Quote Originally Posted by Hypnos View Post
It's mostly a matter of me convincing my lazy arse to actually go and put pen to paper (or hands to keyboard, as the case often is). I'm incredibly slack about actually making the transition from idea to finished product.

I'm also way too insecure and jumpy about my skill. I'd say that more than half of what I put down fails the acceptability test and gets backspaced in short order.
Ahaha. You're no worse than me, then. I have to seriously fight the urge to delete a good 90% of what I write. I've taken to forwarding it all to my English teacher from last year, so there's a hard copy out there, and deleting it will accomplish nothing.

I don't know, though. I'm rapidly realising that maybe I'm a bit too hasty to delete at times. And I'm sure you are too... I've gone back to things I hated, and haven't looked at in several months, and found myself wondering how I was even able to write them. As much as I'm not one to preach, I don't think it's ever wise to delete anything, no matter how awful it might seem at the time.

Quote Originally Posted by Hypnos View Post
You might be able to take advantage of that in writing a longer piece of work. Treat it like a connected set of tales rather than one big story. Link them together using a bit of literary smart-assery (say, by having the narrator actually be the protagonist relaying his stories to a third party long after they all took place). Lets you work in some character development without needing to dive into all the minor scenes.
Oh, yeah, I thought about trying something like that. It's an interesting idea, trying to write something that bridges the gap between short story collection and novel... One idea I had was to have a series of short stories focusing on tragic love. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, but something goes wrong in every one. In each case, the protagonists would be extremely similar, although perhaps in radically different settings. One could be a fantasy story, one could be Sci-Fi or whatever...

Eventually, as the collection of short stories goes on, the characters become more aware of their circumstances. They remember bits of what has gone before, and realise that they're entirely star-crossed, and have been doomed in every case. Gradually they begin to make contact with the writer of the stories that they're in, and begin to reason with and get the best of him. It turns out he's writing them into a doomed romance every single time out of spite, because they're literary incarnations he has created of his girlfriend, who left him, and the man that she left him for. Eventually, perhaps, they'll talk him into giving them a happy ending in their last story. Or maybe not. I don't really know yet. Something like that, though.