As a journalist and content writer in my day job, I like a deadline. Deadlines concentrate the mind, deadlines force you to finish things. So I googled \u2018short story competitions\u2019 and found that, surprise surprise, there were actually quite a few out there, and all with a deadline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of my very first attempts won a modest prize (\u00a340, I think) in a competition run by a small press. This was encouraging. I didn\u2019t get anywhere with a story for over a year after that, but that small crumb of validation was enough to tide me over. I started writing more and more stories, and I\u2019ve never really stopped since. I must have written over 100 by now. In 2019, a couple were nominated for the Pushcart Prize<\/em> anthology in the US. And best of all, in 2020 I published my debut collection of short stories, Hotel du Jack<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I love writing short fiction, and I always have several stories on the go. But I\u2019m still interested in getting novels published too, and my first, Work in Progress<\/a>,<\/em> a co-authored farcical novel-in-emails about an eccentric writers group, comes out from Unbound in 2021. I\u2019m also putting the finishing touches to another full-length MS, working title The Wolf in the Woods.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n You may have noticed that I went from failing to finish novels to writing short stories\u2026 to finishing novels. And that, I believe, is no accident. Starting on short stories is a great way to build up your writing muscles. You get the satisfaction of structuring, shaping and, above all, completing <\/em>things. At first, you may find you can\u2019t write anything over 200 or 500 words. But after a while, you suddenly realise that your stories are getting longer and more complex, as you start to experiment with ideas and forms and voices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A short story is often not so different in length and shape from a scene in a novel, or even several scenes strung together. And one day when pondering what to write a short story about, you may find you have a different, chunkier sort of idea, one that requires more than a few thousand words to really do it justice. And maybe that day is the day you start on a novel \u2013 which you\u2019ll now have a much better chance of finishing, with all the craft and experience that you\u2019ve developed by completing a slew of shorter pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So: in a matter of months, I went from being able to finish nothing fictional to writing scores of stories and regularly getting them featured in competitions and magazines. If you\u2019re looking to get your short-story writing off the ground, I hope these tips and ideas of mine will help you too\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve always loved short stories. I remember my dad reading me the stories of O\u2019Henry when I was little, studying Maupassant\u2019s contes <\/em>of the Franco-Prussian war for A level, discovering the (now deeply unfashionable) tales of Updike, marvelling at \u2018The Language of Men\u2019 by Norman Mailer and Katherine Mansfield\u2019s \u2018The Garden Party.\u2019 \u2018Cat Woman,\u2019 Chekhov, the \u2018murdered lady\u2019 series of Cathy Ulrich (now collected as Ghosts of You<\/a><\/em>), Aimee Bender, Salinger, Nadine Gordimer, Denis Jonson, Zadie Smith, David Vann\u2026 Oh, I could go on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes I think short fiction is closer to poetry than it is to the novel. The best short stories are little universes of compressed perfection, where every paragraph, every word, every punctuation mark has to earn its place. Short stories can be intricately plotted or they can relate little more than the movements of a mind in conversation with itself on a small domestic topic. They can be all showing or \u2013 whisper it \u2013 all telling. They can range over years or take place in a lunchtime, relating the end of a friendship or the decline of a civilisation (though the former, if we are honest, is more common). They seem, for some reason, to talk a great deal about death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Short stories can take one tool from the fictional toolkit \u2013 voice, character, dialogue, structure, point of view, idea \u2013 and major on that, almost to the exclusion of all others. They can talk of boring or obvious topics in fresh ways, or they can deliver great weirdnesses and wild thought experiments. In short, they can do whatever they like. They just have to be true to themselves, and make us believe in them, and not go on for too long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For length, mind, we will need our piece of string. Short stories can be 30 pages long, or they can just be a few paragraphs. If we include flash fiction<\/a> here \u2013 and why wouldn\u2019t we, though it\u2019s almost a whole separate article \u2013 we are looking at stories that can be as short as 100 words (technically known as drabbles<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are those who look down on flash fiction<\/a>, but this I\u2019m afraid is mere ignorance (I can say this with confidence, as I languished in this sort of ignorance myself till not so long ago). Not convinced? Try reading this<\/a> or this <\/a>or this<\/a> or this<\/a> or some of these<\/a>. Flash is a distinctive