How to Write a Short Story: The Ultimate Guide

Mar 8

Novels are often seen as the pinnacle of writing achievement, but short stories can be just as challenging and rewarding to write. In this blog post, we'll discuss some tips on how to write a short story that is well-crafted and engaging. So if you're looking for a new challenge, or simply want to hone your skills, read on!

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A short story is a work of fiction that typically ranges from 1,000 to 10,000 words in length. Though shorter than a novel, a well-crafted short story can be just as powerful and fulfilling to read. Many famous authors, such as Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut, have written masterful short stories. If you're looking to write your own, but you’re not sure where to start, keep reading!

Step One: Coming up with an idea

There’s nothing worse than staring at a blank page or the flashing cursor at the top of an empty word document. Some writers can begin a story just by writing it, but most can’t. If you think you might be the latter kind of writer, it’s a good idea begin writing your story when you have at least the germ of an idea.

Now, you can sit around waiting for inspiration to strike, but who has the time? Instead, start trying out the many established methods for coming up with short story ideas.

How to Generate Short Story Ideas

Here are some tried and true methods for coming up with ideas for short stories.

Look at newspapers and magazines for inspiration.
Read short stories online. Often, when we read other works of fiction our imagination gets so fired up, we start to come up with our own ideas. Just make sure your idea isn’t too closely related to the story you’re reading.
Look at a photo and try to imagine the story behind the image.
Check out our database of 100+ Flash Fiction Prompts. Although these prompts have been designed for very short fiction, they can easily be expanded to suit a story of any length.
Think of a movie. Try to summarise the plot of that movie in just one or two sentences. Then use that as a prompt to write your own story. For example, the plot of ‘The Hurt Locker’ could be simplified to: a bomb disposal team must disarm bombs in Iraq. So, now write a short story about a bomb disposal. Again, as long as you just use the idea germ and come up with your own unique plot and characters, it doesn’t count as plagiarism.
People watch. Go to a public place and look for interesting people. Invent situations and backstories for these people and use them to come up with an intriguing plot.
Write from your own experiences. Think about interesting moments from your everyday life. If you don’t want to write a memoir, add something or someone to the story that didn’t feature in the real life event. Remember that time last week you got all the way to the coffee shop counter before you discovered you’d left your wallet at home? Now, imagine someone behind you offers to buy your coffee for you, only now they want something in return. What happens next?
Talk to people. Ask them about interesting moments in their lives. Just make sure you change enough of the personal details or ask their permission before you use their life in your writing.

Looking for inspiration? Why not check out our list of the 20 Greatest Short Story Writers of All Time!

Step Two: Decide if you want to plot it or pants it

Now that you have a germ of an idea, it’s time to decide if you should begin writing your story now or continue to plot and plan. As you gain experience, you may find that one method seems to always work better than the other. This preference determines whether you are a ‘plotter’ or a ‘pantser’. However, it’s not unusual for this to actually change from story to story. So, whenever you have a new project, it might be worth beginning without plotting. You can always return to plotting later if it seems the story is going nowhere. The downside to always plotting everything is that you can lose some of the enthusiasm and excitement for the story by the time you’ve finished planning.

If you don’t think you’re ready to begin writing, here are some things to work on:

