7: The Dead Spot – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

The seventh story in my new collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, is just as long as it needs to be. Which is another way of saying it’s very short – just shy of a thousand words. I’ve mentioned before how inspiring I found ‘24 Rules for Writing Short Stories’ by Owen Booth. There’s plenty of good advice doused in snark, such as this: 9. All short stories should be 3,000 words long. When I read that it flipped a switch in my brain and I suddenly understood that if I wanted to write a 10,000 word story, that was fine, and if I wanted to write 350 words, that was also OK. Sure, it’s useful to have guidelines, but they shouldn’t interfere with the simple act of storytelling. ‘The Dead Spot’, it turned out, wanted to be about a thousand words long. Sure, I could have stretched it, but I like to keep my prose lean, and I hate reading stories that I can tell have been padded, or pulled too thin. With ghost stories especially the plot often comes after the central image, incident or…