I am inspired to write, any tips on how to start writing? Is there any standard proforma when it comes to writing stories? TIA
You might want to submit a separate thread with this as the question or topic you want explored. But Stephen King answers it best in my opinion: READ MUCH / WRITE MUCH. The first will educate your subconscious, the second will be partly practice in listening to your subconscious while writing.
____________________________________________
As for the comment that short stories and novels are two different art forms, I don't go along with that popular way of looking at things. The way I write I use exactly the same tools and models for stories. The short story FOR ME just has fewer scenes and characters and a simpler problem to solve or goal to reach.
For that matter a trilogy or longer work is exactly the same. That is my experience for just completing one: the three books you see in my sig.
This is my opinion. If you want to disagree, fine. That might even form the basis for a new thread in this forum. But I'm not interested in pursuing it.
I write what I feel compelled to write. Sometimes that is stuff I know is going nowhere and is destined only for my fragments folder.
I think of my fragfolder or shelved works as a treasure chest. Lots of time months or even years later I will discover something that turns into or inspires a completed successful work.
____________________________________________
Back to the original post. Each of us is different and are in different circumstances.
Do what feels right FOR YOU.
In my case short stories and novelettes come to me that are inspired by my novels. They might star a secondary character. Or a situation just lightly developed in a novel. I think of them as "fill in the cracks" works. Each is a complete story which can be enjoyed without having read anything else in the universe in which my other works exist. But they enrich the other works and are enriched by them.
They've turned out to bring a fair amount of money. I suspect partly because my readers get invested in the universe after reading one book and want to explore it further. Whatever, over the years as my output mounts my income continues to grow. Every book or shorter work I put out ignites new interest in the previously published works. Often I'll get emails asking when I will write a sequel to one of them.
That's what happened with
The Eons-Lost Orphan. I had no intention of writing a sequel. Then one reader kept asking me and to shut her up I wrote
The Orphan in Near-Space. Still more emails irritated me enough to write another sequel
Travels of the Orphan. I thought that would end the questions, as I discovered how to turn the third book into the end of a story arc I'd accidentally introduced in the first book.
Well, it worked. But recently I got emails about two other works: when will we see more X or Y? And they inspired me to work on both at the same time, switching between them as my inspiration flags on one.
Having fans, or maybe I should say READERS, is a two-edged sword!