Journal Entry #13: Storytelling

Date: November 11, 2007
Time: 21:42

When I write, I don’t set out to write a book. I set out to tell a story. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that, but it always needs to be repeated. You see, a book is limited by the number of pages. A book, in order to be classified as such, has to have a minimum number of pages to a maximum number of pages.

A story, on the other hand, can be as long or as short as you like. I heard tell of an author, his name is Fredric Brown, and he wrote a book called “Martians, Go Home!” that was made into a not very good movie starring Randy Quaid. Fredric Brown was purported to have written what is considered the shortest horror story in the world. Here it is. "The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door."

Now I haven’t written anything as short as that, but I never wrote anything as long as “War and Peace” either. I did write something that, when turned into double-sided pages, adds up to about 125, which is about the size of what is referred to as a “novella”, the basic definition of which is “a story with a compact and pointed plot.”

I will admit one thing though; I am technically working on a book. I am writing a series of short stories featuring a detective who specializes in the paranormal. I mentioned him in an earlier post. I think that I’m setting my sights so high is one of the reasons I’m having trouble with one of the stories. It also might be that in a sense, I’m attempting to re-write the history of characters of fantasy. But then again, I’m my own worst critic.