Writing a Story a Week

This is from facebook:

I am going to start a discussion of writing a short story a week. How does one do it? Why does one do it?

Do you have the time to write a story a week? If you have kids, a day job, other responsibilities that take your time and energy, maybe not. If you have the free time, it's possible. 1000 words a day for seven days will get you a story. That's doable.

The problem is, how good is the story? And can you do this for 52 weeks? As an exercise, it sounds interesting and maybe worth doing. However, you are likely to write a lot of fiction with flat characters, a sketchy setting and a stereotyped plot. Not to mention a style that is bloated or slippery or both. Good fiction usually requires thinking and revision. Once in a long while I've written a story that seemed handed over by a muse. All I had to do was type and the story came out and was good. But this is very rare.

Why do it? To get yourself in the habit of writing consistently, and because it's practice.

It's a really good idea to NOT beat yourself up if you don't make production in a project like this. .

It strikes me as a saner project than NaNoWriMo. To write a 50,000 novel, which is not really a novel length, you have to do a steady 1,700 words for 30 days, and novels are a lot harder to plot than short stories.

I will add to all this that I am really bad at writing stories to order or as a project. But if I did it more, I might get a lot better.