How to Write Short Stories: Tips for writing a short story

Every short story comes into being in its own way. My first three were commissioned, so I wrote them to a deadline and someone else’s brief. The Black Church grew from a single story seed on a cold Icelandic morning, and Between Two Breaths was written specifically to deepen the theme of a collection. There’s no single right process, only the one that gets this particular story onto the page.

The good news is that everything is compressed at this length. You might draft five thousand words in a day at a push, or over a weekend, and edit in the days that follow, so it’s possible to finish a complete short story within a week. Whatever your writing process, you get to experience all of it — drafting, revising, finishing — in miniature, and it’s well worth the journey!

My book How to Write a Novel goes into great detail about everything to do with the writing process and writing craft, so I will only cover key tips that are important for short stories here.

It doesn’t matter whether you plot and plan, or discovery write, just get the words on the page

There’s a lot of discussion in the author community about whether you should spend time plotting or planning your story before starting to write, or whether you should write by the seat of your pants (pantsing), which is what many of us call ‘discovery writing.’

I am a discovery writer, so I usually only have one or two elements of the story before I start writing and I never have a written plan. I write out of order and figure it all out along the way. That makes it fun for me, but I know plenty of authors who love plotting and planning every aspect before they write a single sentence.

It doesn’t matter what you do. The result is the same.

Given the length of a short story, you could write the whole thing and be done in the time other writers around you spend debating which approach is correct.

Just get words on the page in whatever way feels right to you.

Start as late as possible and don’t info-dump backstory

The brevity of a short story means that you have no time for throat-clearing, which in writing terms often means spending too much time on world-building or character backstory or setting up the inciting incident — the event that kicks off the plot. You need to get into the story quickly and hook the reader’s attention within a few paragraphs in a short.

One way to do this is to write what you like but then see how much you can shave off the beginning of the story and still have it make sense.

Readers are smart. You don’t need to spell everything out for them. Just get into the story and their imaginations will fill in the rest.

The reader has to feel something

In a novel, authors are encouraged to write scenes that help the reader care for the characters in some way, and that is important for short stories, but they also have a much broader reach. Short stories may include elements that bring a character alive, but they may also focus more on evoking an idea or a feeling, something that gives the reader the impetus to keep turning the page. It doesn’t matter, as long as the reader feels something.

In the opening lines of Beneath the Zoo, an architect stands in front of the padlocked gates of a derelict zoo remembering how she had once roamed its hidden passages with her deceased father, echoing my own nostalgic memories of exploring Bristol Zoo with my dad after my parents’ divorce.

In the opening scene of Seahenge, on a desolate Norfolk beach, a perfect circle of ancient wooden spars emerges from the waves with an upturned tree at its centre, and in its twisted roots lies the remains of something long forgotten.

In both stories, the intent is to arouse curiosity as to what happens next and keep the reader turning the page.

Land the ending

There are different options for ending a short story and you get to choose what suits yours best.

A resolved ending answers a central question. An epiphany turns on a character finally understanding something. An ambiguous or open ending withholds the answer on purpose and lets the reader decide. A twist recasts everything that came before and surprises the reader somehow. A circular ending returns to where it all began, but now something has changed.

My personal preference as a reader is to be left with a sense of wanting the story to continue. Maybe a question has opened in my mind about the theme, or I’m curious about what happened to the character next. Perhaps I have a sense of being unsettled in some way, of wondering ‘what if.’ As a writer, I aim to arouse that feeling in the reader as well.

Of course, these are not the only ways to end a short story, it’s just me being raised on Tales of the Unexpected! Many writers use short stories as a way to explore side characters from their main series. For example, a romance author might write a version of a wedding scene from another character’s perspective, and in that case, the ending will tie everything up nicely. But for me, I want my story endings to land and stay with you.

The main way to do that is to know what happens, but end the story before you write that far, so even if the character’s arc is closed, there is still a sense that whatever happened will echo into someone else’s life. In Between Two Breaths, a free diver longs to enter the fabled cathedral, a labyrinth of underwater tunnels in the sea caves off a New Zealand island. They are so deep that return is unlikely. Whether she makes the ultimate choice or not, we know that the cathedral will continue to call those who long for the deep.

Experiment with the form

I pretty much always write my full-length novels in third person, past tense, with multiple point-of-view characters. But I’ve written several of my short stories in first person, present tense, and the short form is the perfect place to try a combination you wouldn’t risk across a whole book.

First person brings the reader as close as it’s possible to get. The ‘I’ voice invites them to step into the illusion of being the character, which is why it suits the obsessive archaeologist of The Dark Queen and the glassblower of Blood, Sweat, and Flame, whose voice is nothing like my own. It’s hard for me to sustain first person across a full novel, but a short story can be perfect with only one point of view, so the constraint disappears.

Present tense adds immediacy. The character, the narrator, and the reader all experience events at the same time, and no one knows how it ends. What you lose is the reflective distance of a narrator looking back and shaping the telling of the whole story, but over a few thousand words, that immediacy is often worth the trade.

Trying new approaches can help expand your writing ability, and if your attempt doesn’t quite hit the mark, you haven’t lost much time, and you’ve improved your craft along the way.

Use timed writing blocks

I use time blocking for pretty much everything I do, marking off chunks of time in my Google Calendar for writing and editing, publishing, and marketing tasks, as well as meetings, research, and the rest of my life, like going to the gym or even meeting my mum for coffee.

I’m writing this now in a time block marked ‘Short story book draft,’ and when I make a time block like this, I turn up for the meeting with myself in the same way I would turn up for a meeting with any person I respect. I’m on time and ready to work.

Writing is fun for me, but it’s also my job, so I treat it as such, turning up for work as I used to turn up to the office to work for someone else’s company. Why would I treat my own time and creativity and working for my own business in any other way?

I don’t slack off. I don’t check email. All my notifications are turned off. I’m here to work, and that is how I’ve written so many books over the last two decades. It’s just hours and days over multiple time blocks over many years.

But I know many writers struggle to get words on the page, and if that’s you, my biggest tip is to try timed writing. You don’t need long. Even five minutes is enough. Set a timer, then write until the timer goes off. You will have words on the page. You can always edit them later, but at least you have something to work with.

Editing options for short stories

After the story is finished, you can do a round of self-editing, going back through it to see what can be improved. Personally, I print out the story and scribble all over it, then make those changes back in the main version, which for me is in Scrivener. I also use writing software ProWritingAid as a line editor for all my stories, and I have worked with different professional human editors over the years.

If you submit to an anthology or a professional short story market, there will be an editor assigned and you will likely have to make changes. But you may not even get that far if you have not edited the story yourself first and worked to make it the best it can be before submission.

There are professional freelance short story editors but it’s often hard to hire someone to work on 5,000 words. You are far more likely to be able to hire someone to work on a batch of shorts, which makes it worth the editor’s time. Many authors also barter their time with other writers, critiquing each other’s stories, which can work well if you know writers who enjoy the same kinds of stories as you do.

Questions:

• Are you getting your words done? How can you improve your process if you’re not happy with it?
• Take a story you’ve drafted: how much can you cut from the beginning and still have it make sense?
• Is your ending working? How can you improve it?
• How can you experiment more with your shorts to deepen your writing craft?
• How can you improve your editing process?

Resources:

• How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book — Joanna Penn
• Scrivener writing software: www.TheCreativePenn.com/scrivenersoftware
• ProWritingAid editing software: www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaid
• List of editors: www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors

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.