Tuesday, December 6, 2011

How long does it usu­ally take you to com­plete an entire story?

Depends on several factors: my interest, time available, if I know the ending or not, desire, deadline, length, and which draft stage?

If I had to give an average, my long stories take about a year to complete. Usually I spend a few months and get down the whole first draft, and more often than not that’s where it remains. I have too many ideas to dawdle on one for too long. Occasionally I come up with something I like to see through to the end so I do a couple more runs on it.

I don’t generally write my stories for publication. I do it because it’s insanely fun to do. My stories could almost be considered my journal. Through my characters, I can explore all kinds of situations that I want to better understand. The stories that I come up with often reflect something that’s going on in my life at the time. A friend of mine passes away, I write a story about the afterlife, exploring people who are left behind, and the attempt to get them back.

Almost never do I notice the link between a story I come up with and what’s going on in my life at the time. It’s not until years afterward when I look back on it can I notice where the story came from. At the time of a story’s creation, it’s just me writing down whatever I find most interesting. If I leave a draft alone for a couple years after I’ve written it, I can come back later and figure out what it was I was trying to say with that story, and then it can be rewritten into something worth sharing.

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