sub-genre of short fiction. It is much harder than it looks, very much not just the offcuts of longer stuff, and the best exponents are very fine writers indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are many ways to structure a short story. You could have a beginning, a middle and an end. You could have a mini-version of the classic novel structure<\/a> or one of the seven basic plots<\/a>. You could have a classic sting in the tale \u2013 think of the stories of Roald Dahl or O\u2019Henry or Saki. Or the best way to start a short story might be to just start writing \u2013 and see what shape starts to emerge. Often voice or idea is far more important than structure in a short story, and you can often retro-fix the shape once you\u2019ve nailed those essential components first. Because short stories are, well, short, you can sometimes even plan and draft them at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some stories read almost like anecdotes or well-crafted jokes; others appear to have no obvious plot in a novelistic sense, but are more like tableaux vivants<\/em> which, like an interesting painting, reveal more meaning and information with every look. In some, like Hemingway\u2019s \u2018Hills Like White Elephants<\/a>,\u2019 nothing really appears to happen; there is talk of \u2018an operation\u2019 in a tense conversation between a couple, but the reader has to look between the lines to intuit what\u2019s happening. All this, again, points to the wonderful fluidity and flexibility of the form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One classic way to tell a story is what I call the Pivot structure, where you set one non-human element against another, usually human, event or relationship. Over the course of the story, the non-human element starts to tick away like a metaphor engine for the human element of the story, resonating with different meanings as the narrative develops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, I\u2019ve just read \u2018Little Tiger\u2019 by JR McMenemie, a beautiful story told from the point of view of two children who have just lost their gran. Their Mum is upset at having lost her Mum, and Dad is trying to comfort her. The kids have never been to a funeral before, and returning to their house in the aftermath is clearly a very unsettling experience for all. Mum engages in some aggressive tidying up, while Dad \u2013 who is struggling to juggle the competing claims of his children and his wife \u2013 starts laying a little heavily into the booze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, all of a sudden, the kids find a butterfly, sitting on top of a picture of a beach where they all spent many holidays with gran. This is odd, as in the story it\u2019s February, in northern England. The children feed the butterfly some banana, and are keen to make a pet of it. All of a sudden, Mum announces that the butterfly is her Mum, come back to say goodbye. In the morning, however, the kids wake to discover that the butterfly is gone; Dad explains that they couldn\u2019t really keep it. Do you really think the butterfly was Nan? they ask. The story ends with Dad\u2019s reply:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018I don\u2019t know, son. It could have been. Your mum says some funny things sometimes. All I\u2019m saying is that your grandma didn\u2019t like bananas.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n This crude, simplified summary doesn\u2019t begin to do justice to the patient, emotionally intelligent storytelling of the piece, but you can see that the butterfly acts as a pivot on which the whole story can keep turning. It is, by turns, a distraction, a projection of grief, potential proof of an afterlife, an emblem of marital devotion and, in its release, a key to the processing of loss and the attainment of a certain understated resilience. Do we live on after we die? Dad is doubtful, but he loves his wife and sees no value in challenging her theory. And she, in her turn, aching with love for her absent mum, can be forgiven a little magical thinking. If, indeed, it is magical: who, after all, can be certain that she is wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\r\n Edit your short story to perfection<\/p>\r\n <\/a>\r\n <\/div>\r\n Get actionable and professional editorial feedback on your short story or a collection up to 50,000 words. We’ll match you with an editor who can help you polish your manuscript ready for submission. Express Services and Premium Member discounts are available.<\/p>\n<\/div> One of the attractive things about writing short stories, as opposed to longer stuff, is that you don\u2019t need to work out a fully-fleshed outline, snowflake-style<\/a> or otherwise, in order to get started. Nor do you need oodles of background words about characters, stakes, setting, timeframe and so on. You just need an idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that idea doesn\u2019t even need to be an idea in the grand sense either; it can just be a prompt<\/em>. It might just be a chance remark you overheard on a bus, a funny ornament in a front garden you pass every day, an odd-looking chap you spot on a holiday beach, a sudden childhood memory. It might be a smell or a view or a colour; it might be a thought triggered by a film or a radio programme or a children\u2019s book. Of course, it might also be a break-up you\u2019ve never got over, a terrible act of cruelty you once witnessed, or