May is National Crime Writing Month. Who knew? CBC Canada Writes is posting daily, short writing tips by Canadian crime writers, including Giles Blunt, Debra Purdy Kong, Joy Fielding and Louise Penny.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a long short story and finished it Monday. Long short story seems a contradictory descriptor – like jumbo shrimp. My story is around 13,000 words – half way to novella length and five or six times longer than the average short story published today.

Not that there is an average. Markets range from postcards-size to, in theory, unlimited until the story is clearly a novella or would take up too many pages in the magazine.

In my first creative writing workshop some twenty years ago, the instructor asked us to hand in stories of around 5,000 words; he said that anything less than that wouldn’t have enough meat. This primed me to write short stories around that size until I discovered how hard they were to get published. I reduced my typical story length to a more marketable 3,000 words, which is still way too high, today, for many appealing markets and contests, such as the CBC Literary Awards

Why this short story shrinkage? I think the reason is practical. Most short stories are published by literary magazines, which recieve tons of worthy submissions. Who can blame them for preferring to allocate x number of pages to 3,4,5,6 writers than xxxx number to a single one?

So, what will I do with my jumbo shrimp? For starters, put it aside. Then, revise and see if anyone wants to publish the whole creature or parts of it that might stand alone. This story’s been rumbling around in my head for the past three years; it feels good to get it out of there and onto the page. And now, with my published short story credits, I have enough material to start thinking of a story collection.

Personal deadlines work for me.  They prompt me to get started on my writing project so I have a chance of reaching my goal and keep me going as I approach the deadline.

In early January, I began the second draft of my novel-in-progress. My deadline was the end of February, when I planned to leave on a one week beach vacation.

I knew that with reasonable effort during that block of seven weeks I could reach the mid-point of the book. Since I like to stop at turning points, should I set the work aside in the middle or move forward? The latter, I decided, as the chapters rolled along. The more I could do before my break, the less to tackle later.

I worked on the novel almost every day. After all, it was winter and, while a mild one for Calgary, not ideal weather for playing outside.  How do people write if they live in a continuously beautiful climate? At a certain point, I realized it might be possible to finish the draft before the trip. I pushed myself harder and made it.

It felt good to be on holiday with draft #2 under my belt and relaxing to come back and not have to plunge right into writing. My tasks until the next deadline – late May – are to get manuscripts of draft #2 to my trusted readers, process their numerous comments, make minor amendments to the draft, do research for the novel, submit some short stories and poems to markets and, I hope, write a short story I’ve been mulling for several years. If there’s time leftover, I’ll start revising another novel-in-progress I set aside a couple of years ago.

These goals are less singular and focussed than completing a novel draft. I can see it will be tempting to slack off during Calgary’s spring, which already feels like it’s here.

Happy daylight savings time.

Last week, I spent a fascinating afternoon and evening at the University of Calgary, speaking to students in the English department. Instructor Margaret Hadley included Deadly Fall in the course syllabus for her two Detective Fiction courses this term.  What a thrill it was to see my novel listed with stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle,  Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, Georges Simenon and Raymond Chandler.  Hadley introduced Deadly Fall as an example of what modern authors are doing with the genre. She invited me in to talk with the class about the novel as well as my writing, since her students have the option to write a mystery short story as their major course requirement.

I began each session by describing my writing trajectory and must admit I was nervous facing the first group of 50 students who were mostly under age thirty, not my usual demographic. By the second group of 50, I was more relaxed. The students followed my opening by firing off questions that were interesting, intelligent and somewhat different from ones I’m used to.  Some had an academic slant: “What do you think Deadly Fall contributes to the genre?” Others simply surprised me: “Why do the swear words only start half way through the book?” They do?

I wrapped up the sessions with some writing tips and sympathized with their course assignment, as I’ve never written a successful mystery short story. How do you manage the surprises and twists with so few characters and little space to conceal clues?

I wish all of the students the best luck in the Detective Fiction course and in their academic careers. I’m so glad I had the chance to meet with this younger generation and hear their comments about Deadly Fall. If nothing else, I hope my appearance showed them that writers aren’t all dead white guys from other places. They can be ordinary people living in your own home town – your mom or neighbour or some day, perhaps, you.

On Saturday, I spoke to the Alberta Romance Writers Association about short story writing. To prepare, I took out a couple of books on the subject from the library and learned a few things.

Apparently, as late as the 1950s you could earn a good living as a commercial short story writer. Magazines like Redbook and Good Housekeeping published five or six short stories per issue and paid well. Now, they publish one, if any.  Other short story markets have also dried up during this time frame.  Two magazines that published my work within the past ten years are gone (Storyteller and Green’s). The cause of this demise is probably TV.  Today, people would rather turn on a drama or comedy than spend a relaxing evening reading magazine fiction. In contrast, literary fiction still flourishes thanks to journals produced by universities and literary groups. These magazines tend to pay poorly and are rarely read outside of the literary community.

