The 10 Steps to Successfully Write Short Stories
Follow these simple steps to create your best short story yet
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
There are countless ways to approach short story writing. The challenge is mainly to finish one that’s engaging, authentically you, well-structured, and inhabited by great characters.
The following ten steps will help you tackle these challenges and publish a well-written gem of a story.
#1: Find your style
Every author has a style. How that style comes across depends on the choices you make, your experiences, and your influences. Don’t worry too much about finding your writing “voice” yet, it’s going to be an amalgamation of the things you’ve read and what appeals to you in stories.
My style comes from studying the craft of writing, following writing courses, reading lots of articles, and analyzing the work of my favorite authors.
In the works of your favorite authors, notice how they describe people and places. How do they set up a scene? Identify how authors play around with plot twists and suspense. How do they make sure that you have to continue reading?
#2: What’s driving your story?
What do you want to say? What bothers you? What do you find intriguing? What do you hold dear or believe strongly in? You have to find one or several themes. However, one theme is usually the best decision when it comes to short stories. It gives you the space to explore and not confuse your readers with other ideas. Try to make one main point.
Approach your themes in an authentic way and don’t be afraid to pour your heart out, if you wrap it in beautiful prose. Hide your messages thoroughly, but leave clues to the reader, it’s like magic. Bring your experience into your writing.
#3: Know your audience
Write about what you want but bear in mind your readers. Writing is reciprocal. You are creating on your own, but on the other end are your readers. They interact with your ideas, characters, reflections, and the issues you pose. Readers invest in your work, therefore you should invest in your readers.
Invite the reader in. Make your character(s) relatable. Make readers wonder, think, and daydream about the issues you present. Create “What would I do in that situation?” conditions. A writer and his or her reader together shape a story. That’s where the magic happens. A transcendental experience from writer to reader.
Spend time thinking about who your readers might be. What can they get out of your work? What other stories do they read? What magazines and blogs would they read?
#4: Decide if you want to plot your story
There are two types of writers: those who plot their stories beforehand and those who don’t. Plotters and discovery writers. The latter figure out where their story goes while writing it.
For the sake of this list, I’ll focus on plotting short stories. I love plotting because it gives me a sense of control and I can map out what I want to say and how. That’s doesn’t mean that the plot is rigid.
The most important element of creating the plot is that you give your story and ultimately the reader, a sense of progress. There should be a roadmap. In your story, you make promises to your reader, usually at the beginning. This is like a foreshadowing of sorts; you leave the reader with an inkling of where your characters are going. You want twists and turns but you don’t want to disappoint the reader by turning the story into something different by the end. At the end of your story, you want to make sure you fulfill the promises you made to the reader, preferably in an unexpected and satisfying way.
How can you plot your short story?
Start with your story idea and build a premise
Think of the promises you’d like to make
Think about what insights you want your main character(s) to have at the end
Come up with a route your character(s) have to walk on to reach that end spread over different events or action points
Think of ways to make that route as interesting as possible to your readers
Map out the route in scenes and create bullet points of important character moments, clues, insights, and progression in the story
Then turn this into a smooth story
Characters, relationships, and progress. Those three elements to me are the most important to create an interesting plot. How will your characters develop? How do they interact and influence each other? How will they go from point A to point B?
#5: Structure your story
There’s no need to overcomplicate something that has worked for centuries.
The most typical way to structure a story is to divide it into three acts:
Act 1: Introduction. Here’s where you introduce your readers to your characters and establish your story setting and tone. Your protagonist is usually called to action here. Here you make some promises to your reader as to where the story leads to.
Act 2: Confrontation. The protagonist and his or her allies face some complications as they are moving along. Often things get worse for them and they need to find ways to tip the scale.
Act 3: Resolution. Which is what your main character tries to do in the last act. He or she is actually doing something to tip the balance, face trials, solve problems. As a writer, you have to build towards a satisfying conclusion here that is living up to the promises you’ve made early on in the story.
#6: Build your characters
Who are your characters? What motivates them? What do they want and why? Even if you have a great idea for a story, with an intriguing plot, if your characters are flat — or worse: not interesting — your story falters.
What elements make up an interesting character?
