WRITING SHORT

If you were to click on the Mighty Tieton link to the right (and I heartily encourage you so to do), you will eventually find this guy - Ed Marquand, publishing supremo of Ed Marquand Books and all-round Thoroughly Good Thing. I receive this from Ed, on Friday: 

'Subject: I need a short story. Quick!

Jacky:

We are trying something totally cool here that involves a new way to publish short fiction. I am looking for short stories of no more than 750 words for an experimental form of publishing we are trying out at Marquand Books and Paper Hammer. Stories should be tightly written, wry, and amusing. For now, I am looking for pieces related to food or meals, beer, wine, or cocktails, romantic seduction, memory, or missed opportunity, but feel free to contribute others. If you are game send to edm@marquand.com

Got something????'

750 words, thinks I. Now that's a challenge, to begin with. I do not naturally pack lite, nor write short. Short is tough. Short takes time, and planning, and here I am with a deadline from a friend (which are always the worst sort), and I have neither words, time, nor plan - but the challenge is growing more irresistible by the minute.

I am going to have to Write Short. It's like being asked to rustle up supper for 6, at no notice, from whatever you have in the store cupboard. So what do I? What do I have in my head?

I have a lot of annoying stuff about tenders and compliance that has been overshadowing everything at work like a sunspot for the last weeks. I have Lent, and various thoughts on abstinence, and spontaneity, and impulse, and are these good things or are they bad, and the difference between what you're meant to do, and what you want to do, and how the latter always somehow finds a way, and what that says about the human spirit, and why are we hard-wired that way when it causes so much trouble, or does that in fact suggest there is a great organising principle here, and that what will happen was always going to anyway. And I have an apple. A very fine apple. A Braeburn. Big, crisp, cold, and as finely marbled as Kobe beef. 

You start to cook. I have a sense already, because of the apple, of a setting way, way back at the very beginning if things, but when all the questions above nonetheless already existed; so because of that, and the whole 750-words thing, I want something snappy as a format, and writing in the form of emails, and the setting, would contrast nicely. Then it begins to feel as if I've done enough with the email-thing; that 750 words (now growing up past 800) will seems much bigger if split in the middle - two acts, not just a sketch. So we have an email-format for the first half, and a conversation on mobile phones or walkie-talkies for the 2nd. Both completely anachronistic, but that's the point - the issues I want to explore in my now-900-words have always existed, regardless of medium, or indeed, of time or space. I have two main characters, and now they have their own voices, and points of view, and a big, big problem to solve. And now I'm writing against both deadline and word-limit, so this is like a race where you don't rush up to the finishing line; it rushes closer and closer to you, and it is interesting, this, it's a great challenge, terrific discipline, it's really put me in the zone, and I just have to tweak the ending, I just have to get another twist in there -

- and that's it. Finished. Done.

And when I know what Ed has in mind to do with it, with his blessing, I will post it here.