Before I get into some of my post-mortem-y thoughts on this story, I want to encourage you all to take a look at the thoughtful and thought-provoking comments some readers left, particularly on the last post. And, also, thank you to those people. Very cool.
The hardest thing about writing this story was keeping it "short." This is a frequent problem of mine. I'll get a neat idea for a short story, and I'll go start writing, and then a few pages in, it becomes obvious that what I'm actually doing is trying to write a novel.
The problem is that I really love high concepts, but to give a good one the treatment it deserves takes a lot of time, a lot of world-building, even if you let the characters stay a bit flat in service of the concept.
Shadowloss could have been a novel, but I wasn't interested *enough* in the concept to stick with it for another couple hundred pages. So I knew I had to build an arc that could be traversed much more quickly. This is one of the reasons I stuck with Reg's perspective, in first-person voice. I wanted to capture the development of one person, forced through one stage of evolution. Confined to his perspective, much of the story occurs though his circling, sloppy thoughts, toward painstaking maturation.
True short stories can only focus on one main event. In that sense, Shadowloss definitely doesn't qualify. But I do think I managed to get its length to fit its objectives. I wanted to introduce an evocative world, without getting lost in it, and I wanted to help Reg mature from point A to point B. And I hoped to be able to explore the dynamics of the concept in a way that would feel authentic and satisfying to both myself and the reader.
This was also the first time I've started getting feedback on a story before I had even written the ending. I love the way this turned out, because it made the end a whole lot stronger than the first few versions I considered. And it was a unique (and stressful) challenge to not go back and change anything that had already been published.
I'm not sure this would work for anything much longer than Shadowloss, or for something more rigorously plotted. Setups and payoffs matter a lot, and it's a hallmark of bad writing to steer the story in directions that haven't been earned. Which is often what you see with old serial network TV shows in which the writers didn't have a clear sense of where the plot was going from episode to episode (looking at you, Lost).
Eventually, I plan to serialize a novel via the Dispatches. But I'm not sure I'll be able to do that unless the novel is basically done, with all the necessary plot beats baked in. Or at least finished to the point that any changes I'm inspired to make based on reader feedback can fit within the constraints of what has already been published. Charles Dickens is one of my favorite authors, but I'm not sure modern readers would let an author get away with what he did back when he was publishing his sprawling novels one chapter at a time. Those suckers were NOT tightly plotted. In our media-saturated culture, there is an expectation for storytelling to be a bit more efficient.
But who knows. Maybe that's all just noise. The only thing that really matters is the relationship between me and you. I'll write what and how I want to, and you'll like it or you won't. There really aren't any other rules.
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Last thing! If you read all of Shadowloss, and really liked it, I hope you'll share it with someone. I've made following along very easy. All you have to do is click on this big orange button:
So easy.
Oh, by the way, a new story starts next week. I know! Try to stay calm.
Jordan
Definitely excited for next week! And while it isn't fair for me to say this since I'm not the one who will have to do it, but I love the idea of a novel done in this exact same way, except you DO allow yourself to make edits along the way. Not in the original post, but in subsequent posts where you explain what was the old portion, what you are changing, why, and then we see how it goes collectively.
Maybe what I am saying is unclear, or unattractive to you, but either way I would love to see something like that
You could write out simple scenes or sequences of your novel to get the ball rolling. Sort of micro insights in the characters doing something boring in a setting that's interesting. I tried that once for a hot minute with some novel ideas and really enjoyed taking the microscopic look into the story and setting without having to do the serious heavy lifting of getting the plot and presentation all right.