Short stories are an interesting way to deliver a narrative experience in a smaller form. Because of how short a short story is, it can be a bit difficult to give the full experience of characterization, plot development, world building, and more. However, when a writer does a short story the right way, it can be an amazing experience to read. So, here’s how to write a short story.
What is a Short Story?
A short story is a smaller, compact narrative that takes place over 1,000 to 10,000 words, but typically 10,000 words is a very high end of the spectrum. A short story does not have the level of extensive narrative elements that a standard novel would, since a standard novel tends to fall around 80,000 words. Short stories tend to focus more on a single, linear plot with a few key characters or even one single character. To write a short story requires a lot of precision and writing in a concise manner to deliver the entire story in a brief number of pages.
How to Write a Short Story?
Come Up With an Idea
The first thing you want to do before you start writing the short story is to come up with an idea for what you want your story to revolve around. Coming up with ideas doesn’t have to be complicated, as you can write a short story about practically anything.
For instance, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is about a town that has an annual lottery ritual where they purge bad omens and try to bring about a good harvest. This is a simple premise that can spark a really interesting story behind it.
I personally wrote a short story when I was younger about an heir to a large company who discards his father in search of more money, and as his profits went up, his father’s health declined until the father died at the end of the story, leading to the company stocks to go down (this is a trend usually when a CEO dies). The main character realizes that he has been swayed by The Will of Greed, a concept that personifies the idea of greed.
Try to think of what you want your story to be about and pick a topic that you personally have some interest in.
Come Up With Characters
Most short stories revolve around a very small number of characters and the main characters are usually one or two people max. These characters get the most development across the short story and need to be developed and written well if you want to leave a lasting impact on readers.
If you want to learn how to develop memorable characters, then check out this post for more help!
Create a Setting
The setting of your story is likely going to be only one location or a very small number of locations, since you don’t really have too many words to work with. You need to achieve as much impact as possible with your setting over the course of the story. Using vivid descriptions and relying on invoking the senses can help.
As you write your story, you’ll want to incorporate the setting and create the scene because you need to use as much detail as possible to create the maximum amount of energy around the scene and to help readers actually visualize what’s going on.
Outline Your Plot
Even if you’re writing just a short story, you need to think about the overall plot and what the major event will be in your short story. You should outline a short story just like you would a standard novel, but it will require less intensive focus on many subplots and those kinds of things.
When you go to outline your plot, try to think of things in the context of the three-act structure, which is likely the one you already know and remember from school. If you need a quick refresher though, you should check out this post where I talk about the three-act plot structure and how to use it to outline your own plot.
Start Strong
When it comes to novels, I’ve mentioned that the first page is basically the most important one because it’s basically like the hook of your entire book. If you can’t get readers to flip past the first page, you’ll have a tough time selling the rest of the story to them. The same thing applies to a short story too, but you have basically one line to achieve the same thing. You want to start the readers off with an interesting piece of dialogue, a description, a line, or some sort of action.
Here is the first line from Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Veldt: “George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.”
Here is the first line from The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.”
As we can see, these two lines are interesting and hook you into the story immediately. In Bradbury’s case, we are placed in the middle of a scene of dialogue. We also get a sense that something is wrong, because it seems like someone is pleading with a man named George to look at a nursery. From this, we can assume that something is wrong with the nursery, which entices us to check out what exactly the problem is.
For Gilman’s story, we are told that the narrator and a man named John are regular people and it’s rare for them to find ancestral halls for the summer. From this, we want to understand who the narrator is, the relation to John, and why ordinary people don’t secure ancestral halls. The first line is important and makes you want to keep reading. That’s why it’s so significant to the overall story.
Determine Your Theme
The next thing you want to do is try and figure out what your theme is going to be for your short story. Chances are, if you’ve already got an idea, you already have some concept of what your theme is going to be about as well.
Deciding what your theme is ultimately depends on you as a person, what you value, and what you’re trying to convey to readers with your story. In the short story I wrote a few years ago, the theme was clearly the idea of greed and its ability to corrupt a person. It doesn’t need to be a super complex theme, but it has to be known to you so that you can focus your story around it and build your plot in a way that services the theme.
Use Dialogue to Enhance the Story
Dialogue can be an important part of a short story, unless dialogue is not the focus of your story. However, if you do decide to include dialogue in your short story, then you need to focus it around things that will advance the plot. You don’t have much room to advance the dialogue beyond that in a short story, so you want to keep it natural and realistic. You also don’t want to info-dump through the dialogue, as there isn’t enough time for that. If you want to learn how to make dialogue realistic, check out this post for more help.
Keep the Number of Scenes Limited
When you write a short story, you don’t really have a lot of time to go into scenes upon scenes, so focus on just a few scenes that work around the narrative and are focused in the most effective way. You want to focus on things that advance your plot’s main idea and the theme of your story.
Choose How Many Perspectives You Will Have
Even if you have just a small amount of characters in your story, you can still write it from multiple perspectives. This will require you to focus with these perspectives so that you don’t go too far with the word count, so you should check out this post where I talk more about writing from multiple character perspectives.
Use Conflict and Action Frequently
If you don’t want your story to feel boring to readers, you’re going to have to use conflict and action to drive the plot forward. You don’t want to focus too much on the world around the characters and what the sky looks like. You want to focus on what the characters are doing, what their interactions are like, what’s happening in their heads, etc… Use action to push the narrative forward as much as you can.
It’s OK to Be Open-Ended, But…
A lot of short stories leave some things up to the reader’s interpretation, but there is usually a stylistic reason behind this where a sort of ending is almost nudgingly implied to the reader. A story cannot be left open-ended just because you’re not sure how to end it. Set up the reader to interpret the story in a certain way, but leave it a bit open for them to come up with theories if this benefits your story.
Can a Short Story Be Longer Than 10K Words?
Unfortunately, if you start dipping beyond that word count by a significant margin, you’ve entered novella territory instead. Try to keep your word count below 10,000 words so that you can stay in the range of a short story.
Can You World Build for a Short Story?
The answer to that is YES! You can easily world build for a short story. Now, your world building won’t get the same level of time on the page as it will in a full novel, but you can focus in on something small and relevant to your story that still includes some details relevant to your world building.
Conclusion
Writing a short story is something that is a bit complicated because a short story doesn’t have the room to be expanded too much with its limited word count. As a writer, you’ll need to deliver an impactful story to readers in less than 10,000 words, which can be difficult. However, using the tips I listed throughout the post, it’ll be a much easier process. I also recommend that you read some famous examples of short stories and try to analyze them for yourself: What did the author focus on for the theme? Who are the characters? What is the setting? What is the dialogue used for, if it’s present? I know it sounds a bit like English class, but it helps to do a sort of literary analysis sometimes!
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