The first story

Well, I finally finished the first of my stories. This one was about 5,000 words. I'm honestly a lot better then I thought I would be - I haven't written fiction in over 8 years. The story coheres pretty well, and the main character isn't flat. I do feel as though I didn't put very much of myself in the secondary characters, and so they're a lot more flat than I would've liked. True, it's tough to provide much characterization in a short story. However, characterization can be expressed in tiny gestures, quirks of clothing, odd word choices, and so forth, and I didn't really put many of those into this story. They would've given the two secondary characters a bit more life.

I'm happy with how the action scenes went, but I honestly don't know why I know how to write action at all. I never wrote any in middle school. My best guess is that I absorbed good action from writers like Robert Jordan and RA Salvatore. That explains why I know what good action looks like... but it doesn't really explain why good action would flow from my fingertips. I might just be deluding myself. Who knows.

I have a friend named Emily who's a technical writer, and right now, she's my hero. She brought up a number of things that I honestly didn't even think of - logical consistency to the story, foreshadowing, identifying the main conflicts, and so forth. One thing that also came to mind when I was reading her comments was that short stories are short enough to be expressed in a roughly three-act structure, and I didn't do any of that in this story. I need to.

I had a pretty good image of the world of the story in my mind, but I didn't flesh it out as fully as I should have. I think that's ultimately what's missing from this story in general - a lack of vivid imagination. I feel like I was so caught up in the difficulty of writing my first story that I was a little too cerebral about it - that, and I didn't write the first draft with a lack of self-consciousness, as I was taught. I tried, but the words just didn't flow. It came much easier in the action scenes and in the final scene, but not as easy as, say, it's coming right now.

Overall, I'm pretty happy.