How to write a 2000-word short story in three days flat
I’m just coming up for air after a heavy afternoon of writing. Feels great! I don’t remember being this absorbed in my writing for a long time.
I must admit, though, I do feel a bit of guilt for spending so much time on something I love. Not very good “adulting”, right? Should be knuckling down and stifling my creativity and doing boring tasks that pay the bills and stop pretending life is art.
Nope. I don’t buy it.
So what have I accomplished today? Well, I fleshed out the remainder of a short story I’ve been working on since the beginning of the week.
I’ll be submitting it to a weekly writing prompt publication on Medium so the turnaround time on the story has been tight to say the least.
I’d normally end up with a 400–600 word story with this kind of deadlind. But this time around, I pushed myself to form a more rounded out story based on the five key plot points structure. Thank you to Shaunta Grimes for the advice on that.
By Wednesday, I had around 700 words in rough note form. By the end of today, I hit 2000 words.
It’s not entirely junk either. In fact, I’m rather proud of it.
And it doesn’t feel rushed, just intense! I’ve been working on the story intensely in my head for days.
Admittedly, it has distracted me from other work I probably should have been doing instead. But, no! Art is important gosh darn it!
I think one of the main reasons for me being able to achieve the 2000 word count in such a short period of time was by focusing on the five key plot points.
Before now, I haven’t thought too deeply about my stories’ structure. Stuff just kind of happened. And that can work, sure. But a good story structure strengthens everything around it. I know that now!
I’ve already done a couple of comprehensive reviews and I’ve used Grammarly and the Hemingway text editor to help ensure a high quality of prose. I’ll likely need to let it breathe for a day and then do a final edit but apart from that, I think I’m done!
And it gets better… it looks like an creative friend is going to do some illustrations for the story. I can’t wait to put the words next to the illustrations.
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Take it easy, and thanks for reading.
