How to write short

What Hacker News says

1. mkycNov 2009
   I've re-written your story to read as I read it:

   In the year 3065 of The Future, people not only have all they need to be happy, but are indeed happy. Alas, uploads remain an imminent futurist dream.

   Enter a man, a normal man, a man filling in a 10x10 multiplication table. But that multiplication table held not the numbers 1-10, but pi, and i, and all sorts of other crazy future symbols. If you looked at the sheet, you would find that the correct answers were all there to all their decimal places - that's right, the man was a complete badass at math. And logic. And innovation. He was the type of guy who would ask dickish questions in university classes, which he finished when he was 13. At five months old he beat his mom at math, and his mom was pretty awesome.

   He read his idea journal, and it was like reading science fiction because he couldn't remember what he wrote at 2am last night. He lived in a research center, where he goofed off but was still awesome. He had a paranoia of doing math in the dark (e.g. at 2am) which he never could justify to others. So on this day of year 3065 of The Future, he went to bed.

   And had a nightmare about being surrounded by Big Black Machines (I kid you not). He thought he could use logic to get out, but ended up sweating a lot instead.

   You would think he would shower, but no, he just dressed and shaved. Usually, people shave and then dress, but not this man. He felt strange, like that time he thought he proved time travel (but it was just wormholes).

   He drove to the office where his realistic and probably conscious submissive fembot greeted him.

   He used Google and manually made a database of all the webpages he visited (grand technologies like "Google Chrome" were lost to the ages). As usual, he wasted most of the day reading 1000-year-old blog posts about how crappy DRM was.

   He got back to "work" though. Turns out, everyone except him stopped caring about the origins of life, the universe, and all that.

   "Hey babe, get me some coffee!" The smack on the ass that he gave his female robot coincided with the exclamation point.

   "It's bad for you, sir."

   "Don't care."

   She brought it.

   "What are you working on, sir?"

   "You damn well know what I'm working on based on my search queries, which I know you peek in on."

   "...any luck?"

   "Not on finding out the origin of the universe. But that's because I'm working on finding out what's real. People seem to..."

   "Ignore, sir?"

   "Stop trying to end my sentences, sugarbuns."

   "Sorry, sir. By the way, I was reading Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and..."

   And then it struck him. Maybe he was in the Matrix. A quote floated into his head, "we are someones dream but of whom we cannot know". He decided to get to work.

   The story is not good. It's actually pretty bad, but all early stories are bad, so don't worry. My advice is to read a lot of science fiction, and a lot about how to write, how to write SF, and how to write short stories. Pick something and focus on it. In this story, you don't even have anything to focus on - what theory of reality are you actually getting at, and why doesn't it permeate the story? Never describe how awesome things are.

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2. SwellJoeAug 2016
   I've read that, as well. Enjoyed it, but never think of it when I'm trying to name a great book for aspiring writers, and it really only covers an area (punctuation) that I don't find terribly challenging. I've been searching and reading reviews ever since reading omaranto's comment, and the market segment seems to be entirely cornered by Elements of Style. There's simply nothing in the same category, in terms of size, that is anywhere near as well-regarded as Elements. Even a book called How to Write Short is nearly three times as long.

   I've (tried to) read many bigger books about style, usage, and grammar, of course, but I really would like a book I can plow through just before I sit down to write something large. Like, the day before NaNoWriMo starts, or before I embark on an editing pass of my company's documentation, just read it all in one sitting as a refresher on how to write clearly and effectively. I've always used Strunk and White for this purpose. I don't want to be a grammar scholar, I just want to write better and more clearly, and I think a lot of folks are in that position; which likely explains the enduring popularity of Strunk and White, despite its critics.

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