My 5 Tips for Writing Short Stories

Why swim at the surface when you can dive straight in?

Right off the bat, what are my credentials for handing out my hallowed pearls of wisdom? Nothing substantive enough that should make you want to listen, I will admit.

I have written a novel. It is, however, unpublished. More to the point, the last time I checked a novel and a short story aren’t the exact same thing. I’ll have to look that up to be sure, but I’m fairly sure I’m on solid terra firma there.

I have written poetry since my teens, some of which is on Medium. But once again, the poem and the short story, wholly synonymous and forever in inviolable matrimony they are not. I really must consult with someone on this issue.

Lastly, I do have two short stories up on Medium and many more not on Medium for one reason or another. And two is not many, actually, it’s very few.

The first is about cows and the quandaries of freedom. I will write one or two more parts for it, at the behest of Randy Pulley.

The second is a thoroughly darker affair and centres on a man who has drunk himself so deep into a hole that he can do naught but keep on drinking. It’s called ‘Skimming’.

So, really, the only impetus driving the weight of my words is the words themselves and whether you find something sufficiently stirring and sensible in them.

Without further ado and additional waffle — the tips.

1. Jump straight in

Dive straight in ensuring the whole of your body is at least a few feet below the surface from the word go. It’s not about dipping your toes in slowly to tentatively test the water. Nope. Get stuck in nice and deep just as quick as you can.

Why? It’s not a novel; it’s not even a novella. As a rule, the longer you intend your story to be, the more time you have to wander about to breathe in the vaporous grandeur of the world you have conjured up. However, if you are conceiving of it as a short story, be it a bit longer or a bit shorter, you definitely need to adopt the mindset that backstories, ancillary avenues and secondary river systems are not your friends. They are your enemy and will only dilute the concentrated potency of your work. This goes for both the beginning of the story and the entirety of the tale.

How you jump in is up to you.

You may jump in with the essence of what your story is.

Here’s Nikolai Gogol with ‘The Nose’:

An extraordinarily strange thing happened in St. Petersburg on 25 March.

Boom. He’s told us exactly what we’re going to be reading straight away. We’re in the strange thing from the get-go; we’re not being led to the strange thing over several sentences.

Or you may begin with a powerful statement about life or your character’s emotional state or a core aspect of the story.

James Joyce does just this in ‘The Sisters’:

THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.

Any mote of doubt is smashed to dust as to the hopelessness of whoever we’re talking about with the capitalised ‘THERE’. What does the third stroke mean? A stroke as in an attack upon the brain or something more obscure? Who knows? We’ll find out, but of prime importance is that we can be most assured in our knowledge that all hope has been irretrievably extinguished.

At the beginning of the next paragraph Joyce tell us, ‘Old Cotter was sitting at the fire … .’ Notice, he didn’t lead with this for the reason that it’s incidental to his story, rather he got straight away in there with a cold and brutal truth as to what we are going to read. No messing around.

As a small sidenote, names are often incidental. State them quickly as some of the Russian writers do, often to comic effect — ‘One fine evening, a no less fine government clerk called Ivan Dmitritch Tchervyakov.’ (Chekhov). Or don’t even bother with names at all. Either way, the naming of characters shouldn’t take up much room in any short story.

Lastly, here’s ‘Cows’:

‘Never a slave before been who didn’t a cruel crack find freedom’s love on the shoulder,’ said the Wise Old One, the wisest of us all before she went away, as we all hope to one day.

We’re right in there with an essential truth of the story couched in a somewhat unusually constructed but hopefully powerful and memorable sentence. No faffing about.

Remember, get right to the heart of the matter at hand from your very first sentence. What that heart is specifically is up to you, but you should be there from the off.

2. Show or say things quick

Show your readers what you want them to know using the power of deftly and craftily positioned language, or say what you want them to know quickly. Do one and/or the other. The cardinal sin to avoid at all costs is to take a long time to TELL your readers something. It’s clumsy and they’ll feel you as a heavy omnipresence weighing the piece down and forcing them to wade through your stodgy storytelling.

This is poor writing always, full stop. But it’s particularly problematic when it comes to a short format.

Explaining too much in writing is like explaining a joke — it destroys the magic.

Imagine you had 30 minutes to explain to a learned audience the rigours of an idea you are well-acquainted with. And imagine you take 10 minutes overall at various points to tell them in no small detail about a number of points that lead away from the core aspects of the idea. The more you do this, the more they start to notice YOU and not the IDEA that you’re supposed to be talking about.

Explaining too much in writing is like explaining a joke — it destroys the magic.

If you are going to be visible, then you need to break the fourth wall properly and make yourself a proper character in the experience. And you can’t do this half-assed; these kinds of meta-movements need to permeate your story actively and consistently. Anything in between and you’ll be an unwanted presence, a ghost at the feast, as opposed to a limber and light-footed master of language leaping and somersaulting to break form just as soon as you build it.

A few examples:

I came home, closed the door and said to my wife, ‘I’m never fixing his fuckin’ car again.’ ‘I always love it when my husband curses at me first thing after a long day at work.’

He’s a mechanic, obviously, and he’s pissed off, and his wife comes across as calm, considered and no small bit witty. I haven’t told you anything directly and you’re right in there with knowledge of his job and a whole lot more.

Or:

John was a mechanic and probably still is.

