What Joyce Carol Oates Can Teach You About Writing Short Stories
20 excellent writing tips, from one of the greatest to ever do it…
One of the keys to writing an excellent novel is having refined your craft before you started it. And the best way to do that is by writing short stories.
But you can only access that writing goodness through knowing what exactly you can do with a short story — form, craft, plot, character. A short story is basically a novel super compressed, but it really seems like a different medium.
So here goes some twenty or so tips from Joyce Carol Oates on how to write the best short stories you can.
Protect Your Time
Joyce says that the only thing that’s detrimental for writing in the modern age is interruptions. “The great danger right now of creativity is being interrupted a lot,” she says.
Most of the interruption is self-inflicted interruption — looking at a cell-phone, or Twitter, or the news, or your email. You are willingly sacrificing yourself to passivity, and so your writing continuity stops flowing. Joyce says that our century doesn’t have the level of concentration that the 19th-century people had.
