Talking Short Stories During a Short Week
Hi everyone!
I hope you’re doing great. It’s a short week for a lot of people, and I hope you get to spend the holidays with folks you love and care about. I’m thankful for so much this year, especially my family, friends, and the talented rock stars I get to work with. When I say I have very little to complain about, it’s 100 percent true. Wishing you and yours the very best, always.
Before I get into this week’s mini-essay, I want to point you to some big news:
Mara Llave: Keeper of Time is back!
That’s right, I teased this a bit last week, but it’s official: Nickolej Villiger and I have returned to Comics Kingdom to continue the adventures of Mara, the action-adventure newspaper strip we launched a while back for King Features. We’re excited to relaunch the strip and really devote ourselves to make her adventures run for a good long while. It’s a real passion project for Nickolej and I, and a love letter to the sci-fi newspaper strips we both love - a twisty, expansive story that will let us tell all kind of adventures through the prism of Mara. Nickolej is really pouring his heart into every panel and detail of this series, and it shows. The guy sure can draw.
Now, I hardly ever engage with reviews or comments, but I have seen a few logistical questions pop up since the strip kicked off that I want to address, just to clear the air!
In terms of story - yes, this new strip is a bit of a soft reboot. Does it mean the strips you saw before “don’t count”? Not at all. We will get to tying the two threads together. Keep reading! We wanted to provide new readers with a clear jumping on point, but it doesn’t mean what came before is gone. In fact, it’s very integral to the bigger story we’re going to tell.
As for the delay - look, Nickolej and I would’ve loved to have been producing the strip nonstop, but we had to find a model that was sustainable for both of us. I think we’ve hit on it, and we’re both cranking and trying to get more strips out there. Thanks for your patience! We’re extremely thankful to our editor, Tea Fougner, and Alex Garcia and the entire team at King Features/Comics Kingdom for believing in Mara and her world. This is the kind of project I think Nickolej and I can spend a good long while doing.
Frequency: we’re looking to do one “Sunday” style strip a month, with the hope we can do more depending on reader reaction. So please, spread the word and let people know you like Mara Llave and want to see more. It makes a huge difference!
And now…let’s talk about short stories, shall we?
My good friend once told me he took a “vampire’s approach” to short story anthologies and conventions. Meaning, if he was invited in, he’d do it. If not, he was fine not doing it. Smart, huh?
I’m pretty sure we were on an interminable drive from LAX to Mysterious Galaxy for a book event which feels like it was a lifetime ago - but it was a great opportunity to just chat about, well, everything. Duane’s not only one of my favorite writers, he’s a great person and mentor - one of the folks who’ve really helped me on this journey. You should pre-order his new crime novel, California Bear, which I can’t wait to read.
But the reason I bring this anecdote up is because I get asked about short stories a lot!
And, like Duane, I don’t consider myself a short story writer. Which I guess is funny because I’ve won actual awards for some of my short stories, and had one included in Best American Mystery and Suspense stories. But it’s just not part of my process. I don’t write them for fun. I don’t read them all that much, either. It’s not that I don’t like short stories - but my brain tends to be wired for novels and comics.
I got to thinking about this earlier in the week while compiling a list of stuff that’s eligible for awards this year. Spoiler alert: I wrote a lot of short stories! Part of it goes back to the vampire thing - I get invited to be in anthologies fairly often. Not a brag, just a reality. I’m always flattered and honored to be thought of. I’m also not very good at saying no (working on it, I promise), so I end up taking on these gigs and then trying to figure out what to do with the space. With that in mind, I thought it’d be useful to share some of my perspective on writing short stories - as someone who doesn’t particularly think about writing in that format but does his fair share anyway.
For me, my shorts fall into two spaces: vignettes or workshops. The former is exactly what it sounds like - an idea or scene or moment that’s been buzzing around my brain that I need to get out, but that I’m also not sure merits a novel draft or isn’t exactly a comic book. For the Anthony Award-winning “Red Zone,” which was included in Pa Que Tu Lo Sepas! - an anthology to raise money for Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria’s devastation - I knew I wanted to write a sports story. Specifically, a football story set in a tiny Florida college that was mostly white, with a Cuban-American protagonist. I also knew I didn’t want to write a sports novel. Sometimes for a short, all you can actually do is put your pieces down - characters, setting, conflict - and nudge them along just enough to keep the reader interested. There just isn’t enough space to tell a longform story, so you want to create the idea of one, or give a slight resolution that will leave your reader feeling fulfilled but also leave you, the writer, enough room to come back if you want to. The trick here, I’ve learned, is to not just leave a cliffhanger - short story readers are probably not interested in that - but to give the reader the sense of a complete meal, even if you’re just handing them a snack.
