Writing short stories for school...Not so short.

For my English classes we normally have to write a short story some where along the road. I find it really funny because in 9th grade we had to write two short stories. Well, my stories weren't so short. My first one was about 15 pages, and the second one about 30. I asked my english teacher if there was a limit to how many pages there was and she said no. When I showed them to her, she had the funnest look on her face. XD Normally for school the stories are like 2-3 pages, but I find it impossible to write a good story with just that many pages.

So, who else is like that for school stories. You write way more then you have too.

Well I think it is a lot harder to write a really short story. That's why at my school they set words limits so you really have to refine and prune your story. Otherwise I would definatley go on and on .

I'm the opposite - for me, a story has to be either a novel or 2-3 pages long.

My assignments always, always have page limits on them! It really irks me but then again, I'm sure my teachers (I'm homeschooled so my work gets sent in the mail) doesn't want a whole lot to read and go through. Although, I have a tendency to go slightly over the limit. I never go too short ^_^

Usually, later on, I add those short stories into my novels. It works.

Hm... my teacher says only one or two pages at the most. *cries* I have to do at least five or six, especially since he's the one that gives all these good writing prompts.

I remember last year I wrote twenty nine page stories for our assignments. On my report card, the teacher sure mentioned it. "Chloe is an amazing writer for her age, but she takes too many risks. If she writes that much on her next story, she might not have enough time to edit it."

Like that would happen. I wrote all my free time to get those stories done. And that was when I typed at about twenty words per minute, too.

And, so far, sadly, this year we haven't done any short story assignments

Haha.
We always have a page minimum limit. =P
2-3 pages minimum.
Mine always ends up way more than that, of course...

Especially when given an awesome writing prompt.

I remember last year in my English Composition class, my teacher had us write short stories with a word limit, then we brought them into class, we did all of this stuff to them and then he said we had to cut out like 20% of all of the words. (I don't remember if it was that amount exactly, but you get the idea). So we all groaned because a lot of people already had to cut out a lot of words to make their story under the word limit. It was so hard, but then you really knew which words and phrases were the most important to the story and any of those other words were taken out.

In my English classes we're usually supposed to write 150 to 200 words. But how you make a story so short? To me it's really ridiculous. I always go way past the limit
I remember when we had to write the first story of the year, the teacher said "I had a lot of creativity" in front of all the students (so embarrassing...), but that my only mistake was with the 200 words. I had written like 500, lol.

Once we had to write a short story, five pages maximum. I tried to get around this by using font size 8 and single spacing. I wrote four pages like that and realized I was still on exposition, so I abandoned that story and plagiarized my sister instead (with her permission).

Once, in my English class, we had to write a 3 page short story so most of mine was like, the girl's thoughts or whatever and the entire story really only panned out over the course of like 25 minutes. But it was a good story. Well, we had to give a summary to the class and everyone had their stories all drawn out and everything. It really confused me how you could get the plot of getting ready for a party, going, getting in a fight then ending up in jail in three short stories. Then, when we read all of the papers, I saw why. Most people had these really...bad...stories. But I can't do a short story in three pages! I need at least 10-15 for a short, 80-150 for a 'long' and my novels could sometimes be about 200-300.

Uggh I get limits too! I hate them! I got a project for math to research a "math geek" and I did Fionacci and it had to be 250 words and I wound up with 393 and I spend hours trimming it down to 320 which my math teacher said was ok.

Its so annoying!

Once I had to do a 2 page short story for a "Youth Literature Day" program that I go to. It turned out to be 14 500 words long. As much as I tried, I couldn't reduce the font enough to get it into 2 pages.

Ohh! This was my problem at school and when I took creative writing courses in college. I could never really write a short story. A novella maybe, but never a short story. It took me a lot of work to write "17 minutes" that was only 5 or 6 pages long.

Darn, I don't get assignments at all like these in my school. D:

Except for that one time though where we had to make a personal chapter 11 of Animal Farm, and a word limit of 800 words(EGAD!). My work turned out to be a complete mess when I revised it, yet I still had to pass if I wanted a grade. =/