Adventures of a Writer

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash The new year is already a month old. It seems a little odd to talk about 'new year resolutions' when things are still kind of out of whack in the world. The long shadow of 2020 continues to chase us into the new year and one is still a bit wary of hoping that things will ultimately fall into place. After all, you don't wanna put any kind of hex on it, right? So, January passed by in a swirl of activity. Some planned, others unplanned. And still others totally unexpected.  On the planned front, I took out time to listen to the three-part Robert McKee webinar series on longform TV writing. McKee's insights into the growth of binge-TV and their evolution from the soaps and serials of yore are incisive. It's a masterclass for anyone who is interested in writing - and has many lessons for all fiction writers including novelists. My own writing has been going slow for the past couple of months; so I have spent whatever spare time I ha...

It's the first month of a spanking new year and what better way to welcome it than have the very lovely author Reet Singh talk about her reading and writing preferences. Better still, she decodes the difference between short stories, novellas and novels. Over to Reet... I love reading fiction, all genres (except horror) and all lengths, but of them I’m happiest reading shorter stories or novellas rather than novels. The real reason for my choice is not complicated to understand - it's because I am keen to move on to the next author and the next book so that I can sample a wider variety of fiction than if I were to read one long novel. As they say, there're so many authors and so little time. When it comes to writing fiction, however, I find that even if I plan out a short story, it tends to grow and grow, threatening to expand until it becomes at least a novella, if not a novel. Is the difference only in the word count?   Actually, no. Sure, a short story is usually less th...