Short Story

What is a short story?

'A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph, a novel is a film' - Lorrie Moore

​

A short story is a work of prose fiction that can be read in one sitting—usually between 20 minutes to an hour. There is no maximum length, but the average short story is 1,000 to 7,500 words, with some outliers reaching 10,000 or 15,000 words. At around 10 to 25 pages, that makes short stories much shorter than novels, with only a few approaching novella length. A piece of fiction shorter than 1,000 words is considered a “short short story” or “flash fiction,” and anything less than 300 words is rightfully called “microfiction.”

​

Research

• Find a list of the most famous short story writers and see if you recognise any

• Find quotes that sum up and give the spirit of the short story

• Look across the different genres at the range of stories and storytellers, and select some that you would like to read.

​

Famous short story writers:

• Raymond Carver - Considered one of the greatest American writers, Carver helped breathe new life into the short story in the late 20th century. His stories – Vitamins, Neighbours, Fat – are, like their titles suggest, full of small-town lives, down-on-their-luck characters and failing marriages. From a working-class background himself, Carver used pared-back prose to bring real, disillusioned existences to the page.

​

• James Baldwin - Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin was an influential writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and his collection of short stories Going to Meet the Man is widely regarded as one of the best in the genre. Concerning black lives in America, his writing deals with subjects such as racism, sexuality, integration and childhood.

​

• Anita Desai - Anita Desai’s stories capture life in India; family dynamics, female oppression and the everyday events of childhood. Her prose glitters with detail, transforming the ordinary into something almost magical. There are no happy endings here – Desai's stories have a bleak reality to them, the characters swept along by the currents of life. 

​

Short stories with quotes that show the spirit of the story:

• The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

​

​

"The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."

 

• The Lottery - Shirley Jackson

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”

​

​

Basic elements of a story

• Theme: Idea, belief, moral, lesson or insight. It's the central argument that the author is trying to make the reader understand. The theme is the "why" of the story.

​​

• Point-of-view: "Who" is telling the story? First person ("'') or third person ("he/she/it"). Limited (one character's perspective), multiple (many characters' perspectives) or omniscient (all knowing narrator).

      Second person ("you") is not often used for writing stories.

​

• Tone: The overall emotional "tone" or meaning of the story. Is it happy, funny, sad, depressed? Tone can be portrayed in multiple ways, through word and grammar choices, ' choice of theme, imagery and description, symbolism, and the sounds of the words in combination (i.e. rhyme, rhythm, musicality).

​

• Style: This is how things are said. Word choices, sentence structure, dialogue, metaphor, simile, hyperbole. Style contributes significantly to tone

​

 The steps to writing a short story

 

Step 1: Find your key emotion

​Before writing a short story, it is key that you think of the emotion you want to flow throughout it – this emotion is the core meaning of your story, the thing that readers are going to remember most and the reason as to why they continue reading. Although sounding simple, finding the key emotion you want your story to show can be difficult as most emotions come under an umbrella (for example, sadness could be about someone losing something of great sentimental value or someone losing a family member) - it is important you figure out what part of the umbrella you are wanting to write about. The most engaging key emotions come from real life, real stories and real people so try and take inspiration from those factors, however, if you are struggling to think of a key emotion looking at prompts and speaking to the people close to you can help get the ideas flowing. 

​

Step 2: Opening hook 

After finding out the key emotion of your story, you most likely have an idea of how you wish the story to unfold – this is helpful when it comes to the next step, the opening line. Within the opening line of your story, you must introduce us to the protagonist, tell us when and where the story is happening and set the tone of the novel/show you what genre the story is in. An effective method for writing the opening line is to write an opening hook, a sentence that immediately intrigues the reader and prompts them to ask questions.  

​

Step 3: Build the story

When beginning to build up your story and write, it is imperative that you remember with a short story you have a finite number of words – each word and sentence has to be important and carry the story in the least amount of words you can do. Whilst writing, you should read back on every sentence to make sure it directly advances the story or tells the reader an important part of backstory, if not, the sentence is not needed. As Edgar Allan Poe once said, ‘A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it’. 

​

Step 4: Write a strong ending

Your story's ending is important; it is the last chance to push your emotion and give it the high impact you want. If you are struggling to find an idea for the ending of your story, go back and review what you have already written and ask yourself questions such as ‘How would a reader want this to end?’ answering this involves a combination of what would realistically happen and what would be impactful. Once you have finished writing your ending, again, ask yourself these questions, does it make sense based on the rest of the story? If there's a twist, does the story hint at it without being too obvious? Does it make a strong emotional impact? When you can answer all these questions positively, you are ready to begin editing your story. 

​

Writing my own short story

Margaret once led a life of simple normality. A picturesque album of family-filled affection and a sense of community was all that she had known for generations- Margaret Lyson, the sweet elderly woman on the corner of Cherry Avenue, not a single malicious bone in her body. This persona, however, was long gone, now strangled, and drowned in the vicious flowing depths of grief and despair. The old Margaret never wore crimson, her mother always told her it washed her out, yet as she glanced at herself in the reflection of the clouded glass mirror, she had second thoughts. She decided that red was the colour she had missed her entire life. Hot, red blood dripped down every inch of her body, head to toe in an iron-like liquid, born from a lifetime of built-up resentment and constant reminders to bite her tongue and remain as polite as a woman should be. The knife that was once used to prepare meals for her kin for years was now an old friend, an encouraging aid inspiring her to kill, to get revenge over deep dents on her face created from fake smiles and laughter. Margaret had gone through life holding her breath, patiently waiting for the moment she could exhale, let everything go and finally become human. As she strode towards her final victim, she unclenched her white-knuckled fists and embedded her knife deep into the heart of the man, an act she had been waiting to fulfil for far too long. 

​

Evaluation