Month: February 2021

Waiting for Mister Inspiration

Short stories have never been my favorite form of writing. I always found them difficult to compose because I tend toward the “long-winded” end of the rainbow. Cutting the tale off at a preordained word count is difficult sometimes.

Take, for example, my very first dive into creative writing. It was in the mid-1980s. My (then) husband (now ex- and good riddance) and I developed an affinity for table-top role-playing games. Specifically, we got hooked on playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, or AD&D. Along with a few other family friends, we had a gaming group that met regularly.

As part of creating our AD&D gaming world, we all decided to write up a background biography on our main character. It didn’t have to be anything fancy or in-depth; a couple of paragraphs, maybe a page. Just some background detail to add depth to the character each member played.

My character’s background biography concluded after approximately five hundred pages, double spaced with one-inch margins. “Long-winded” is putting it mildly.

This brings me to my current predicament. Since I began freelance writing in 2015, I’ve trained myself to limit my writing word count. When a client orders webpage content with a thousand-word limit, they don’t want five hundred pages. And they certainly aren’t going to pay for that much. So, I’ve finally conquered the demon from my youth that insisted a story wasn’t complete until it topped at least a hundred thousand words.

I can write flash fiction with a five-hundred-word limit or a short story with a thousand-word limit. I’ve entered a couple of my short works in contests on writer review and critique websites to which I’m a member. And I’ve won a couple of them! (Grab that cash prize and head to the Wal-Mart!  Woo-hoo!)

Now another contest has just opened up, one I very much want to enter. And while I’ve mastered the art of tailoring the story to fit the word limit, the Muse still gets a little bitchy sometimes and refuses to cooperate. It seems Lady Muse still prefers the novel-length tale and really isn’t interested in what I want.

So, here I sit, impatiently waiting for Mister Inspiration to illuminate a lightbulb above my head. The contest is for a short story featuring a mystical or magical creature—it can be an established, well-known creature like a dragon or unicorn or a beast spawned in the writer’s imagination. Length is one- to three-thousand words. How much of that count do I have put to virtual paper at this point? Exactly zero. Nada. Not a single word. Not so much as the first word of a title.

I intended to pound out a story for the contest when I sat down at my laptop this morning. This blog entry is the result. Not exactly contest material.

A Muse is a great thing. One with an attitude can be a pain in the ass at times.

Why I attracted a Muse with an attitude is beyond me…

©Bobbie R. Byrd, February 2021

Photo by Voicu Dragomir on Unsplash