a historical event that has always had a special resonance for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you start, you won\u2019t necessarily know what\u2019s a story-worthy idea and what isn\u2019t. So the first thing to do is to cultivate the habit of looking and listening, both to the outside world and to the things that bubble up in your mind. Now this might sound easy, but often it defeats people because they can\u2019t believe it will ever get them to a finished story. We sometimes envision creativity as this wonderfully crazed, instinctive outpouring, whereas this note-taking business feels like something rather dull and premeditated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But your notebook, whatever form it takes, is where all the raw data of your stories will start to emerge. No data: no stories. So you have to get into the habit of jotting things down, and trusting that this is a worthwhile thing to do<\/em>, and just repeatedly doing it even if you don\u2019t really believe that yet, even when your first efforts are just dreadful callow things like So here I am writing in this book <\/em>or Milk, wipes, olive oil. Post office!<\/em> As with a half-used tube of toothpaste, you sometimes have to squeeze the crud out to get to the good stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For inspiration, try Morning Pages \u2013 as popularised by Natalie Goldberg<\/a>, Julia Cameron<\/a> and others. Basically, you sit down at the start of your writing session \u2013 it doesn\u2019t even have to be morning! \u2013 and you just write down whatever comes into your head for 10 minutes. Don\u2019t censor what pops up \u2013 just record your thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might be amazed what occurs \u2013 shopping lists, dreams, the fag-end of a row with your partner, a glimpse of a first crush, childhood memories, strange bits of wordplay, spiritual reflections, a person in your life you haven\u2019t thought about for ages\u2026 It\u2019s all good, and it could all get used somewhere in your fiction. Just as the stand-up sees the world as a bunch of set-ups waiting for a punchline, so the short-fiction writer sees the world as a bunch of prompts waiting for a good story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My Dad always said that he could tell a really good piece of cheese because it gave him a funny tingly feeling behind the ears. I spent much of my childhood trying (and failing) to experience this elusive dairy-led sensation. But I do at least get the tingle when it comes to stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over time, you\u2019ll start to look at the bits of mental flotsam in your notebook, and you may find there\u2019s a phrase or an anecdote or an image that you keep coming back to. When that happens, you may well have the first tinglings of a story on your hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From time to time I go back through my notebooks and highlight bits of scribble that I think I might be able to use. Sometimes it\u2019s a setting. My story \u2018The Beach Shop\u2019 in Hotel du Jack<\/em>, for example, about a heartbroken man stalking his ex-wife on her holiday, was inspired by my early-morning stops at a cafe on a French campsite. I loved the locale, and just started writing about it till a story came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes \u2013 often in my case \u2013 it\u2019s a bit of anecdotal autobiography. My story \u2018Plane-spotting<\/a>\u2018 was inspired by reading a story to my young son about an airport where all the planes are animals. I thought it would be funny if the Dad was a real aviation nerd, increasingly infuriated by the inaccuracy of the drawings, and it just went from there. With the flash \u2018Eau de l\u2019avenir<\/a>,\u2019 the inspiration was a smell \u2013 or rather, a scent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To give one more example of how ideas turn into stories, George Saunders says his flash fiction<\/a> \u2018Sticks\u2019<\/a> came from something he saw from his car every day. \u2018For two years I\u2019d been driving past a house like the one in the story, imagining the owner as a man more joyful and self-possessed and less self-conscious than myself. Then one day I got sick of him and invented his opposite, and there was the story.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you note down stuff, you don\u2019t know if you\u2019ll ever use it, or if you\u2019ll end up using it several times. You may use it in a way that\u2019s a complete betrayal of the original memory. You may dredge it up again, years later, and forget you ever jotted it down in the first place. It doesn\u2019t matter: you\u2019ve got it down now, and it\u2019s adding to your imaginative store. It\u2019s all good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another way to approach a story is to ask yourself: What if\u2026? <\/em>What if supermarket shelf-fillers and nurses were the most celebrated and best-paid members of society, and celebrities and lawyers were considered the lowest of the low? What if an epidemic of kindness broke out in the world \u2013 Agapia-117, let\u2019s call it \u2013 and threatened the stranglehold of capitalism, with its built-in systemic reliance on rabid self-interest? (Just riffing here, obvs.