Four Hours, Forty Days, or Forever

A friend recently asked me how long it takes to write a short story.

Back on April 18th I posted the following status update on Facebook:

I'm toying with a short story in its early stages, but it's not going very well. As is my wont, I move the setting to Las Vegas and add some sex. Still not working. I ask Muse for help.

Muse shows up, for once, stumbles over the chair and nearly smashes into the computer. She's obviously been drinking.

"Batman," she says. "Batman Rules."

So now I'm halfway into this short story about a drunk in a Batman costume working security at a Las Vegas strip club, and a stripper named Robin...

F*cking Muse..


"Halfway" was a bit of an exaggeration, as after an hour of writing that evening I had maybe 200 words to show for my inspiration. I had a character, but I didn't know what he wanted, or what was going to happen to him next. You know, the tough stuff. So I did what I usually do with the tough stuff.

I ignored it, and went on to some other projects that were further along.

I didn't forget completely about my Batman, however. I kept thinking about the parallels between this character and a different character from another abandoned story fragment. This other character didn't have a drinking problem, but he used to work Security and now tended bar at a strip club. And one day I even added a few hundred more words to the original opening paragraph, describing what Las Vegas is like on Halloween, and then on yet another day I went back and cut most of those words when I realized that all that background had been fun to write, but it wasn't helping the story.

Then, of course, I gave up on the whole thing again.

Today, however, I participated in a virtual writing retreat at home while members of one of my writing groups gathered elsewhere. To kick off the day, I opened up four different barely-started documents, including "Batman in Vegas," intending to type away at whichever one first clicked.

That's when my Muse gave me the one last kick in the head I needed to put everything together. She'd been trying to tell me to merge the two strip club Security characters into one, but it took a over a month of conscious and subconscious rumination for that thought to finally surface. When the last pieces of the character's history came together, I immediately knew what he wanted, and then what was stopping him from getting it, which would become the plot, became obvious as well. The story came together in about four hours (it's a rather short short story, although too fat to be flash fiction at around 1,500 words), and once I had the ending I went back and rewrote the beginning and the middle a couple more times over the next couple of hours. And now I'm done, if by done I mean that "Batman and Raven In Las Vegas" (the latest version of the title, and yes that's Raven, not Robin) is ready for one or more of my writer's groups to critique.

So how long does it take to write a short story? Four hours? Six hours with the rewrites? Forty days? (Not to mention however long it takes to get from this stage to become truly polished and ready to submit.)

Or Forever, for those fragments that never resurface?

That'll teach her not to ask me questions about writing.

Thanks for Reading,

Stephen