So much for the character generator

Last Tuesday at the workshop one of the established writers was giving away a pile of books (a trick I've never learned) because he was moving and wanted to reduce the amount of stuff he had to haul across town. I picked up a copy of a book that does more for character generator than my program ever did.

I've also discovered story treatments, something I really hadn't done before. Yes, I'd thought about my stories and plotted them all out, but I never managed to get the nub of an entire story down to a one page description. I wrote one for a friend who wanted to know what kind of story I was working on, and now I think it's a valuable tool. I'm writing treatments for all of the stories I haven't finished or are still in draft format.

Seems so simple, doesn't it? Of course I'd heard the advice that short story writers should get everything down to one paragraph, then embellish. I tend to work from the other end of the scale. Another writer described is as a noveling approach, rather than a short story approach. I'll write a very long text and then try to cut it down. Creating a story treatment helps with the focus on the essential story while I edit. I've had 6,000 word stories boil down to 2,000 words. The extreme case a friend told me about was a 35,000 word story down to 13,400. Unfortunately that version was hard to read.