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n These kinds of story offer you a rich counterfactual challenge. Depending on the challenge, you might offer the reader the pleasure of watching an unexpected idea play out, or you might challenge yourself to pull off a narrative feat that the reader doesn\u2019t know about until the end: What if (to cite a notorious example) you could tell me a whole story that turns out in the end to have been narrated by a cat? What if you wrote an alien contact story, only for us to realise at the end that the narrator lives on another planet, and the \u2018aliens\u2019 are actually humans from earth?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea for my story, \u2018Nothing So Blue,\u2019 came to me when I asked my son for ideas of what I could write about. \u2018Write about becoming invisible,\u2019 he said. Now sci-fi isn\u2019t really my thing, but then I thought: \u2018What if you were granted a superpower, and it turned out to be a bit rubbish?\u2019 Now that, I thought, was very much more my thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A great example of the thought-experiment approach is \u2018The Rememberer\u2019, by Aimee Bender<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don\u2019t know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It\u2019s been a month, and now he\u2019s a sea turtle.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n Structure doesn\u2019t come naturally to us all (guilty), but an easy way to get round that is to give yourself a nice constrained timeframe, such as the hours of a day or the seven days of a week. I use this structure in a few of my stories, notably the title track of Hotel du Jack<\/em>, because it offers a natural scale of narrative progression. On Monday, we meet the cast of the story and get a sense of what\u2019s at stake. On Tuesday the first signs of conflict emerge. Wednesday sees problems escalate, Thursday brings a false dawn, and on Friday things really kick off. Saturday is the day the crisis resolves and the loose ends are tied up, and Sunday has that nice sort of epilogue feel to it. It is the day, as Craig David tells it<\/a>, on which one chills; the day one rests after creating a world<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might choose a lunch-hour, or a night, as Helen Simpson does with her insomniac narrator in \u2018Erewhon\u2019 (collected in Constitutional<\/em>), a man in a roles-reversed world who stays up worrying about kids and money and sexism while his high-powered wife lies snoring indifferently next to him. It could be a date or a work meeting or a conversation between dads at the side of a junior football match, where the competitive nature of the chat echoes the changing fortunes of their kids\u2019 respective teams and the climax of the story coincides with the final whistle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking this idea a step further, hermit-crab fictions \u2013 also known as borrowed forms \u2013 are stories that are made out of everyday verbal templates. The more banal the form, the better \u2013 think product reviews, missing-person reports, recipes, maths problems, listicles, top tips, user instructions\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n The trick is to try to stick quite closely to the structure you\u2019re stealing, so that the story you tell will seem even wilder or more heartbreaking by contrast with its dull container. As you go through your day, you\u2019ll come across thousands of these dead bits of copy \u2013 from insurance letters to FAQs to parish newsletters. Choose one, and make it your own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve written hermit-crab stories in the form of a shopping list<\/a>, board game rules, FAQs<\/a> and even a penalty charge notice<\/a>. In Hotel du Jack<\/em>, you\u2019ll also find a ghost story told as a neighbourhood forum thread, a reflection on #metoo in the form of board meeting minutes, a meditation on grief in the form of a dishwasher glossary, and a product recall notification. Another story, \u2018Active and passive voice\u2019<\/a>, dissects a flawed relationship through the structure of a grammar lesson. Meanwhile \u2018My Mummy is\u2026<\/a>\u2018 was written \u2013 out of a sense of profound inadequacy \u2013 just after I\u2019d read a book with my 5-year-old son at school entitled My Daddy is a Firefighter<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my favourites pieces of flash fiction, LIFECOLOR INDOOR LATEX PAINTS\u00ae \u2013 WHITES AND REDS<\/a> by Kristen Ploetz, manages to condense an entire life into a trio of paint palettes. George Saunders has a lot of fun with this response to a customer complaint<\/a>. Here\u2019s a story of long-term love that\u2019s also a 5-star blender review<\/a>. And this story is just receipts<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019d like to read more hermit-crab narratives, here\u2019s a couple of great anthologies to inspire you: Fakes<\/a> <\/em>by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, and The Shell Game<\/a><\/em>, edited by Kim Adrian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019ve got a prompt that feels rich and interesting \u2013 whether it\u2019s a vague memory or a thought experiment or a borrowed form \u2013 the next thing to do is not worry about how to write a good beginning of a story, and just get something down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My process at this point is crude: just bang a first draft out. If you have an idea that feels like a start, get it down and