The technical parts of writing short stories, developing a solid routine and publishing your work

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash — Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

“A short story is a different thing altogether — a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.” — Stephen King

Stephen King, Charles Bukowski, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut all have one thing in common: they started their careers writing short stories. And with them a whole lot of your favorite writers. How can you start writing short stories if you’re a beginner?

First, what is a short story? Neil Gaiman has a good definition: “Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.”

Why should you write a short story? Perhaps a novel is still too daunting, and you want to test the waters of fiction. Or you want to become better at the craft and train yourself. Writing short stories helps you to discover your writing voice and how you can convey your ideas into fiction. It sure did for me. After writing and publishing 30+ short stories I dared writing a novel, and then another one. The second got published (in Dutch), called ‘The secret portraits of Mondrian’. I’m now working on another novel, while pitching the first.

Writing short stories has taught me so much. I started out with one story and have been published on many outlets, improved my writing, found my voice and went on a journey to new lands like podcasting, publishing books, writing a novel and writing about writing and creativity.

Based on my experience, dozens of books on writing and creativity and many creative writing and publishing courses, I launched a book and course how to write short stories for beginners. This guide contains a large part of that material and is divided into two sections. The first part focuses on the technical parts of writing a short story, the second part focuses on the publishing side and how to create a writing routine. Because it’s one thing to learn how to plot or write dialogue, but it’s another thing entirely to be able to produce consistently and publish and market your work.

Part 1: The technical parts of writing a short story

1.1 Plotting

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.

Let’s illustrate the difference with two examples:

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all plot ever should be. It is human desire to let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.” — Ray Bradbury

This is one way to look at the plot. Based on what Bradbury is saying here we can conclude he’s a discovery writer.

“A plot is the purposeful progression of events. Such events must be logically connected, each being the outgrowth of the preceding and all leading up to the final climax. I stress the words events because you can have a purposeful progression of ideas, or of conversations, without action. But a novel is a story about human beings in action.” — Ayn Rand

Do you notice the difference in approach? Rand obviously plots her stories, described as a progression of events. I prefer to plot a story too and I frame events in a story structure (see next section) that has a clear flow from beginning to end. You don’t have to treat this as a rigid format to write. To me, it merely functions as a skeleton of my story. Let your imagination guide you. Sometimes the plot can change because you invent a new direction. That’s fine. Let your outline be a living organism. It’s the best of both worlds, although structure comes first.

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 fulfil the promises you made to the reader, preferably in an unexpected and satisfying way.

I like to view plotting a short story as setting up chapters for a manual to achieve the desired outcome. But some people never open the manual and just try out different stuff to reach the same result. It’s up to you!

Personally, I think it’s good to have a clear view of the message you want to bring across with your story and what your endgame is. About 75% of the time, I work like this with my short stories.

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

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?

1.2 Structuring a story

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.

You can use this structure to plot your story against and it’s a good starting point if you want to (start) write short stories.

The Box

You can add an extra layer to it, to create more depth by using “The Box” structure. The Box is basically the techniques you use to tell your story. It consists of the plot, setting, and characters. When these elements are in some kind of conflict, you have your story.

This box can be depicted in different ways and is completely up to the author.

“Good prose should be transparent, like a windowpane.” — George Orwell.

This is Orwell’s take on the box. But it doesn’t have to be yours. You may build a glass in lead window, with beautiful prose and multiple layers. Or you can have some smudges on the window, just to give your story some grit. When your box is really pretty, you may call it literary work. It’s up to what type of writer you want to be and what your “voice” is.

What should you want to achieve with your box?

A plot that serves the type of story you want to tell
Have interesting characters
Have a distinctive setting (here your story can be most unique)

It’s not like I’m sitting at my desk looking at a picture of The Box and figure out my plot, characters, setting and the type of conflict they must be in. I use this tool more as something to measure my story against. Is every element distinctive and interesting enough? Does the story work?

