The result is something that is incredibly distilled. For every thousand words I wrote in both Sarge and Murphy, I kept maybe a hundred.
A fun challenge… Hey, I’m not doing this for a degree or a grade, right? Writing is fun for me.īut… how to write something that conveys what the characters are feeling, and how incredibly powerful the relationship is between them, without breaking the (word) bank? It’s not easy, that’s for sure.
Instead of seeing the short form as something limiting, I decided to make it a challenge. How could you say everything in such tight constraints? I managed to do it, but never really warmed to the short form.įast-forward to last year while I was writing Sarge. I excelled in writing long papers-any time I had to do short abstracts, I floundered. Huge, weighty papers that had pages of endnotes (or loads of footnotes depending on the prof). See, I might be new to writing fiction, but I wrote research papers for years: substantial works in history, art history, anthropology, philosophy, art theory, psychology, and Shakespearean language/ interpretation. Folks enjoyed it and wanted more, so I set myself some writing hurdles, one of which was: can I write a reasonably well fleshed-out story in less than 20k words? Then, I had a dream about two Space Marines and decided to write it out to see if I had any future in Science Fiction-that was the first chapter of Sarge. Caged wound up being over 120k words, which makes it a hefty enough read… and that’s after I cut out a whole bunch. When I first started writing, I jumped straight into the novel form.
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