I. Am. Stck.

[Mikki S]

Okay, slow down, take a deep breath.  All is not lost.  You have good ideas, but they become a plot that is too broad for a 500 -1000 word story.  Learning to "write short" is necessary if you ever want to publish a story or an article in a magazine.

First...have you read and studied your second assignment in your manual?  Do you understand everything it says, about each story having to have a beginning, a middle and an end?  Do you understand that your characters don't have to have a lot of depth and description in this particular assignment?  Be sure you read all of that very thoroughly, and also the suggested stories in your "Best of the Children's Market," as it is important to understand each assignment completely in order to build on the next one.

Okay, you've done that and you're still stuck.  So start with one character and develop one conflict:

In your last example, you had a girl who could communicate with her dog, who then ran off and got stuck in a pipe of some kind.  You don't need all those other conflicts in this kind of short story.  One is enough.  Take the girl and shape your story around her, her communication with her dog, and the dog getting into trouble.  But she has to resolve this conflict herself, she can't  ask anyone to help her.  She can use her telepathic communication to find out where the dog is, how far down he is and so on.  Then she has to figure out how to rescue him herself.  You mentioned rain...so it starts to pour, and the drainpipe the dog is in begins to fill up.  She has to hurry to get him out or he will drown.  But this solution has to come from her alone, she can't get suggestions from her dog.

You don't need asthma or boyfriends or mother, just the girl and the dog.  You're not writing an epic, just a short story. The beginning is showing the telepathic communication between the girl and her dog;  the middle is the dog chasing after a squirrel or something and falling into the drainpipe.  The end is the resolution of the problem: rescuing the dog before the rain drowns him.

Take it one step at a time.  One MC, one conflict, one resolution.  When you try to put all these extra characters and conflicts in you can't possibly do justice to any story of 1000 words or less.

Hope this helps some.

Mikki

[jfields]

If you're a novel writer, it's because you're a novel reader. You've internalized all the structure and pacing and plotting of a novel and that means you choose conflicts that take a long time to resolve because that's what you want in a novel.

In a short story, the conflict/problem/pressure needs to be tighter. You need a "ticking clock" a sense that the conflict must be resolved in three hours or three days or else. That automatically will help you a bizillion percent with your word length. You'll also need to keep your character list tight --a story that involves moving up the chain of popularity is a novel...lots of characters, lots of interaction. A story that involves a fight with a single best friend and what to do about it MIGHT be a short story (especially if you absolutely have to resolve the fight before the best friend moves away in two days).


Time and scope are the issue, not "too much conflict." You can have a really rough conflict that has to be resolved in two days and you'll have a short story. Maybe "conflict that takes too long to unfold" might be closer to the issue or "conflict that involves too many people."

Presuppose you have two limits -- time and number of people involved...then begin looking for a story and you're likely to find it works out as a short story a bit better.