How to Plot and Plan a Short Story

Who are your characters?
For short stories it is a good idea to include only a few characters.
You’ll definitely need a main character (protagonist). If you already have an idea for your story, you can select a protagonist based on that idea. Who is likely to be in the situation of your story?
For example, if you decided to go with the story about a bomb disposal unit, it’s unlikely that your protagonist will be a sweet old lady with white hair and a penchant for crocheting tea cosies. That is, unless you want to write a comedy.
But it’s also a good idea not to make your protagonist too boring and predictable. Your first inclination can sometimes be influenced by stereotypes and unconscious biases. Your bomb disposal expert doesn’t have to be a G.I. Joe-type, she could be a capable and formidable single mother.
Once you know who your protagonist is, it’s time to work out what they want. Give them something to want and the story becomes about them trying to get it.
Perhaps in the story of a bomb disposal expert, the thing they want is to complete the mission so they can get home in time for their son’s seventh birthday.
Decide if you’re going to have a human antagonist
Every story needs some kind of conflict. It could be physical or metaphysical, it’s totally up to you.
Your antagonist could be another character who is preventing your protagonist from getting what they want, or your antagonist could be something much more ephemeral.
For example, in the story about a bomb disposal expert, perhaps the antagonist is time because she knows the bomb will go off at any moment.
Add one or two secondary characters
It’s very important you don’t include too many. Too many secondary characters can just confuse the story, make it too convoluted, or detract from the reader’s relationship with your protagonist.
However, secondary characters can add conflict and help move the narrative along, giving your protagonist something to react to.
Remember to give your secondary characters some backstory and something they might want. If the thing that they want interferes with what your main character wants, you’ve just given your story an extra layer of conflict.
In our hypothetical bomb disposal story, a secondary character could be young and gung-ho, with something to prove. It’s easy to see how this kind of character could create conflict for our protagonist who just wants to complete the mission and get back to her son.
Think about setting
Where will your story take place?
This is where research is really important. Try to find out as much as you can about the setting you’ve chosen for your story.
Make note of specific details that you can include in your story. You want your reader to feel like they are really there. Adding little specific details can sometimes be much more effective than a whole paragraph of vague description.
Consider story structure
The most common structure for fiction of any length is the ‘Three-Act Structure’. Beginning, middle, and end.
Act One: Beginning
Although this is sometimes referred to as the ‘introduction’, it’s really important with a short story that you don’t waste too much time before you introduce the ‘inciting incident’.
The inciting incident is the event that sets off the rest of the narrative. If you think of your characters as real people who exist outside of this story, then the inciting incident is the thing that happens that makes this part of their life worth writing about.
A big mistake when writing short stories is to begin too far away from the inciting incident. New writers will often assume that the very beginning of a story should be introducing the characters or the setting in which their story takes place. This is why so many stories by new writers will begin by describing the weather, or introducing us to the main character and giving us their backstory.
You do need to introduce your main character and the setting during the beginning of the story, but it doesn’t need to be in one big lump right in the first paragraph.
Another writing faux-pas is to begin with the main character waking up on the day your story takes place. This is almost always the wrong place to begin a story for the same reason you wouldn’t begin your story with your character being born. The beginning of their day might feel like a natural place to begin, but it’s as unnatural as ending your story with them going to sleep!
If you’re not sure when to begin your story, a good rule of thumb is to begin it just before or during the inciting incident.
The first third of your story should include:
The inciting incident.
An idea of place and time. However, these can be implied, not explicit.
An Introduction to the characters, some elements of their backstory and a set up of their motivations (what they want). These details should be cleverly interspersed. Don’t fill up the start of your story with exposition, however some exposition will be necessary.
The start of the story’s ‘rising action’.
Foreshadowing.
Remember, it’s not necessary to do all of these in the very first paragraph!
Act Two: Middle
The second act (middle part of your story) should include:
Rising action.
Confrontation.
Stakes getting higher.
Act Three: End
The third act (end) should include:
Crisis. This is the part of your story where it seems least likely that your protagonist will succeed at getting what they want.
Falling action.
Resolution, a deliberate lack of resolution, or a twist.

Step Three: begin writing

Whenever you decide to begin writing, it’s crucial that you let the words come out without worrying too much about how ‘good’ your story is.

Remember, the first draft is just about creating something to work with. Good writing comes from good editing. A first draft isn’t supposed to be any good. If you can take that pressure off the first draft, you’ll have learnt one of the most useful lessons about writing:

Writing is more like sculpting than painting. Painting is about adding more to the canvas to create something. With writing, your first draft is about making a block of clay to work with and editing is about shaping that clay into something beautiful.

Write with abandon, edit with precision.