Like my colleagues on this blog, I believe it’s vital to give our work time and space to breathe before undertaking the last-last-last-absolute-last draft. I might think the story’s done, convince myself I’ve married strong characters to a clever plot and captured it all with compelling prose.

But experience has taught me that word choice, sentence cadence and plot development all benefit from simmering on the back burner for a good long while. A day or a week or a month later, depending on whether I have a deadline, I often return to a story I felt sure needed only a final polish and find a dozen creative cowlicks in need of taming.

I’ve been thinking about this recently while working on a couple of short stories, a challenge quite different from writing a novel. To be blunt, there’s no time to fart around when writing short story. In five or six thousand words characters need to be introduced, the plot must unfold, tension has to build, the climax needs to be reached, and loose ends have to be tied up.

I’ve been noodling with both stories for a while, and I believe it’s time they find home outside of my laptop. So I’ve been busy massaging sentences and evaluating synonyms, moving clauses around, cutting sentences and then paragraphs, reorganizing and then un-reorganizing. A few days ago, still fretting about wordiness, I pulled several short story collections off my shelves and looked for examples of writers I admire using relatively few words to make their stories sing. Here’s some of the inspiration I found:

♦  My friend Carolyn Marie Wilkins writes with beautiful rhythm, which makes sense because she’s also a jazz musician who teaches at Berklee College of Music in Boston. In her 2023 short story The Moon and Stars, published in Wolfsbane, she brings the reader right into the music hall where a cocksure young trumpet player is showing off:

 Jet’s composition had a twisting, looping melody and intense, unexpected harmonies, It was meant to be performed at a fiendishly difficult tempo. Two minutes into the tune, the drummer broke a sweat, his round face twisted in concentration. The tiny Chinese pianist hunched over her instrument, drawing forth massive clusters of sound that punctuated Jet’s frantic improvisation in all the right places. After a lengthy and acrobatic solo, the musical equivalent of a man turning summersaults on a balance beam, Jet blew a final high C.

♦  Joseph S. Walker is an award-winning short story writer (the Bill Crider Prize for Short Fiction at Bouchercon, the Al Blanchard Award at New England Crime Bake (twice!) who’s also been nominated for an Edgar and a Derringer. In his 2022 story Crime Scene, first published in Malice in Dallas and included in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023, he writes a memorable, nuanced description of a hit man in seven smooth sentences. After listing his many skills—blowing up safes, hacking alarm systems, kidnapping people, he says of his character Adler:

Eventually word got around that he didn’t mind eliminating people under the right circumstances, and Lamar started steering hits his way. By his count, Adler had done thirty-four. If he thought hard, he could remember all their names. Lately he’d been remembering them a lot, drifting around on the lake. It was always easiest to assume they all deserved what was coming. It was starting to bother him that for some of them, he didn’t know. He didn’t know why someone in their lives wanted the hammer dropped.

♦  MCW’s own Gabriela Stiteler, published in various anthologies and magazines in the past few years, is one of my favorite short story writers. Her 2024 story Two Hours West of Nowhere, originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, was nominated for the prestigious Robert L. Fish Award and got an Other Distinguished Fiction shout-out in Best American Mystery and Suspense.

I admire Gabi’s stilletto-sharp observations about her characters and their worlds. In her 2023 story A Simple, Hard Truth, published in Wolfsbane, she introduces a high school English teacher who worries about a quiet, bright student named Amy who’s stopped coming to school after asking a question in class that all but screamed she’s in crisis. It’s nearly graduation time, and the teacher’s determined to make sure Amy gets the diploma for which she’d worked so hard. She tracks down the girl at her home, described in this painful, poignant passage:

It was that misguided optimism that had me showing up at Amy’s address one Saturday morning in early spring, when the crocuses were starting to pop, golf ball-sized bursts of purple and white. Her trailer was robin’s egg blue and overlooked the on-ramp to 95 going north, The yard was half marsh and half brown patchy grass. The driveway was all mud and the roof was covered in a thin coat of moss . . . The mom, who might have been named Donna, was sitting on a rusted metal glider with a pressed-glass ashtray on her knee. She was wearing a faded yellow terry cloth bathrobe and a menthol cigarette was hanging out of her mouth . . . In that bright morning light she was almost beautiful, faded and soft at the edges like the petals of a daffodil.

For those looking for inspiration when revising and polishing your work, you’d be well-served to look for inspiration in gems like these.

Brenda Buchanan sets her work in and around Portland. Her three-book Joe Gale series features a contemporary newspaper reporter with old-school style who covers the courts and crime beat at the fictional Portland Daily Chronicle. Her short story, Means, Motive, and Opportunity, was in the 2021 anthology Bloodroot and received an honorable mention in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. Her 2023 story Assumptions Can Get You Killed appeared in Wolfsbane