How to Write Short Stories: What is a short story?
A short story is not a small novel. As James Scott Bell notes in How to Write Short Stories and Use Them to Further Your Writing Career, “The ‘feel’ of a short story should be that it follows one trajectory, or arc. It concerns a character (or, in some cases, a group) heading through one primary crisis or concern.”
A short story exists as its own entity, even when it is part of a collection. It is complete, self-contained, and designed to be read in one sitting and leave a trace behind once it’s done.
If you’ve only ever written novels or full-length works of non-fiction, this may be a shift, and you certainly need to read a lot of short stories in order to understand how they work. So, what are the basics of a short story?
A short story is still a story
You need to place a character in a situation, in a specific setting, create a plot event that changes things, and then end the story in some way that may be unexpected or surprising.
By the last line, something must have changed, but you don’t need a big cast or a sprawling plot to achieve this. You need one person who wants something, an obstacle or a difficulty that stands in their way, and a moment where the story breaks one way or the other.
It doesn’t have to be one character in one place
Plenty of short stories have a single point of view and a single setting, which certainly keeps it simple, but you can experiment with multiple scenes and more than one character.
In Seahenge, I alternate between a marine archaeologist responsible for the remains of a Bronze Age timber circle that emerges from the waves off the English coast and the technician who is trying to decode the strange markings on the wooden staves next to the remains of the ancient sacrifice recovered from the site. The story takes place within a short period of time and alternates between the two point-of-view characters.
You can also lengthen the amount of time passing in a story using scene breaks or chapter breaks. In With a Demon’s Eye, a combat photographer is injured in a war zone in the opening scene, and then the story jumps to her recovery in hospital and the impossible decision she has to make in order to save her sight.
What length should a short story be?
If you are submitting for a specific award or magazine or competition, they will always include the word count, so check to be certain of what you’re writing towards. There are also rough conventions as follows:
Flash fiction: Up to 1,000 words. While some are full stories, flash can also be more like a prose poem. Some authors create a ‘novella in flash’ with multiple individual flash fiction stories in a collection that combine to tell a bigger story.
Short story: The range is usually 3,000 to 12,000 words, with the broad middle of 4,000 to 7,000 words as the sweet spot for submissions.
Novella: 17,000 to 40,000 words. A novella is a short novel, and I’ve written several of these that land around 25,000 words, such as One Day in Budapest, one of my ARKANE thrillers that can be read as a stand-alone adventure.
There are further gradations, but these are rough guidelines to consider. You can either write to a specific length, or just start writing and see how it turns out.
What is the best length if you want to sell a story?
Douglas Smith, who has sold short fiction to magazines and anthologies all over the world, makes the point plainly in Playing the Short Game: the longer your story, the harder it is to sell.
An editor working to a fixed page count can buy three 3,000-word stories or one 9,000-word story, and longer stories are rarely favoured unless the author is particularly wanted for the project.
The total length of a work means paying more for editing, print costs, and potential audio narration, so keep that in mind if you are aiming for submission to professional markets.
However, if you’re writing shorts for your own purposes, like reader magnets, collections, audio, or mainly digital publishing, then length is your decision and not so tightly bound. I’ll cover your options more in part 2.
Questions:
- Are you aiming for a certain length of story or are you just writing it and seeing how it turns out?
- Do your ideas feel small enough to be contained in a short story or expansive enough that you need many more words to explore them?
- Does your potential story idea include a concrete change between the beginning and the end?
Resources:
- Playing the Short Game: How to Market & Sell Short Fiction, Second Edition — Douglas Smith
- How to Write Short Stories and Use Them to Further Your Writing Career — James Scott Bell
