Once again I’m renewing my efforts to narrow focus and simplify creatively. Somehow over the past year or so I’ve gone from working on just a few short stories at a time to as many as twelve or fifteen. While I think it’s OK to have a folder (real or virtual) with lots of ideas in it that sit there and ripen until they’re ready to work on, and maybe you occasionally add a little note to the folder, I think it’s a mistake to have a very large number of active projects you’re working on at once.

What I’ve found is that I’d work hard for several weeks on a given project, such as code name TF, then shift to something else, and by the time I dabbled a little bit in other items in my folder, three or six months might pass before I returned to TF again. By that time some of the passion for the project might be lost, or whatever impetus or motivation got me started on it in the first place might be dulled a little. I’d go back around to TF and spend a bunch of time trying to figure out what I was doing there in the first place, what the story needed, and how to go about these changes. If I’d just stuck with it and made more substantial progress, I would have been able to get this story to a place where it was almost ready to be finished, and all I would have lost was a bunch of dabbling in projects that probably won’t end up going anywhere for a long time, anyway.

The obvious answer might be, “Why not just work on one thing at a time, then?” I could do that, and I do sort of envy those writers who get to (or are able to) focus closely on one thing at a time. But I find that my solution to writer’s block or loss of motivation is simply to switch gears. If I’m stuck on project AIR, I just switch over and work on FFS for a while instead. By the time I’m done with that, maybe (usually) I’ll find I’m un-stuck on AIR. This kind of switching around has worked well for me within reason. The problem is when I start to get too ambitious about adding more projects to the “active” file. Like a cook who does perfectly well preparing a main dish and a side dish simultaneously, but who would totally fall apart trying to multi-task the cooking an entire buffet worth of food, I just need to narrow my focus. I’m back to switching between no more than three stories, and I’ll devote at least 90% of my time to those. When one of them is finished and sent out into the world, I can move another one into its slot. What little time I don’t devote to those three will be spent making sure that some of my “back burner” ideas are developing into something substantial enough to develop when their time comes.

As a writer, I’m stuck in that in-between place. No, not that place between “beginner” and “published.” That’s a hurdle I finally cleared, and it was a great relief to achieve my first publication a few months back.

No, I’ve made it to another kind of “stuck.” I’ve had something published, so I know it’s not the case that everything I write is rubbish, and everyone can see it but me. I’ve participated in workshops, intensives, and critique groups, had my work read by everyone from beginners, to peers at roughly my own level, to more established authors. Along the way I’ve received suggestions, some of which I’ve found valuable, some of it less so. The thing is, the majority of the critique you receive, even when it comes from someone in a position of authority, amounts to basically, “if I was writing this, I would’ve done some things differently.”

It would be so much easier if someone said, for example, “Your prose is top-notch in terms of the style and flavor of your voice. You just need to square away your handling of plot, get better at structure, and you’ll be all set.” Or maybe just, “Your stories are great in terms of character and dialog, and you just need to amp up the drama and make things more compelling.”

The thing is, you rarely get “big picture” critiques like that. Instead, you get specific nuts and bolts stuff like, “You used the word ‘disintegrate’ three times in a single paragraph here. Try to change one or two of them to different words.” Or else, clarification stuff like, “At the top of page 3 when she tells him to come inside and go to sleep, it seemed like she was angrier all of a sudden than before, and I didn’t get why.”

I understand that magazine editors don’t have time to respond to submissions, even the ones that are “almost there.” A writer has to sort of read between the lines even to figure out that they’re “almost there,” when they start getting rejected by head editors instead of slush readers. It leaves me in a frustrating place, though. It’s not that I’m deluded into thinking I can’t get better. I’m still working at it, writing every day, and I have no doubt I’ll be better in six months than I am now.

There’s this sense that if I had a better idea specifically what I need to work on, I could get where I’m going a little more directly. I can see how people in this situation get drawn into MFA programs. I feel like I could use a part-time “coach,” or someone to give a wide-angle appraisal of where I’m at, and what I should work on.

One thing I’ve done recently is purchase a “critique service” from a somewhat established writer, editor and blogger. He’ll read a certain number of pages of short story manuscript and offer feedback. I’m not certain what to expect, but I hope this will result in a more tailored response than what I received in the other group workshops I’ve done. You know, more than just line edits, and a vague “good job” at the end. I’ve seen several writers and editors offer this kind of service before, but this is the first time I’ve tried it. We’ll see.

Ideally, a writer should make their story as long or as short as it needs to be, but practically, market realities nudge us toward certain lengths. Sure, if you’re Neal Gaiman you have no problem finding a home for a story, a novel, or a poem. Stephen King could write an 1,100 page novel and nobody would say, “Sorry Steve, maybe you wanna trim this a bit.” We know this, because his last novel was 1,100 pages and plenty of people bought it. I did.

If you’re a novelist without an existing mega-audience, though, you shoot for between 80,000 and 110,000 words, depending on genre or publisher preference.

When it comes to short fiction it may be tempting to look at all the different lengths of stories being published — everything from 600 word flash pieces to 40,000 word novellas — and conclude there’s a market for any length you want to write.

It’s true that markets exist for longer stories, but there are only a few, and they tend to publish almost exclusively established professionals. If there are 30 places I might normally consider sending a story, and only 5 of those takes stories over 6,000 words (and those 5 also have much longer odds against less established writers), then a writer in my situation has to recognize that the likelihood of getting a story published is much, much higher if the story is on the shorter side. Many more markets are available, including most of the ones that give emerging writers a realistic shot.

When you look at it this way in terms of pure probabilities, it makes sense that someone like me should write a lot of 3,000 and 4,000 words stories, because pretty much ALL magazines, webzines, anthologies and e-zines take that length. The difficulty with that is that sometimes a story wants and deserves to be longer than that. What do I do with an idea that would be best told in 8,000 to 10,000 words? Strip it down like crazy, go super-minimal and try to make it into a 5,000 word piece? That’s probably what I’d do, yeah. But I don’t like it.

There has been a nice side benefit to this need to cut words, which is that my natural over-writing style is something I’ve had to recognize and learn to overcome. No more spending 10,000 words on an idea that can be done just as well in half that. But on the flip side, I’d love to be able to stretch out a little with some of my story ideas. This morning I gave my wife a 7,500 word rough draft to read, and I really don’t think there’s a lot to cut out. Yet if I go down the list, I’ll find that 9 out of 10 of the places I’d consider sending a story won’t take something that long.

Really the nicest thing about reaching that next level (OK, let’s face facts… it’s more than one level up) of receiving anthology invites, and getting stories into places like F&SF or Asimov’s or Subterranean will be not only the exposure and the sense of having “made it,” but the freedom to stretch out a little.