A categorical hiatus

A few months ago I drafted a short fiction and was reasonably satisfied with it. It came to about 550 words. Meanwhile I’d identified a journal that I thought would be a good match. On revisiting their guidelines, I discovered a peculiar hiatus between their categories of ‘microfiction’ (max 250 words) and ‘short stories’ (min 1,000 words), with nothing in between. That’s a considerable swathe of people’s potential output that is being dismissed apparently randomly.

I’ll have more to say about categories in an upcoming post, but here I just want to describe the consequence of this discovery. I decided to revisit the story and, without padding or detracting from the overall read, see if there were any threads that could be developed.

To put this a different way – I was consciously and cautiously allowing an extraneous, non-artistic criterion to influence my work.

To my genuine surprise, it worked, in that I teased out and developed another dimension to the story which I was happy with. Now I’m wondering if I’ve been cured of my ‘compression obsession’ or whether, more probably, my approach to finalising a text has just been broadened in an unlikely way. The revised story has been submitted. If it’s declined I’ll have another look at it, which in turn could be another interesting experience.