I’ve written several novels over the past 15 years, and I think two of them approach being good. I never wrote short stories until about a year ago, when my writers group started a biweekly challenge.

Now that I write one short story every two weeks, I’m starting to learn how to do it. It’s totally different from novel writing! I mean, some mechanical things cross over, like dialogue form and how to use tense.

But the story telling! Good god. It’s nothing like the same. At the beginning, all my short stories wanted to be mini-novels, which was exactly the wrong thing for them to be.

Learning how to tell a real short story that didn’t need to “grow up” has been a huge challenge.