Keeping the Creative Engine Warm
Why I’m writing short stories while deep in edits
I’m deep in edits right now on two different projects, which means most of my creative life lately has involved refining sentences instead of creating them.
Some days I spend hours wrestling with a paragraph to get it just right. I’ve done the big picture (developmental) edit. This is the line edit where I get to wrangle over a specific word. Because words matter. They paint a picture. One perfect word in the right moment can do magic.
But let’s not forget, editing is writing. Let me say that upfront because newer writers sometimes think revision is somehow less legitimate than drafting. It isn’t. The finished book lives or dies in revision.
But editing does not feel the same as writing. Editing and drafting use different parts of your brain.
Drafting feels like exploration, or discovery. You are driving into the fog with bad maps and too much confidence. Sometimes you find a quaint little restaurant you want to visit again. Sometimes you get a fender bender trying to merge onto a highway, but you meet someone new and unexpected in the process.
Editing feels more like I just went to the Ikea store and have a bunch of furniture to put together. It’s necessary work, but after a while it can start to feel like all you do is tighten bolts and try to figure out why you have left over parts.
And when I stay in edit mode too long, something strange happens. I stop feeling like a writer and start feeling like a repairman. I start to wonder if I will ever write something new again.
That’s part of why I wrote a short story a couple weeks ago. Not because I needed another project. God knows I do not need another project. My imagination already looks like a garage full of disassembled motorcycles. I wrote it because I needed to remember what forward motion felt like.
Short stories are wonderful for that.
They don’t require spreadsheets, continuity tracking, family trees, orbital mechanics, cattle drive logistics, or figuring out whether Chapter Fifty-two still works after you changed one conversation back in Chapter Four.
A short story lets you sit down and just go. You can follow an idea while it’s still hot, take risks. You can write something weird, sad, funny, experimental, or deeply personal without needing to sustain it for 120,000 words.
There’s also less pressure. A novel can start to feel like steering a cargo ship through a canal. Every adjustment has consequences three chapters later.
A short story is a dirt bike.
You can hit the throttle and see what happens.
And honestly, I think there’s something healthy about that during long edits. Because editing can make you cautious. You start analyzing every sentence. My creative brain starts wearing a tie and carrying a clipboard.
Short stories help me loosen back up again. They remind me that writing is still supposed to be fun.
That sounds obvious, but I think a lot of writers lose sight of it during revision. Especially when you are deep enough into a manuscript that you can no longer tell whether your voice has changed from the beginning scenes into the later ones. Do I need to start over? GAH!
The other thing short stories do is let me finish something.
It’s gratifying. Don’t dismiss that.
When you’ve been working on this same book for two years it can start to feel like you will never reach the finish line. You’re still working hard, maybe harder than ever, but psychologically it can feel like you’re stuck in place sanding the same board forever.
A short story gives you a complete creative cycle.
Idea. Draft. Revision. Done.
It can revitalize you. A reminder that stories can still arrive whole and alive. They still need to be edited too, but you are talking ten pages vs hundreds.
So right now, while these two bigger projects are spread across the operating table, I’m probably going to keep writing short fiction here and there, as creative maintenance. This is not procrastination, which I felt like I majored in during college.
Sometimes you need the tiny campfires between the long crossings. A reminder that you still know how to string words together in a new way.
My serial fiction is somewhat like what you describe here as short stories. Each episode, while it fits into the whole, is its own compact tale that takes about a week to reach Substack-publishable form. I'll worry about all the work of editing for publication later.