Stephen King said that “A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger" and it is. It's fleeting, it's mysterious and it leaves you both excited and satisfied. The best thing that you can do for your writing is to leave it up to interpretation. When I write, I don't want to tell you that the door is blue because I am sad- you can conclude this or you can conclude that the door is a symbol for something else entirely or maybe, just maybe...it's just a blue door.
           I don't want to draw you a map with a big red 'X' at the end, making sense of the entire journey, I want you, the reader, to travel a winding road and end up somewhere entirely unexpected. This 'somewhere' will not be mine. It will be elsewhere for everyone who reads it, that is the only intention or plan that goes into anything that I write. Ishmael Reed said that “No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” In short, write anything you want, anyway that you want to but make it real and honest and it will be good.

          Take a cue from Hemingway and sit at your typewriter (or Macbook...since it is 2013) and "bleed" until the world knows the truth about how you see things. Wake up at 3am and write, write drunk, write sad, write angry- never happy. Happy is full of euphemisms and falseties. Write at anytime that you will be completely honest- and do not edit out the truth in order to please anyone, not an editor or a reader that you don't even know. All efforts to do so will be like trying to extinguish a fire by blowing on it- futile- and untimately you will end up burning the whole thing down.

         Do not cower behind fluff or write happy endings, in fact, omit endings all together and leave your reader angry. They will never think more about a piece of literature then when it has not ended the way they want it to. Leave it ambiguous, kill the good guy, let the bad guy win, end the world as we (the readers) know it and they will love to hate it.

         Basically, do not let anyone tell you how or what to write because it will not be good, it will be lying. I will not tell you about rhyme or meter, punctuation or grammar because it is not important. There are no rules to writing, so write in capitals, breaks, run-ons and mispell anything you want if it makes your piece yours and it will be great.

by Hayley-Quinn McBride