I may have cracked it

After several false starts, some crucial staring vacantly at the wall and way too many mugs of redbush tea, I think I know how this SF shorty is going to end.

I'm crap at the twist in the tale. Looking back over my collected short stories, there's a distinct lack of forehead slapping 'doh!' moments. I tend more to tell the tale in such a way that the implications take a while to sink in. I like the idea of a story that stays with you, particularly if it makes you shudder at some later date when something that wasn't immediately apparent suddenly presents itself in the front of your mind. If this happens whilst you're standing in a queue at the supermarket, or sitting in the pub with your friends, or on the phone for an important business call at work, so much the better.

But when I read short stories, I much prefer the well-crafted kick-in-the-pants twisty ending; the double bluff of having your expectations sent in one direction, then being forced to backflip completely by a single sentence, a single fact, or better still a single word.

In theory I know how to do it. Sometimes I even set out intending to write that way. But almost always as I approach the end of the tale the revelation seems contrived, or the twist strikes me as all too predictable (which it is, to me, because I already know what it's going to be.) So I end up with my more usual technique of laying out several ideas and leaving it up to the reader to put them together in their heads before they have the lightbulb moment.

This latest shorty (which has no home, and may never see the light of day), follows the predictable pattern. I had what I thought was a really good idea, with a neat little twist to it. But in putting the thing down on paper, structuring it to read in a way that wasn't complete gibberish, I found that I had to spend more and more time on the set-up. Too much had to be explained and made plausible - the dreaded infodump - and this is perhaps what has been taunting me as I've struggled with it over the past week or so.

Now, as the end limps into view and I can see how that final sentence might work, I can see a way to rescue the whole thing, to divest it of most of its complexity. This has to be a good thing, since it's a bit of a plumper of a short story, weighing in at four and a half thousand words before it's even finished. If I can strip it to three and a half it might just make it as an amusing little distraction, but it should never have taken this long to write.

Perhaps if I'd planned it a bit more before plunging in, I'd have found it easier, but the main reason for writing it in the first place was to distract me from endless fantasy novel planning. And in this it has been a great success - the mental block that had me stuck at the end of Benfro book three has dissolved and I can begin to tie the whole series up.

Meantime I should probably spend a little time over at Tribe's flash fiction site, Flashing In The Gutters. working on those wriggly little shock-twist endings and tight seven-hundred word max limits.

Though I'm told it can become quite addictive.