Whatever your stance on blogging, there is a lot to be said for being able to master writing shorter form stories, regardless of genre. In writing blogs, articles, and short stories, a greater care and precision is required in telling a good story. Like poetry, every word needs to be there for a reason.

Short story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

Lynn Abbey

While blogging may have decreased in popularity in recent years with the advent of videos on platforms like Instagram and Tiktok, the value to practicing writers is everpresent. For one, anything that encourages regularity in the practice of writing is good. But a detail that is easy to overlook, especially to new writers, is the value in being able to shape a story with fewer words.

So many new writers aspire to sit down and craft their magnum opus in novel form. While this is absolutely encouraged, taking moments aside to write short stories or even nonfiction articles is akin to how one should train for a marathon. While ultimately the goal is to run that distance, taking days aside to focus on strength training individual body parts will better round out the athlete.

Writing short-form pieces helps train the “muscles” to sharpen focus and stay on track. Whether the blogs are about travel, daily life, parenthood, you name it, readers read them for the stories.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read blogs with a title saying one thing, the opening paragraph starting somewhere in vague relevance, and by the time I reached the end of the blog, the piece had meandered through four different subjects, completely straying from the point. When I look back at my own work early on when I first started blogging for the practice of it, I was guilty of that very thing as well. “Shiny object syndrome” might be forgivable with a novel when you can open up into subplots with supporting characters, but in blogs and articles and short stories, those distractions carry the reader away from the point and the heart of the story, and detract from the quality as a whole.

With regular writing on my equestrian nonfiction blog, I began to realize I had a terrible habit of running astray from the original ideas. Often, what started off as one idea would quickly turn into something else, and by the time I had exhausted myself, I had at least two different blog posts in one. Sometimes I would put the work in to divide the subjects and actually craft them into intact individual posts, but often, after rereading them, unless it was something I felt really passionate about, they forever sat in the drafts folder.

The best thing I ever did for my novel writing was write nonfiction articles for a magazine. I was lucky enough to have my queries approved, and when I set out to write the articles, I began to realize pretty darn quickly how easily I ran astray from the topic, and I remembered my bad blogging habits. Thankfully, with deadlines and the incentive of a paycheque, I had significantly more motivation to develop better self-discipline to figure out a more efficient way to write. I learned to use my query like an outline, and developed the self-discipline to stay on topic. Now it’s something I can do in an evening, where I can even anticipate an approximate word count in the draft, and then cut it down to fit the required word count.

Ruthlessness in Revision

Second to focus in importance to writing short pieces is the ruthlessness required to effectively self-edit. This could be a blog post all its own someday, and maybe I’ll get to that, but it’s relevance to the benefits of blogging and writing short stories and articles requires a mention here.

Until we can resist the shiny object syndrome in our drafts, significant portions of our writing are going to be cut. Unavoidably. Whether we like it or not. Like my early blogging, all those sidetracks need to go if they don’t serve the title topic. The nice thing about shorter form pieces though, is how easily those scraps can become a different story or post. We simply need to have enough perspective of our own work to recognize when it doesn’t serve the story or article in question, and then the self-discipline to make it into something all its own.

Practice, practice, practice

The more we write, the easier it gets, and perhaps one of the most advantageous qualities of short form works is that they are short form works. We could sit down and write a 3000 word story in a day if we have a clear vision in mind, so it’s easy to entertain the possibilities of how beneficial that practice is for our ability to conceive a story, see it through, then be able to edit it.

The more pieces we write, finish, edit, and actually finish, the better and stronger our writing practice will be.

You have to finish things – that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

Neil Gaiman