First Book Friday: Kristen Britain

[jimhines]

Welcome to First Day Friday! Click for submission guidelines and an index of previous authors.

Kristen Britain (LJ, Facebook) is a New York Times bestseller. Her latest book Blackveil came out in February of this year. The series even has its own wiki, which is pretty darn nifty. Kristen is another DAW author, meaning I suspect it pained her to

Comments

[snapes_angel]

The story is the major thing, yes (and good work, by the way!).

Writing short stories is good practice, even if longer ones are your venue of choice. Sometimes you need to write back stories for your characters, and short stories may work better for those scenarios then novels.

[jimhines]

Short stories are good practice for writing short stories. But the best practice for writing novels is, in my opinion, to write novels.

I spent years doing short stories because I thought that was what you were "supposed" to do. I did learn some things, but it wasn't until I started writing books that I began learning the rest of the skills I needed to write *good* books, if that makes sense?

I wonder how much sooner I would have sold my first book if I had started earlier.

[snapes_angel]

Short stories are good, when you have a simple (one) thing to tell. It's not easy for me to tell a short one (as evidenced by The Behemoth, for which I'm still working out the convoluted subplots and main plots). If you have one incident from your novel's protagonist, or even the antagonist, where you're trying to work uot the details and that particular back story (and mind, that's one singular incident), then a short story is the best format for a back story.

But yes, you really need to write books in order to learn...how to write books.

[kristenbritain]

Heh, my single incidents seem to explode, but I've managed to write a few shorts for anthologies...though they were on the longer end of the word count.

[snapes_angel]

That usually happens. The ...thing I'm working now, started as a flash fiction piece (it was in The Cosmic Unicorn #1, not sure if the publication still exists) published in 1993, and it's grown exponentially backwards from there, over at least three generations, and several different, yet interconnected...yea.

I was in the writer's workshop back on the old SFFW RT on GEnie, and had my outline up for critique, for one novel (unrelated to this one); several people looked at it and said there was too much in there for one novel, and it was at least a trilogy. Some of us just seem to have the "longer", rather than "shorter", story mentality.