Short and Surprising

The challenge of writing short and its magic

Photo by Sergiu Nista on Unsplash

First thoughts

I love reading short stories. I always did. But I love writing long stories.

A paradox!

But it is not so strange, actually, since the very same mechanism is in play — When reading a short story, I can fill in the blanks myself. And imagine what came before, what comes after, and what happens in parallel. My imagination is working, and I love it.

Writing is all that same imagination channeled through the fingers into the keyboard. I do all the thinking so the reader will not have to. Or perhaps the reader will enjoy many more blanks to fill in, much more to imagine before, after and in parallel.

When I once went through a challenge by a publication on Medium, I discovered both how difficult it was to sort and bring only the most valuable information in the 200 words allowed — and how quickly I got the concept worked into my brain and my fingers, so that I almost ran out of words and meanings right at the moment where my word counter hit 200.

Surprisingly, as I always struggled with short. But then — after ten short articles in a few days — I was hooked on the format and wanted to write more of it. I now like writing short and understand the joy of it.

There was another surprise, though — when reading through both my own and others’ contributions, I feel that they lack the rich and broad coverage of ideas, presenting only one briefly described one. Stories can be too short for offering a universe to build on. It surprises me that some people prefer to read such short and less rich texts?

There is more to learn!

---

Afterthoughts

There are many myths about modern people having a short attention span, and that we are all too busy to read longer texts.

But being busy and quickly skipping through texts does not give me any satisfaction. I want more!

It is like watching a movie, say Star Wars, and then feeling that there are too many ends left to wind up, to much of a mess remaining to leave the story. The people behind Star Wars understood this and made a zillion more movies, TV-series, computer games, etc., so now I don’t need more of that.

But in general, if I like what I read, I want more. I don’t want it to end. As a child, when reading many, long stories, I always hated the moment where only a few pages were left to read and the story was about to end.

Short can be impressive.

Looking at our nature, I can get very amazed by some of the tiniest creatures - how can they function at all, being so small? They have legs and perhaps wings, they have eyes and other sensors, they know what is going on around them, they can make plans, survive… They are alive with only a few grams of body weight to support that.

In outer space, on the contrary, everything is colossal! And yet, everything there consists of extremely small elementary particles - even they being not so elementary after all, as they also consist of even smaller things.

Small definitely has its place. Short, low, slim - we adore the tiny.

But combine more of that, and you suddenly have long, big, high, and much.

Everything good comes in small doses, they saying goes. An apple a day keeps the doctor away, even. Not a kilo of apples. No. Just one modest apple.

Our language, whatever language that is, can easily express gratitude for having just a little, or for not facing big challenges.

We don’t like everything that is big, that’s for sure. Big can be scary. I remember that little boy at the childrens’ library, where I worked, who wanted to read more but had problems with it. He wanted thin books. The thicker ones were too much of a challenge for him. I thought that my enthusiasm for reading could also become his, so I tried to explain that a thick book is just like three thin ones - nothing to worry about. He trusted me and borrowed a thick book, which he brought back a few days later with a sad expression in his face - “It is too difficult”.

But he spent long hours in the library, just like I had done as a child. Not everything needed to be diminutive. And we did have something in common, if not the love for long reads.

And questions

I wonder:

How do you feel about this? Do you want short or long texts?