If there’s little money in them and relatively few readers, why do people still write short stories? I came up with eight reasons. The class added two more.

1. If you take a creative writing course, you’ll be encouraged/required to write one. During the length of a six-to-fourteen week course it’s possible to write a short story, have it critiqued by the class in an evening and revise it for submission. Novels, in contrast, are difficult to critique in a course, since you can’t cover the whole work.
2. You like reading short stories. It’s always best to write what we read. You can have a fine writing career as a literary short fiction writer – and a spectacular career if you reach the top like Alice Munro.
3. Short stories and novels employ the same fiction techniques – character, plot, theme, setting …  By writing short fiction, you learn these elments and how to complete a story without getting bogged down for years working on a novel.
4. You can try out genres, types of characters etc. in a short story that you don’t want to tackle in a larger work. This can stretch you as a writer.
5. Characters, setting, plot, themes you’re comfortable with in a short story might morph into novel material.
6. You can get a story written and published in a much shorter time than it would take you to do the same with a novel. Publication feels good and validates you as a writer.
7. Short story credits create a track record that will help you get into writing programs and, when you submit your novel, will encourage publishers to look at it more seriously.
8. Short stories often translate better into screenplays than novels, where much material must be cut. There’s more money in film than in publishing any kind of fiction.
9. A short story track record can lead to gigs like teaching and speaking to the Alberta Romance Writers Association.
10. When you’ve written enough short stories you can collect them into a book of short stories –  that few people will read.

A comment by a member at Saturday’s session made me wonder if short stories are poised for a revival. Harlequin publishers has a call for short stories (upwards of 7,000 words) that they will sell in digital form with books they release. Likewise, anyone can sell a digital story on sites like Amazon or Smashwords. People who like a particular author or, in the case of Harlequin a particular type of book, might be willing to add 99 cents to their order for a story to read when they’re looking for something … ah … short.

January was a productive month of writing for me.  After the holidays, I plunged into the second draft of my novel-in-progress.  In the past, I thought I enjoyed writing first drafts best for the discovery and because it doesn’t matter if your sentences are shoddy or if everything is accurate and fits together perfectly. With Deadly Fall, I found some of my revision drafts harder work than the initial one and took longer to write.

Now, I’m finding this second draft not nearly as difficult as pulling a story from the blank page. It’s going more quickly than I had expected and I’m surprised to find myself past the mid-point.  I think much of this is due to what I learned about structure and pacing while revising and editing Deadly Fall. This enabled me to get it more right the first time. At least, I hope I did and I’m not deluding myself in this revision.

All novels, including contemporary ones, require research, that is, information you want in the book but don’t know enough about. While writing, I try to limit my research and often insert guesses I’ll look up later. This way I can get to the end of the novel and not latch onto research as a writing avoidance tactic.

After the first draft of this current book, I felt there were two matters I needed to know more about before getting into the second draft. The first was insurance. My protagonist, Paula Savard, is an insurance adjuster. I didn’t do a lot with her profession in Deadly Fall, but in this second book her job is central.  I worked in insurance some thirty years ago and my knowledge of it has faded.

At a Reading I gave last November, a man in the audience mentioned he was retired from an insurance career. After the question and answers, I gave him my business card and invited him to e-mail me, which he did.  I sent him numerous insurance questions. He answered in detail and assured me this wasn’t a burden; he enjoyed reminiscing. I did too and found it fun to refresh myself with the familiar insurance information and lingo.

A second topic prominent in the novel is hoarding. This was inspired by my  uncle and the details in the first draft came from my experience of him and other family members including, a little, myself.  To get a more professional and broader take on the subject, I read two library books and have a memoir to read next. I wrote copious notes on the psychology of hoarders, their personality profiles and details about their hoarded homes. Awhile back, for research, I also watched the Hoarders TV show, which features a real-life hoarder each week and goes through his or her cleanup. Why do people enjoy watching these things? For me, this is too close real life.

While revising my first draft chapters I’ve been surprised – pleased, alarmed? – by how much I knew about hoarding before going in. I’ve enhanced details, but this research was more about confirming my experience rather than correcting or developing information, as my insurance research did.

Also while writing, I created a folder of various research matters I plan to tackle when I’ve finished this draft. I think these are all minor matters that won’t impact the story much.

I’m currently reading The First Stampede of Flores Ladue, a biography about the founding of the Calgary Stampede, another important feature of my book that I wrote from experience. As with hoarding, this research isn’t essential, but it might lead to my adding a few more pertinent details.