How to Write Short Stories: Introduction

I loved reading short stories for many years before I ever decided to write one. For me, it was always Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, stories that unsettled me as a young reader and have echoed in my writing ever since. But as a writer, part of me wondered whether shorts were worth the effort when I had a limited amount of time, and each new story demanded a whole new world and fresh characters. That’s a lot of creative effort for just a handful of pages!

The market for short fiction is also much smaller than that for novels, so full-length books were more likely to be read and potentially earn more income. There’s also nothing quite like holding a finished book in your hand, and with so much short fiction being digital only, a story might not exist in physical form at all. All these doubts held me back, even though I always had ample ideas.

But then in 2013, I was commissioned to write a trilogy of short stories based around Dante’s Inferno,originally published by Kobo and then republished by me as A Thousand Fiendish Angels. It was a challenge, but I loved the process and the resulting world that emerged. I was hooked and now I can’t stop!

Since then, I have written and published sixteen short stories with several more written and waiting for publication. They’ve appeared as stand-alone pieces, in two collections of my own, and in several anthologies. I’ve self-published, licensed rights and been paid by professional markets, crowdfunded a special hardback collection, recorded my stories in audio format, and used short stories for marketing my longer books.

But more than that, short stories have changed how I think about my own creative body of work. They give me an opportunity to play and experiment with new ideas and different genres, reach new readers, and add to my multiple streams of income. I think they can do the same for you.

Who am I?

As J.F. Penn, I’m an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, crime, horror, and memoir with over twenty books published, and as Joanna Penn, I’m an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and author of nineteen non-fiction books. Short stories are only a fraction of my author business revenue, but they play an outsize part in helping me express my creative ideas.

What’s in this book

This is a book on shorts, and it’s also a short book, so hopefully you can start writing as soon as possible. I’ve published detailed guides on writing fiction, self-publishing, and book marketing, so you can refer to those for more in-depth information on specific topics.

Part 1 is about writing: Where ideas come from, what a short story is and isn’t, how to shape one, how to land an ending the reader can’t shake, and how to use an author’s note to establish a human connection with your readers.

Part 2 is about publishing: Your options once the story exists, from self-publishing and audio to traditional markets, plus how to place your work in anthologies, how to create a short story collection, and how to navigate rights and contracts.

Part 3 is about marketing: How a short story earns its place in your wider author business, how to help the right readers find it, and how to make the short length an advantage rather than a deficit.

After those three parts, there’s a short part 4 on using AI tools to support your creative process for writing short stories, or to handle production and marketing tasks. I’ve deliberately kept this section separate so you can choose how you use the tools and decide what part of your process they might be useful for.

A note on the examples

I’ve used my own short stories as examples throughout, from that first trio of short stories I wrote in 2013, collected as A Thousand Fiendish Angels, to my recent collection The Buried and the Drowned, published in 2025.

You don’t need to have read any of them to follow this book, but it might help if you’d like to go deeper. I’ve included one short, The Black Church, and its author’s note in the appendices as an example. You can find the books in all the usual places if you’d like to read more. 

Let’s begin.

The complete short story The Black Church and its author’s note are included in the ebook, paperback, large print, and audiobook editions of this book. You can also read the story and note free at JFPennBooks.com.