So now that I’m one quarter year past The Great Short Story Experiment, I’ve had enough time to observe any aftereffects. And there have been some. Not as far as any of these getting published or buffing my resume, that’s a ways off still. But it did something to me. Not sure what, but it did something. Something that improved my writing (IMO, for all I know I’m going the other way).
I don’t know what it is, but it’s like it did something to my brain. Now when I revise the drafts of my novels that have been sitting for the past year, I can see a way to improve each sentence. And this is something that’s after the second draft. After that point, I’m really just looking for typos and punctuation because, before, there was nothing I had an inclination to change. But now I’m seeing “that doesn’t make sense”, “that doesn’t flow”, “that’s a long sentence”, “that’s ambiguous”, and I’ve been tidying it all up. I wouldn’t say I’m making every sentence sing, but I think readability is improving.
Or I could be arranging deck chairs on the Titanic for all I know. It’s not like anyone’s giving me feedback on the differences. But maybe doing nothing but composition for a year made my “writing radar” more sensitive? I don’t know. We’ll see if this yields anything conducive to getting published. If so, then I’ll definitely be changing my recommendation on whether or not this experiment worked.
