Project Explanation

I am a writer at heart and at soul. I approach situations I can't understand by trying to write out my thoughts about them. School papers thrill me, and reading sustains me. 

Only here's the thing. I don't write actual fiction anymore - which is bad, considering that's what I want to do with my life: be a novelist. 

Every writer knows the guilt that ensues from knowing you should be writing and just plain not doing it. I keep telling myself that if I read instead, I'll become a better writer. Now, obviously the two skip hand in hand, but if I never writer, I'll never have written anything. Obvious, I know. 

During this vicious cycle, I stumbled across this quote on Pinterest one night: "Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working" - Pablo Picasso. This quote guilt tripped me into at least trying to free write. 

So I began freewriting about how bored I am with the characters in my current novel and how I want to write intricate, compelling stories like Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn when I realized that maybe short stories were my knight in shining armor. 

See, short stories are short! So that way if I get bored with the characters, I can twist up their ending and move on to a new batch. It's the perfect fix for an antsy writer. 

I then began a list of everything I know about short stories. And stopped after listing two items - both plot excerpts from the only two short stories I can remember. 

Clearly, I have a lot to learn. I plan to compliment my desire to write short stories by reading several in different genres to learn about their mechanics. 

Thus this project was born. I am going to write one shorter story for every longer story I read that inspires me - in the same genre. Talk about inspiration striking while working! Thanks Pablo. 

Now I might have to try writing one or two and just let them be horrible in order to get some practice because I feel like generally my stories are very tame. Now I want wild and unpredictable. 

I Googled "Best Short Stories" and found this list from litreactor.com written by Richard Thomas in 2012. I'm going to work my way through some of those and find others along the way to teach myself how to write a fantastic short story.

Now there's something I want to make you, the reader, aware of about this project. I read and write painfully slowly. And I am a perfectionist. And I'm starting my sophomore year of college next month. All of that is to say, this project will probably move at a snails pace and there will probably be only a very few posts. But any progress at all toward my dream of actually writing will make me happy. So, sit down and take a load of because you may have to wait awhile for my greatness to appear.