Another good example of this, and also a sports story, is “Black Diamond,” my baseball reimagining of the Arthurian legend from the anthology, Stone, Sword, Table: Old Legends, New Voices. Everything you need to know is in the story, but you get a sense of something bigger. Now, the benefit of reimagining something as iconic as King Arthur is that there’s a lot of known real estate there - people recognize the elements. But that’s also the challenge, right? How do you subvert those concepts and present them in a new, interesting way. But as far as this lesson goes - “Black Diamond” was an example of a vignette, one that I didn’t want to bog down with a ton of backstory. So I focused on the key moments of the bigger narrative with a sprinkling of exposition. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and I honestly could’ve kept writing about those characters for a good long while. There’s a novel in there, I think.
The reader is here for the tiny bite of story, not for part one of a fifteen-part serialized short, across multiple publications. They don’t want a trail of crumbs, they want to come in, enjoy the story, and leave. There are, of course, exceptions to this - I won’t get into “novel in stories” or serialized stories by multiple writers. But in general, this fits.
That brings us to the vignette. It’s a story that hints at a bigger narrative and gives you a slice of it, and within that slice you have a beginning, middle, and end - and, ideally, your story closes on a powerful visual beat. Those images are the things that linger with readers and the words that have the most impact. Without spoiling anything, “90 Miles,” my Anthony Award-winning and BAMS-included short story, ends on a pretty dark and haunting visual - basically telling you where the main characters ended up, through they eyes of others. It’s meant to stick with you. It’s the bleakest thing I’ve ever written. Even darker than the Spider-Man story I just wrote for Marvel Zombies: Black, White, & Blood #1!
For “workshop” short stories…all that means is I’m using the opportunity of the story to tinker with an idea for something else. I have a story in this Elvis Costello anthology, Brutal and Strange (you can pre-order it now!), for example - and it gave me a chance to test out a character, premise, and style. If it works, you use it as part of something else. If not, you move on. In the Warren Zevon anthology, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, I played with an idea for a 1970s domestic terrorist thriller. I liked the story enough, but the characters didn’t speak to me beyond the confines of the story itself. Not a bad thing, but if I’d gone straight to writing that novel, I would’ve been frustrated a few chapters in, I think. Some ideas are meant to be shorts, some are meant to be longer. Better to test them out when you have the real estate.
Some workshop short story ideas even cross into other mediums. I wrote a prose short for the most recent Phenomenons shared-universe superhero prose anthology (Phenomenons: Season of Darkness) starring La Sombra - a street-level crimefighter that basically turns into the vigilante when the main character dreams, creating a strange (but fun) disconnect between both sides of our hero. The story itself was neat, and it let me dig into the background of the character. My friend Julio Anta, a gifted writer in his own right, and I are hoping to bring the comic version of La Sombra to life someday (ideally with art from pal Steve Bryant, as you can see here):
But without the opportunity to explore the idea in prose, it might never have gotten traction as a comic. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that our esteemed editor, and one of my favorite sci-fi and Star Trek writers ever, Michael Jan Friedman, is running a Kickstarter for the next Phenomenons book, Phenomenons: The Wind and Fire, which will feature another La Sombra short, and is live now. It could use your support! You can see La Sombra there, too!
Speaking of Steve, here’s another example of short stories becoming something else:
As part of legendary editor Robert Greenberger’s must-read and most recent Thrilling Adventure Yarns anthology, I created the occult investigator Diana Montalvan. I wanted to have another Miami-based series character that delved into the more fantastical parts of my hometown. Like a Cubana John Constantine with a Coral Gables storefront, basically. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head.
I had such a blast writing the character in “Diana Montalvan and El Tiburon of Tree Lane” that when AHOY Comics editor Sarah Litt approached me about contributing to their Project: Cryptids anthology, I already had the protagonist in mind - and you even see a nod to Diana’s original appearance in the comics. Notice the shark head?
It was a blast to work with Steve on this, and more proof that short stories can serve as springboards to other things if that’s what you want.
Obviously, this is just what works for me - and how I approach writing short stories (when I have to! Ha!). I know a lot of writers who write shorts as part of their natural process. I know some writers who don’t write them at all. The key is to find what works for you and make sure you’re enjoying the process.
Hope this was helpful!
GOODBYE!
I don’t have the bandwidth for a bunch of links this week, alas. Too many deadlines, not enough hours in the day, rinse, repeat.
So, I’ll let our queen, Polly Jean Harvey, take us out.
Have a great holiday if you’re celebrating!
