Thursday, September 6

Don't Use The Shotgun Approach:
More on Short-Shorts

Dr. Bailey started class today by apologizing for “roughing us up” on Tuesday, for acting like one of his son’s football coaches, the big guys who bark and shout so they can “make men” out of ten-year-olds. Then like any good coach would, Dr. Bailey launched into something like a pep talk to keep us from dwelling on our defeats and get us focused for the big game coming up (that is, the next short-short he assigned us for Tuesday).

“There is no reality on the page,”
Dr. Bailey began. “It’s all the trick of reality. It’s all the dream of a reality.” As writers, he explained, we can’t assume a reality exists for our stories. We can’t have vague details and generic people in our stories and assume the reader will fill in all the blanks. We have to carefully construct a world on the page, and these worlds are built from strong specific details.

“You can’t make it up!” Dr. Bailey is always saying.

Then he grabbed a piece of chalk and scribbled a shotgun and a goose on the board. In large capital letters above the barrel he wrote “KA-POW!” and then he peppered the board with shot that killed his poorly drawn goose. This was not how a short-short should work, Dr. Bailey explained.

Then below the shotgun, he drew a rifle firing into a bull’s-eye. That was how a short-short should work, he said, like a bullet. Most of us were having trouble with the short-shorts because we were employing the shotgun approach, firing all over hoping to bag all sorts of ideas. A short-short should be like a bullet shot out of a rifle, tightly focused on one target, one idea.