start playing around with what happens next. If you have an idea that feels like an ending, get it down and think about how your story might get you there. But do the thinking by actual writing. This is not a drill! And this is not a novel. Just write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As you go along, the idea will start to build and coalesce, especially as, remember, you chose something that\u2019s already glowing and tingling for you. As the juices start flowing, you will start to see possibilities open out for you \u2013 structural bridges, snippets of dialogue, observations that you sense suddenly belong somewhere within the fabric of your story\u2019s world. You can start to put in little headers too, little pegs to mark out future sections. Jot all these extra thoughts at the bottom of your doc, keep typing, and fold them in as you go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, as the story starts to flow, you may get stuck on one bit but can start to see how a later section would work. Go with the flow, and start filling in that later section instead \u2013 just leave yourself some meta-notes for the bits you need to come back to later e.g. insert scene where elephant appears for first time<\/em> or add in funeral-home bit here to explain why Moira\u2019s always hated lilies<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same process also works at a micro-level, too. Often your ideas for the story run ahead of how quickly you can phrase things. Thinking about the broad contours of your story and fine-tuning phraseology are different creative tasks, and it\u2019s not always easy or efficient to flit between the two. Don\u2019t waste time waiting for the mot juste<\/em> to arrive \u2013 just put in a bit placeholder copy or add some \u201cxxxxxxxxxxxs,\u201d and move on. Just get the broad brushstrokes down, and then you can go back and finesse the detail later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I guess the approach I\u2019m advocating here is a bit like \u2018writing by the lights,\u2019 a phrase that inevitably takes us back to a line from EL Doctorow: \u2018Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.\u2019 Sometimes the idea you have is a perfect little synopsis, and all (!) you have to do now to flesh it out in a way that does justice to the conception. Sometimes you just have an opening scene, or an image, or a character to work with, and you have to build the rest of the world around them. But the remedy is the same in every case: get that first draft down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more stories you write, the more you get a sense of the optimum length for a particular piece. Some short stories are almost like extended gags; they go out and back in a simple anecdotal arc that culminates in a snappy zinger. Others require patience and stamina to deliver their potential. Their form might be much more complex: a spiral, a mosaic, a musical symphony of contrasting and resolving themes. But the best way to build up to writing complex stories is to start by completing simpler ones. And the best way to complete a story is get a first draft down fast. Then the real work can begin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A satisfying story can usually be read on more than one level. There is the surface level, and then there is a sense of an underlying meaning. If your story is to feel like more than a mere skit or vignette, we want to have a sense that there is another perspective, a subtext, a theme that\u2019s whirring away in the background as we read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not suggesting that you start with a grand theme and try and mould a story to it; that will usually lead you somewhere strained and leaden. I just mean that when you write your story, you want to have an eye on how others will find it interesting or meaningful. You don\u2019t have to have a pat answer to this question, quite the opposite in fact. Where novels often build up to an accumulated truth, the best stories often have an inconclusive, open-ended quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Often in life, when you think about it, we are working through familiar challenges and conflicts in a variety of different guises and permutations: freedom versus commitment, future hopes versus mortality, child versus parent, addiction versus abstention, ego versus altruism \u2013 the list is endless. What short stories often do is replay one of these central conflicts for us in a way that is both very specific \u2013 involving particular individuals in detailed interactions \u2013 but also has a timeless, universalising feel to it. Life is ambiguity, and things rarely get resolved. So, as your story takes shape, ask yourself: which pattern am I enacting here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This might sound a bit complex, but really it\u2019s very simple, because every story we tell inevitably has the potential to speak beyond its own obvious remit; the trick is just to polish your words in the light of their wider applicability. As you start to get your story down, have an eye on the meanings and themes that emerge with it, and shape your material accordingly. You don\u2019t have to be able to say what the story is really about; you just need to leave enough space and enough interesting glimmers for the reader to want to fill in the blanks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take, for example, Conrad\u2019s \u2018The Secret Sharer.