Constructing the Short Story

I admit that I'm not much of a short, short story writer. I have little use for flash fiction which offers all of two or three hundred words to develop character, plot, problem, and solution. I have nearly as much difficulty trying to tell a tale in under 8,000 words.

Case in point, Against the Gathering Darkness--a weird western tale I wrote recently with an invitation to submit it for a weird west anthology for Pulpwork Press. The target word count was between 7,000 and 8,000 words.

I finished the story in something over 12,000 words. The editor of the anthology kicked it back and said to shorten it or he couldn't use it.

Unlike Stephen King I'm not an advocate of cutting out 1/3 of my manuscript during the editing process. I write lean stories with very little in the way of the extraneous. If I cut a third of the story it wouldn't hang together very well.

My solution? Submit Against the Gathering Darkness elsewhere and write another much shorter story featuring Lone Crow (and without Wyatt Earp this time, Wyatt's got lots of baggage and requires more words). With only 6,000 to 7,000 words to work with I've decided to cut my story structure to the bare bones:

1) Introduce characters and problem
2) Resolve Problem

In the process of a longer story there are usually a number of characters introduced throughout, and quite a few steps taken to resolve the problem of the story. Not so with the short story. In Wyrm over Diablo it's taken me about 3,000 words to introduce the characters and the problem. Now I've embarked on the second half of the story structure--resolving the problem.

I think I can do it in under 6,000 more words...er I mean in under 5,000 more words.