The task of learning, rediscovering and writing

Today, I picked up a short story I wrote about four years ago. It was perhaps one of the first short stories I wrote. At the time, I didn't like it very much - in fact, I didn't like much of what I wrote - but there were people who did see something in it, even if it wasn't perfect, and their comments helped shape the story into something that was more ordered.

Re-visiting the story and the critiques it received, helped me to figure out that I was missing some steps in creating what is called the story: That it takes far more than a little creativity to craft and hone words into something that is readable and structured in a way that is admissible as a story. (In my rather humble opinion, Katherine Mansfield could do it, where Woolf couldn't).

What I learnt from looking over it from such a distance - four years is a long time, after all - is just how much I have continued to learn about what actually makes a successful story; how to structure and plot, and that even when writing shorts, the same basic principles of storycraft still apply. In other words, there is no short-cut to writing a story.

Now. The task at hand is to re-write a long-forgotten story using these newly discovered writing tools.