I’m matter of fact about it and have given a little dry twist to make it sit better. It’s all quick though. No long laborious labour-intensive waffle about things that should be communicated indirectly or said quickly.

An example of sinful writing:

John was a mechanic. He had been a mechanic for some time and was starting to feel a little jaded. When he first started it was fine …

Start with John being jaded. He’s a jaded man. The fact he’s a mechanic is incidental, and this should be used for dressing your story up. The fact he’s a mechanic is flesh and form to make things more interesting; the fact he’s jaded is skeleton to hang your story on.

3. The ‘there’ and not the ‘getting there’

A novel can be an examination of anything or a meditation on anything; be it the ups and downs of your hero, the fullness of your fictional world or the movement of large sheathes of history. It shouldn’t be boring of course, but the getting wherever you’re going to be at the end is most always far more important than the final destination.

A short story is a very different animal: it’s a punch, a blast, a snippet, a fleeting look at a fleeting moment, a zenith, a nadir, the last gasps of a dying creature regarding its imminent destruction.

In a novel, the journey to the edge of the cliff is part of the magic and readers want to go on that journey to see how everything will get to that point. In a short story, it’s the point we’re after, not the journey.

A short story is a very different animal: it’s a punch, a blast, a snippet, a fleeting look at a fleeting moment, a zenith, a nadir, the last gasps of a dying creature regarding its imminent destruction.

Think of it like this. An elephant is an animal which lives for a long time and meanders about for a great many years, eating, learning, teaching, developing, thinking, fighting, raising its young, socialising and generally doing its thing. This is a novel.

A shrew is a hyper-aggressive animal which consumes 200–300% of its body weight each day with a life expectancy of 1 to 2 years. It blasts about the world being precisely where it needs to be at every single second before bouncing on to the next point where it needs to be again. This is a short story.

An elephant can take its time; a shrew cannot.

Accordingly, you need to begin with the precipice, or just before it, and not the walk to the precipice.

Here’s the opening scene from ‘Skimming’:

The stones fly from my hand through the black. Sometimes I see them land, bounce and break the water. On bright nights when the Moon is full-faced, or when the lights on the promenade have the strength to pierce the night, I can sometimes see the lines they trace through the twilight before trickling off and submitting to the small waves or the still sea. Sometimes.

The story’s called skimming and it’s about a man who is lost to alcohol. And the story starts with him on the beach firing off stones into the black water and drinking all alone on the beach. We are at the precipice from the very start.

You can focus on the fall or the moment just before things change or shatter or split apart, but readers should be close to the edge from the start.

Another aspect of this, and a function of the logic of the precipice, is that your tale should probably centre on the most interesting points in time, which means highs, lows and moments of sweeping change. The short-story format isn’t going to be able to get across the sort of textured fullness that transformation and change over time necessitates. So pick the best dishes; don’t try to communicate the full breadth of the menu.

4. Or take the self-contained whole

In fact, it is possible to take a sequence of events wherein a person or something or other undergoes a series of changes. You will just need to perceive it as brief overview of a number of events or some type of cycle, like a schemata of the life cycle of a caterpillar or a charting of the ages of humanity.

The longer your short story, the longer you have to delve into each one of the stages of the transformation or journey. But remember, if you go on too long and you end up with 100 pages, the whole undertaking may fall down like a house of cards: what may be powerful, poignant and captivating for 50 pages may be tedious and overwrought for 100.

A case in point of this is Lev Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’. The story charts the demise of the eponymous Ivan, a high-court judge, who after seemingly innocuously having a fall at home begins to slowly decline, going from a mild-mannered and moderate materialist to a reclusive figure racked with troubling thoughts and contemplating his own fate and the meaninglessness of his erstwhile existence.

At around 60 pages, this is closer to a novella, but regardless of how we categorise it, it is an extremely powerful tale about how we should and shouldn’t perhaps live life. Would this work at 100 pages? No, almost definitely not. It would run out of steam and its essential substantiveness would end up evaporating.

So, get to the cliff from the get-go, pick the highs and lows, and know how deep you should and shouldn’t dive into any one stage if you do wish to take the reader on a journey.

5. Nothing is too absurd

This last one attests to the limitlessness of the short-story form.

You would think that a novel offers far greater possibilities for a meditation on the human condition, and you can definitely go far deeper and wider in a longer piece than a shorter one.

Yet, novels need to make sense, at least somewhat, for the reader to keep on reading and feel satisfied. They need to be compelling, well-balanced and be propelled by the right sort of subject matter that can fuel the experience. Actions and circumstances need to be rationalised and make sense within the parameters of the novel; something cannot just materialise out of thin air and deus ex machina is a mortal sin.

Your story doesn’t need to necessarily make sense in the big scheme of things because there is no big scheme of things.

This is not so with the short story. You don’t need to explain the why so much as the what takes centre stage. This removal of the need to rationalise where things come from and why they’re happening bequeaths a freedom of limitless possibilities. Your story doesn’t need to necessarily make sense in the big scheme of things because there is no big scheme of things. Nor do you need to hack away until you fashion a plot, a set of characters and a compelling thematic base that will be robust enough and enthralling enough to drive the reading experience.

Really, you can do anything you want as long as you appreciate the form for what it is, what it isn’t and how it should be used. So, go wild.

There you are, my 5 tips for writing short stories.