I found this post on Freshly Pressed, and I honestly have to say that Tannarive Due has a wonderful point. No matter what our backgrounds, our genres, or our strengths, authors can learn a lot from writing short stories and novelettes, and even if there’s not always a lot of money to be made, you can get things much more valuable than cash.
Like many writers, I began learning my craft with short stories. By the time I finished my graduate English degree, I’d shifted my focus entirely from my unfinished novels to short stories. I needed to master beginning, middle and end.
Finally–a sale! In about 1990, I sold a short story called “Amusement” to a small magazine called Writers’ BBQ. I was ecstatic…and then I learned that the magazine went out of business. No publication for me. Although I continued to write short stories, they were repeatedly rejected. I did not publish a word of fiction until my first novel, The Between, in 1995. After that, my focus shifted back to novels. But I’d honed my craft on short stories first.
And I couldn’t walk away. When Gordon Van Gelder invited me to write for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I wrote a short story called “Patient Zero”…
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Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors 