffles like a pig when it seeks out its victims. We know that it has a slimy hide with bristly, needle-like hair. We know that when it was feeding on that old man in the shadows, it was all sharp claws and red-tinged fangs.
Twisted or False Innocence
Another tactic for introducing mystery and uncertainty is to start with something safe and known, and systematically show that this surface-level simplicity hides sinister depths.
The classic examples of this tend toward typical innocence and innocuousness: children, dolls, nuns, clowns. These cheerful, delightful, or inherently good things and people slowly reveal aspects that do not match what they’re supposed to be.
The feeling of understanding something, only to have to revise that initial impression naturally brings some level of discomfort and tension with it. It speaks to the primal parts of the human brain that are responsible for studying the dark jungle around us and noticing on the third or fourth pass that the ordinary shadow under that tree is really a tiger.
Reveal Through Reaction
Effective fiction requires a level of empathy between the reader and the characters. Luckily, most humans are natural empathy machines—when we see something happen to somebody else, we tend to think about how that makes the other person feel, and we can even generate a sympathetic response that makes us feel the same feelings we perceive in someone else.
In all fiction, and especially in horror, it’s the author’s job to help the reader activate that sympathetic response. Sensory descriptions are a great way to do this. Again, as a culture that’s immersed in TV and movies, we tend to think very visually, but other senses often are even better at eliciting this empathy in the reader.
Importantly, fiction offers an avenue that isn’t entirely possible to replicate in TV and movies: the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters. Of course, the POV of the story may be a limiting factor, but in first person, second person, and “close” third person points of view it should be possible to delve into the thoughts and emotions of at least one character.
Reveals are Climaxes
With mysteries and uncertainties providing vital sources of tension in horror stories, it’s only natural that reveals should be moments of excitement or relief. Major revelations should come at a point of maximum tension. This can be used as a pressure release valve before moving into a new part of the story and ratcheting up a new source of tension. However, the reveal is often closely coupled with a moment of violence, pain, or trauma, turning that inherent excitement toward terror.
Reveals are also sometimes opportunities to raise the stakes. What started as “I don’t want to die,” may become “I can’t let this evil be unleashed onto the world.” One of my favorite takeaways from Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story is that the character’s personal story should tie into the broader external action. What this means is that good stories have personal stakes for key characters, but those stakes are tied to the bigger events.
In Stranger Things, a group of kids has to fight monsters to save their friends, but those monsters also have bigger plans to wreak havoc on their small town and the world. In The Omen, fear of a monstrous child is heightened by the possibility that he may be the Antichrist. The Alien movies aren’t just about avoiding the Xenomorph, but about preventing it from spreading.
Most horror—or at least horror with monsters in it—ends in defeat, or victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. The climactic reveal may be the piece of information that is needed to fully understand the monster, and thus discover a weakness that can be used to defeat it.
The final opportunity for tension comes at the end of the story, just beyond the climax. The monster was finally defeated…or was it? Did that mangled corpse twitch? Did the eye open? Or is there a clutch of eggs somewhere cool and moist, waiting to hatch? Was the demon really banished, or is there a strange glint of red in that side character’s eye?
One of the hallmarks of horror is leaving the reader with an unsettled feeling even after the final sentence, and a great way to do that is to leave some tension unresolved.
Here we are, in the thick of a new year of short stories. It’s the perfect time to direct you to one of my favorite short-story-writing bloggers, Aeryn Rudel.
Rudel writes and submits short fiction in numbers that I can only aspire to. In fact, the title of this post apparently understates his case—he mentions that he’s had 120 stories published over the past 12 years! That much experience brings a lot of perspective on short story writing, and we’re lucky that Rudel shares it regularly.
Check out the post over on his site, Rejectomancy.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week five: Jan. 31 – Feb. 6.
Stats
Stories Finished: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 3
Acceptances: 0
A New Kind of Rejection
I received one rejection this week. Sort of.
At first I thought it was going to be one of those rejections where the publication is so worried about offending anyone that they don’t even clearly say that the story is rejected. (For the record, these are my least favorite kind of rejection. Don’t treat writers as fragile little babies, even if we occasionally act that way.)
Around the fifth paragraph it became apparent what was actually going on. The publication was unable to keep up with the number of submissions, so they gave up, rejected everything, and changed their format to be flash fiction only.
My submission wasn’t flash, hence the non-rejection rejection.
Goals and Results
The goals I set out for this week were:
Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
Catch up on writing word count.
I have to admit I got distracted this week, but it was productive distraction. I ended up working on several blog posts, which should be a longer-term benefit when I have less work to do for the remainder of my February posting schedule.
I didn’t finish my revisions on Red Eyes, but I did make good progress. I’m now ahead on my self-imposed revision quota for the first time this year. I still have one more week to wrap up Red Eyes before critiques for another story, Taco Cat, start coming in from Critters.
I didn’t quite catch up to my word count quota this week, although I am within spitting distance. Those words were spent on finishing the first draft of the horror story I’ve been working on, currently titled Estate Sale. (I’ll be looking for a more interesting name when I come back to it for revisions.)
Words Deferred 