Competence. If you have characters who aren’t very competent (yet), it raises the tension. If he/she tries hard at becoming competent, your readers will cheer them on. Have someone people can root for.
Proactivity (or motivation). Kurt Vonnegut famously said: “a character must want something, even if it’s just a glass of water.” If your protagonist isn’t proactive (or forced into being proactive by another character), your story isn’t moving forward. What’s at stake?
Development. Ideally, your character(s) are different at the end of your story in comparison to who they were at the beginning. What lesson do they need to learn?
Conflict. Who or what gets in the way of your main character? What hurdles do they need to overcome to get from point A to B? Conflict between characters creates progress in a story.
Flaws. Flawed characters are likable, but it’s imperative that you make them overcome some of their flaws. No one is perfect. Plus, it may remind your reader of themselves. It may inspire them to grow just like your character. After all, stories grant us a way to see life through a different lens and learn something about ourselves and our place in the world.
#7: Develop a writing routine
Now that you are well underway to writing your story, it’s crucial that you actually produce and write. A writing routine is essential in keeping up with the work.
The following has helped me to create a working writing habit and routine:
Write 500 words a day. I recommend that you write every day. That way you’ll never lose focus, flow, and most importantly, the connection with your characters. Wake up half an hour earlier.
Find your writing moment. For me, that’s first thing in the morning before work, opening emails, social media, and other distractions.
Develop a habit for the ‘other stuff’. By this, I mean answering emails, promoting your work, creating social media posts, reaching out to agents or publications. I usually do this in the evening or on the weekends.
Learn and connect. Allocate some time for learning. Writing is a lonely endeavor. Many authors suggest getting in touch with other writers, to learn and grow together.
#8: Finish that first draft
The most important thing you can do for your story is to finish it. Just get it down on paper. This is known as the “shitty first draft”, full of errors, but at least it’s written down.
“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open,” Stephen King said. You need to do exactly that. Write that first draft just for you. Pretend no one will read it. Ignore your spelling or grammar errors.
I always write like this. And boy my first drafts are shitty. Not necessarily the story or the idea. Coherence is usually an issue, grammar surely too, there’s rusty dialogue, inconsistencies, etc. But that’s okay. The words are out! I’m writing, not doubting. I can rearrange, rewrite, and polish later in a second and third draft.
Perfection is your enemy when it comes to finishing that first draft. Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” So go ahead and make mistakes. Don’t look back on what you’ve written until you finish that first draft.
#9: Ask for help and gain feedback
To make quality work, you can’t rely on just you. You need others. Ask your (literary) friends, the avid readers, maybe even fellow writers or friends who studied literature or publishing to read and comment on your work. Join a writing group and critique each other’s work. Every short story I have written has been read and commented on by at least 3–5 people before I published it.
It’s not only spelling or grammar they look at. They look at continuity and if the things that I claim make sense. If the characters are relatable, real, and have depth. If I don’t utter any nonsense. The most important thing though — the stories get better and the message you want to bring across becomes stronger.
#10: Keep adding skills to your writing toolbox
Perhaps you’ve studied literature or English. Maybe you followed an intense creative writing course. The beauty with this craft is that you never stop learning. You learn when you read, when you interact with people, when you watch an intriguing show or even going to a museum or traveling.
Reading about writing routines of other writers, studying their style, following writing courses or studying grammar, it all contributes to your writing toolbox.
Make sure you find the tools you need to get better.
Course: Short Story Writing For Beginners
Have you always wanted to write short stories but do you have no idea where to begin?
Do you want to become better at writing fiction?
Perhaps you find it hard to come up with ideas for a story or to devise a plot.
Maybe you have difficulty developing your own style or is your dialogue rusty.
Let me help you navigate the land of short story writing from outlining your story to attracting readers.
In the course “Short Story Writing For Beginners”, we’ll dive into the technical parts of writing like:
Plotting
Structuring a story
Character building
Writing dialogue
We’ll also cover other aspects of the writing process:
How you can come up with ideas
How to find your voice
How to develop a writing habit
How to publish and market your stories in the current age
In this course, I will teach you to write a short story from start to finish. Let’s begin!
