photo credit: crol373 via Flickr
For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on the long form and haven’t written much short fiction. But whenever I feel like I need to step away from the novel I’ve been immersed and possibly bogged down in for months and recharge the imagination, I find that working on short fiction is the cure. Because short stories begin so much in the middle—a past implied, a present explored, a future as possibility, the storytelling is inherently selective. And this allows you to jump into any story at any time and make something of that chosen moment. With any story, short or long, you are forced to ask yourself what moments matter the most? But a short story reduces that selection even further, often to a single moment of discovery, a flash of illumination. Yet, the beauty of the short story relies on the belief that lifetimes can be conveyed in that single moment.