Fiction Short Stories Perfect Love and Other Stories

April 12, 2012 - PRLog -- Peter Publish has just released a downloadable version on ‘Perfect Love & Other Stories’, a book of short stories. All the works are fiction. Some are love stories, some are funny. Some are science fiction and others are horrid, torrid and just about horror-ble. There is something for everyone. Most of the short stories are set in Malaysia, an interesting and exotic country, intoxicating for its friendliness.


The diminishing art form of short fiction
Is writing short fiction a diminishing art from? Very few publishers will consider short stories or short fiction for publication. Most publishers prefer long novels and this preference may be due to the fact that the potential revenue generated from a thick book of fiction is much higher than a thin book of short fictional stories.


Another reason could be due to the depth of the stories in short fiction is difficult to achieve. Or it could be due to the fact that there are too many authors submitting short stories and publishers could not justify the cost of screening through all of them.  Furthermore it is far easier for a large number of authors to produce similar short stories. Longer stories, will eventually, as the story progresses, have story lines and plots that will deviate from common thinking and appear unique in contents. Hence a successfully published and marketed short fiction book may meet with complaints of copyright infringements and copied themes even though it was the genuine original works of an author. The potential cost of litigation, from such a situation, may cause some publishers to steer away from publishing short fiction.


Furthermore, short fiction is normally written by young authors, in haste. Many of them have not matured in their style and writing skill. “It took me two years to write those 19 short stories.” says Dr. Peter Achutha “And it took me another 15 years to get them published.”


The difficulties of writing good fiction or good short stories
It is not easy to write good short fiction. The ideas can be quite common but the writing style needs to be refreshing and unique. Every author needs to develop his or her own unique writing style. It must be a style that is appealing to a large section of the general public; otherwise the book will not sell.


The author must be able to spin an interesting yarn in as few words as possible and yet not have a predictable story line. They need to keep the reader in suspense as to where the story is leading them.


The choice of appropriate words and phrases can bring about an emotional response in the reader and make them identify with the characters in the plot. As the plot thickens the reader must feel as if the story is happening to him.


“Actually, I don’t think you can be a good author if you had not lived an emotional roller coaster of a life.” Say Dr. Peter Achutha, the author, “You need to dig deep into your heart and extricate painful memories, funny incidents, and disappointing, frustrating and angry moments. For you to be able to do that you need to have experienced the entire emotional spectrum which means you probably had a difficult life. Furthermore, if you plan to write good fiction you need to spend a lot of time watching other people. Watching their mannerisms, their expressions and their habits. For this reason not all fiction is truly fictional. When you write about something that has deeply affected you then chances are that many of your readers would have had similar experiences and will identify with the characters in your short stories. And your work must be original. Your work will be original if you are writing from experience.”


Death to a rain drop is a clean window
Another difficulty that authors face is in compression. You can only describe so much in so few words. There comes a point when too few words make the short fiction look as if it lacks something. The art of writing good short fiction is in the way words and ideas are manipulated as in symbolism. They say a picture describes a thousand words but an idea can describe a thousand pictures. Good short stories build ideas.


“For example,” Dr. Peter Achutha continues “I have a statement in one of my short stories that says ‘Death to a raindrop is a clean window.’ These 8 words compresses a whole chapter of unsaid experiences. Within that story, that statement describes us as insignificant beings in the greater plans of the universe. It shows us that we are free in our youth but we eventually settle down and mingle with a few friends and relatives. It implies our lives are splattered across relationships when we intermingle and something of us lives on in others.”


The other technique you can use to steer your readers away from a potential predictable story line is to use flash backs. Just when the reader is about to predict what you have written next in your short stories, you introduce a flashback. This changes the scenes in your story. By changing scenes in your story the reader is taken away from a predictable story line. Changing scenes in your short fiction makes the reader feel as if he is reading something new.


The cardinal sin of short fiction
Letting your readers guess the ending of your short fiction is a Cardinal Sin. Lead them down the garden path. Take them for a ride, after all that is why they paid you for your short stories but never let them guess the ending of your short fiction.


Test out your short fiction
It is always a good idea to test out your short fiction on friends and relatives or just about anyone who is willing. You can get good feedback and sometimes observe interesting reactions to your short fiction. "I tested out my stories on friends and strangers before deciding to publish them. Actually, while I was field testing my short stories I found out that girls tended to cry but the guys tended to laugh at the stories." say Dr. Peter Achutha.


How to write good fiction
Do a lot of reading in your youth. Try to accumulate as much knowledge as possible. Preferably accumulate in depth knowledge because superficial knowledge may cause your stories to look very similar to everyone else’s.  Learn a skill or two unrelated to writing and practice them well. Become experts in those fields and try to earn good money from those skills because you may die broke trying to be an author. Live life, try to experience everything or die trying, as that will be better than dying broke. When you mature emotionally then write. It will probably be in your middle age when you do not have time to read anything. What do they say ‘Those who cannot read, write’.


This book of short fiction, ‘Perfect Love & Other Stories’ is available at http://drpetersnews.com/fiction-short-stories-download-bo....

# # #

Peter Publishing is a publishing company with expertise in small run printing and publishing their own books. They research many topics from baking bread to gold price movement for publication on their websites. They are involved in web hosting and web site development.