How do you see Fantasy short stories?

[2WayParadox]

I don't know about you, but my background in reading fantasy has been mostly large epics. The Wheel of Time for example is a good 10000 pages. That's a huge investment of time. Say you read 40 pages an hour at top speed, can be more or less (it's been a while since I checked how fast I read). It would still take 250 hours, or ten and a half days of uninterrupted full speed reading, to finish the whole thing.

So that's my background. That shaped my vision of fantasy.

My view of short stories is that you have a peculiar thought, situation, thought experiment or whatever and you turn that into a short story. I've written a few, one about a reporter interviewing people wanting to commit suicide without permission and another about a man who has been blinded and is kept in a cell, he is then joined by a woman who is deafened and they give each other strength. To me it's easy to see how a little seed like this can flow into a short story, it probably also doesn't have more potential than that.

Now, when I think about fantasy, I think about magic, I think about a quest, I think about worlds and stuff happening. I automatically think of novels.

So my question to those who write Fantasy short stories: How do you see them? What is the kind of idea you've turned into a fantasy short? Send it to me for a critique if you don't mind me saying whatever comes to mind. ([email protected])

Do you have an idea like 'wouldn't it be cool to see a young dwarf betting his friends he can shit on a dragon's head?' and then go on to write it? Is it no more than a normal short story idea, but then with fantasy elements?

Or do you use short stories to work out stuff from your world in progress? Like magic spells, religion stuff, races, developing a view on a culture?

I'm here to learn, so show me what you've got to offer.

 

[Incanus]

The solution seems obvious to me: read a boatload of professionally published fantasy short stories!

I think I've read a good 100-200 of them over the last few months, including a few novellas and prose poems. They can sometimes spark the type of ideas you mentioned. Something like: "Wow, that was awesome. If I change x to y, and make it this kind of character instead of that, and use this kind of setting, then it could be a brand new, cool story." Or something like that. Good old Lord Dunsany hit me with something rather like this just a few days ago, and I ended up writing my first prose poem ever.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I've seen two common approaches to fantasy shorts:

1): Same setting, new spin. This kind of story takes for granted that you're familiar with a preexisting fantasy setting (typically medieval fantasy, but occasionally something like gaslamp fantasy.) That way, it doesn't need to explain the old tropes--it can just use them and take them in a new direction. This works particularly well for comedy and metafiction. (For instance, why DO female warriors in fantasy wear such skimpy armor?)

2): Magical realism, or at least a magical realist approach. There's no system behind magic, and no complicated explanation for it--it's just an element like any other, and the characters take it for granted. Again, you can skip straight to the story without any setup.

Note that the latter also fits pretty well with horror, since you can leave the terror mostly unexplained and let the reader fill in the blanks.

 

[Svrtnsse]

1): Same setting, new spin. This kind of story takes for granted that you're familiar with a preexisting fantasy setting (typically medieval fantasy, but occasionally something like gaslamp fantasy.) That way, it doesn't need to explain the old tropes--it can just use them and take them in a new direction. This works particularly well for comedy and metafiction. (For instance, why DO female warriors in fantasy wear such skimpy armor?)

I very much want to do something like this once I'm done with my current WIP. I'd like to put together a series of short stories about different people, but taking place at around the same time and in roughly the same location (city) and in that way try to lay down the foundation for another future novel further down the line.

 

[Caged Maiden]

Here's my take on short stories: Get in, go hard, and entertain the crap out of a reader in a short time.

Short stories don't have the luxury epic novels do. They are not a place to set up meandering descriptions, overly-long prose, or building character arcs. They are a short glimpse into a situation and into a character and because of their short length, each word you select has to do double duty. Word choice and writing style must work overtime to not only form the image int he reader's mind of what the setting looks like, but who the character is who is making the observation.

I think short stories are an ideal way to build writing skills because they tend to work as a crash course on great writing. They make you really think about how best to do it all in a short time. You need a character who invites a reader right into his situation and a setting that immerses a reader in a world from the get-go. No dilly-dally, just the cold grip of writerly professionalism, grabbing the reader and hauling them in.
Also, you get to work on mastering openings and conclusions, often the places newer writers ultimately fail to impress readers and agents because of a certain amount of "wheel-spinning" almost all newer writers suffer from.