April 2026 …
In recent months I have undertaken a new major creative writing project – writing a musical for the stage. Part of the reason was to help fulfil a longterm ambition of my wife, Monique, but it was also an opportunity for me to write in another genre. I noticed that a script for a musical had many similarities and parallels with writing general fiction – especially short stories.
One of the prominent similarities was the need to apply the “show, don’t tell” credo. A theatrical play or musical has the practical and unique constraint that the presentation of the story can be no longer than about two hours; after that the audience gets uncomfortable with sitting and watching. Therefore, the story has to move noticeably through the usual story phases; an inciting incident, rising tension, a crisis point of no return, a denouement, and a resolution. No second on stage can be wasted. All dialogue and actions have to reinforce the theme of the play and move the story to the end.
A musical is “complicated” by the need for songs. Good musicals use songs to extend the story – not merely to repeat those things that have just happened on stage. Many musicals require songs to be written during or after the story has been written or outlined. I was fortunate that Monique has produced an extensive catalogue of musical material in a variety of styles and themes, so it was relatively easy to identify songs to support an emerging story. A good friend, a professional actor and playwright, also pointed out that the preceding dialogue should include words and phrases that are lyrics in the forthcoming song – thereby, intimately connecting the song and dialogue. So, dialogue has a very focused function in a musical.
Short stories, especially flash fiction and micro-fiction, also have the requirement for focused action and dialogue. The extreme limitation of word count forces the author to identify the precise moments that form the story arc; calling on the reader’s imagination to deduce the events prior to the story, and to speculate what happens after. The careful use of punctuation and word order significantly influences the implied dialogue inflections and emotion for the reader.
I participate in micro-fiction competitions with word limits of just 250 words and 100 words; and composition time limits. In both types of competitions I find that I spend two to three times more effort on re-arranging these tiny bundles of words than is needed to create the original draft. Sometimes it requires using different words, at other times it means moving words or phrases to different places. Even at the point of pasting the story into the submission window, I am often still altering words.
This is an aspect I enjoy; the discovery that slight changes in words or phrases can dramatically change the mood and intensity of the story, making it even more readable and stimulating to the imagination. It allows me to write better stories in any form or genre. Challenging myself to write in diverse forms is a development opportunity; the quest to tell enough of a story through the use of sparse language and action; to be able to identify the theme of the current story and to progress from start to finish in the most interesting way. The job of the writer is to stimulate the reader’s imagination as much as possible with a sparse, focused use of words.