<\/a>\u2018 This rich and subtle tale is full of nautical detail and has the feel of being based on a true incident, lightly fictionalised. But Conrad is careful throughout to dial up the elements we can all relate to: the fear of not being good enough, the loneliness of command, the terror of being brave, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Katherine Mansfield\u2019s \u2018The Fly<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 as well as being a pair of beautifully observed little scenes \u2013 speaks to us about bereavement, and the agony of a loss which can no longer even find expression. And in retrospect, we see that JD Salinger\u2019s \u2018A Perfect Day for Bananafish\u2019<\/a> \u2013 for all its enjoyable elements of comedy and social satire \u2013 speaks also to the corrosive effects of trauma and the inadequacy of our responses to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing, as so many have said, is re-writing. Now that you have a rough draft down, the real work can begin, as you hone and polish and finesse your story into the best story it can be, and remove in the process all avoidable friction from the reading process. A few pointers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The start of your story needs to work hard to lure us into the world of your narrative. It must intrigue us from the off. We want to feel instantly that we are in an interesting place, where interesting things may happen, and that we can trust and enjoy the person who is telling us about them. Ambiguity, cliche, long-windedness, unnecessary cleverness \u2013 these can all spell death to a good intro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might start with an intriguing hook (\u2018In the beginning, Sanford Carter was ashamed of becoming an Army cook\u2019 \u2013 \u2018The Language of Men\u2019, by Norman Mailer.) You might set the scene with a sweep of historical backdrop (\u2018Paris was blockaded, starved, in its death agony\u2019 \u2013 \u2018Deux Amis\u2019, by Maupassant.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or you might start by setting the rules of the world, as in \u2018By the Waters of Babylon\u2019 by Stephen Vincent Ben\u00e9t<\/a>, in a way that has the reader wondering from the very start what will happen if one is broken:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Naturally I am instantly curious about what happens if I head east. And the Dead Places? These are things I need to know about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more on this topic, see my 10 examples of how to start a short story<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You need to bring your story to a conclusion in a satisfying way that is of a piece with the style and mood of the narrative that you have created. If you have written a taut, sting-in-the-tale mystery, the ending should close things off with a satisfying snap that tells us the case is closed and justice \u2013 consistent in some way or other with the internal logic of your piece \u2013 has been served.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A story that is more reflective and interior in tone, on the other hand, will ideally finish with a line that adds a new perspective or dimension to our understanding of the whole, and keeps rippling and resonating in the reader\u2019s mind long after they have finished reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ending can be a shock to the system that makes sense of everything that\u2019s gone before; \u2018A Perfect Day for Bananafish\u2019 is an obvious and powerful example of this. Or it can zoom away from the action, just as a camera takes leave of its subject. Or it can inject a twist that calls into doubt everything you\u2019ve read so far. It can sometimes be read two different ways, leaving the reader to work out their own ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it can of course just show that the world keeps on turning. My \u2018Ella G in a Country Churchyard\u2019, for example, brings a story of an uncomfortable parent-child conversation about mortality to a close with the Dad asking: \u2018Ready for some sausages?\u2019 This could be seen as an evasion, but then again there are no adequate answers to the girl\u2019s impossible questions about what happens when we die. Life goes on, and it is almost teatime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don\u2019t send out the story to any magazine or competition until someone else has read it and fed back to you. And not just anyone, but someone whose judgement you respect, and who can give a candid take on what\u2019s working and what isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You may have a trusted beta reader \u2013 perhaps your partner, or a relative or friend \u2013 who always reads your stuff, or you may get feedback from a Facebook group. And of course there\u2019s the Townhouse<\/a>. These are great resources, but in my experience nothing beats being part of a real-life writers\u2019 group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a writers\u2019 group, you\u2019ll have the experience of reading your words to others \u2013 itself often very instructive, as you can often sense where the story is working and where it\u2019s dragging just from the quality of attention in the room. And you\u2019ll get constructive, practical feedback from people who are dealing with the same challenges, albeit from different perspectives and genres. Short stories lend themselves particularly well to group critique, because they are often just the right length to read in full.