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A sure-fire trick for generating better ideas
Between my husband and I, we see a lot of short fiction. He runs a quarterly magazine. So do I. At this time, we both also have more open-call types anthologies, with each of us doing two per year. That means we’re both reading short stories for six anthologies, per year. Each of those anthologies generally run between 50–70K words.
Fortunately, I love short fiction. I really enjoy reading the stories of the professional writers I’m working with. It means that I rarely, if ever, have a story that I would consider bad. All the stories I get are serviceable. Some are not to my taste, but that doesn’t make them bad. It just means that particular story, while it works, doesn’t work for me.
One of the phrases that I learned a long time ago, that I taught my husband, and that we now use as shorthand is the phrase, “Low hanging fruit.”
It means a story that uses the most conventional of tropes, the first idea that everyone has at the mention of a particular theme, and then they didn’t change the trope or make it personal.
They grabbed for the low hanging fruit on the tree, instead of reaching for something more creative or unique.
An example. I have an anthology that I’d love to do, but haven’t, due to the potential for low hanging fruit.
