I attended an informal session of the writers’ circle I belong to last night: Verulam Writers’ Circle.  I received some feedback on the first scene of my story Bird Talk. The feedback seemed to be positive, which was pleasing, and the other writers in the group seemed to be interested in the content as well as the style of the story.

What surprised me was that they thought I should turn it into a longer piece. Maybe a novella, as I had started out as if it was going to be a longer story, building up the characters, setting the scene etc.  I thought this was a fair point as it is quite a long story, over 8000 words.

I think I may do this, however, the story’s with a magazine at the moment, so I’ll wait to see what their feedback is first. Suggestions were that I could develop the social conflict/political side of the story, with the magical element running through it. Also some allusions could be made between medieval and modern times regarding the use of belief to control people and the hysteria of the witch-trial, like in the Crucible.

This does give me a dilemma about my writing strategy, as it seems I naturally want to write longer pieces, flesh out the characters, but I feel I only have time for short stories. So what to do?

The easier option maybe to actually try to get better at short stories, and this may need some further studies of good stories to see how I should be doing this.

UPDATE

“Bird Talk” has been published in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #33

“Bird Talk” is also now available to purchase as a separate story via Smashwordsand Amazon.