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No doubt there will be feedback \u2013 from yourself as well as from others \u2013 and you will need to decide which bits you want to act on and which, not: learning the difference is a lifetime\u2019s work. Inevitably you will find yourself returning to step 7, and perhaps steps 8 and 9 too, but that\u2019s no bad thing. Writing is re-writing, remember.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Yes! It\u2019s perfectly possible to write a story in a day, or less. Sometimes, when you get a great idea, the piece \u2013 especially it\u2019s a flash or shorter fiction<\/a> \u2013 may emerge fully formed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s not to say you\u2019ve only been working on it that day \u2013 in my case, a story might get drafted in a couple of hours that I\u2019ve been turning over in the back of my mind for a couple of years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s not to say it\u2019ll be the final version either. While you might be able to complete the draft in a day, it\u2019s always wise to sleep on it and come back to it next day, to review and revise, and to get some other people\u2019s feedback too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, you\u2019ve written your short story, but what next?<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are loads of litmags and competitions out there. Many of the editors and organisers are aspiring writers themselves, and can be wonderfully supportive with feedback even when they\u2019re not able to accept your story. You can find useful lists here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes there\u2019s a prompt or a theme, which can be a great help when you\u2019re stuck for an idea. With magazines, take some time to read a few stories and get a feel for what they like, and whether you\u2019d be a good fit. Simultaneous submissions are generally acceptable, especially as it can take months to get a response (just make sure you let them know if you get accepted elsewhere). Before you enter, always read the requirements carefully, and get the formatting and labelling right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Have lots of stories on the go, so you move on when you get stuck. \u2018At any given moment, I have a half-dozen story ideas shelved in my mind,\u2019 says Benjamin Percy, author of the collections The Language of Elk<\/em> and Refresh, Refresh<\/em>. \u2018I always choose to write the one that glows brightest.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n Above all, don\u2019t be afraid to keep submitting. For most of us, rejection is the norm and an acceptance is the exception. The more you submit, the luckier you\u2019ll get, and the less those rejections will sting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can do this!<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this article, I’ll share 10 simple steps and practical pointers to help you write shorter fiction, including how to start off and how to end a short story. For about 30 years, I slogged away trying to write a novel. But I just never had the plotting smarts or the emotional stamina, and I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457004,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28664],"tags":[28894],"class_list":["post-2989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction-short-stories","tag-how-to-plot-masterclass1"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow To Write A Short Story In 10 Easy Steps<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Short Story: What Is It And Why Is It Special?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How Do You Structure A Short Story?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/editing-your-book.jpg\")
\r\n Working on a short story or collection?<\/h2>
10 Steps To Writing A Short Story, With Examples<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
1. Forage The World For Story Starters<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
2. Go With The Idea That Tingles<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
3. Try A Thought Experiment<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
4. Borrow A Form From Everyday Life<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"person-typing-on-laptop-and-writing-a-short-story\"](\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/writing-a-short-story.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n5. Start Writing<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
6. Work In Another Level<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
7. Edit. Revise. Rework. Repeat.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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8. Look Extra Hard at Your Start\u2026<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
9. \u2026And Look Extra Hard at Your Ending<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
10. Get Another View<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How Do You Write A Short Story in One Day? Can you Write A Short Story in One Day?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Publishing Your Short Story<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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