1.3 Character building

“What does your character want, what is his dream, what shape has it, and how expressed? Given expression, this is the dynamo of his life, and your life, then, as Creator.” — Ray Bradbury

Who are your characters? What motivates them? What do they want and why? The latter question is perhaps the most important. When I attended a talk by Jonathan Franzen, he said: “A character should want something, even if it’s something small like a glass of milk.” Franzen explained that that is how he starts building his novels, by identifying what his characters want, which ultimately becomes a plot of sorts. The main question becomes: how do they get want they want (or not)?

These questions are not to be taken lightly. 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. Don’t fail at characters, fail on other things, but not your characters.

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 a 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.

“In the meantime, can you see what your people look like? What sort of first impression do they make? What does each one care most about, want more than anything in the world? What are their secrets? How do they move, how do they smell? Everyone is walking around as an advertisement for who he or she is-so who is this person? Show us. Go into each of these people and try to capture how each one feels, thinks, talks, survives.” — Anne Lamott

Character dossiers

A well-known aid in building characters is to use a character dossier. If you Google this, you’ll find thousands of templates.

Templates range from providing basic info like age, gender, and occupation to mannerisms and political views. My advice is to only use what serves your story. It doesn’t make sense to spend time thinking about your character’s favorite food, color, and shoe brand if you don’t need it for your story.

Especially in short story writing, I would not dive into deep into coming up with complete character profiles. Use only what you need.

Plotting your character

If you really want to go all the way, you can “plot” your character. It may sound mechanical, but it’s a thorough way of defining a character. Libbie Hawker wrote a great book about this. You look at your character’s journey in your story as a roadmap going from A to B. That transition has to do with overcoming some sort of inner flaw, where point B is the stage where they have grown into someone else. They might have overcome a huge obstacle and learned something about themselves and the world. How do they get there? Who and what do they need along this road to get there?

To outline your character, you can use the following elements:

Define your main character. Who is she?
Define her external goal(s). What is she after? What does she want to overcome?
Who’s the antagonist, the one challenging your main character?
How is the plot of the story (the events and actions) connected to her growth?
Define point B. Who is your main character by the end of your story? What’s changed?
Describe her main flaw(s) she wants to overcome. This is usually connected to her external goals.
Who is your main character’s ally in her journey? How does he or she help?
Connect the growth of your character to your story’s theme if possible.

1.4 Writing dialogue

“Dialogue is the way to nail character, so you have to work on getting the voice right.” — Anne Lamott

Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson uses the MICRO rules for writing good dialogue:

Motive: Let the motivations of your characters seep through what they say.
Individuality: Write dialogue in such a way so you can tell the characters apart.
Conflict: Good dialogue has its own innate conflict in it.
Realism: How realistic do you want your writing to be? Make a decision.
Objective: Why do the characters say something? What is their aim?

Read your dialogue out loud. Does it sound right? Do people talk that way? Reading your words out loud is always a good way to self-edit.

Use the correct interpunction. I never studied writing or English. One of the best things to do when you want to learn to write is to read a lot. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Dialogue can move a story forward, it creates interaction with your characters and above all, conflict. Dialogue done well is better than good narrative.

When I started writing short stories, I struggled with writing dialogue. I shortened sentences ‘as you say it’, which is not often stylistically considered as good prose. I mean, if your character has a certain accent or speaking disability, go for it! But do so wisely and consistently.

Another thing I messed up was the sentence structure. Just write down dialogue as people say it in real life, right? No. Don’t punish your reader. People like clear and complete sentences. Don’t or leave out pronouns as we tend to do when we speak. That doesn’t work in fiction.

Part 2: The writing and publishing process

2.1 Coming up with ideas

I believe you can train your mind to come up with creative ideas. An idea I took from writer James Altucher is to write down 10 random ideas every day. I did that for a year and the results were amazing. Ideas come to me all the time. Not only did it help me in my writing, but it’s a great way to become better at problem-solving. Whether that’s something in your story or in general. But a nice walk outside does the trick too, or just sitting in a chair drinking coffee or tea without distractions.

Here’s a structure that works well for me in coming up with story ideas.

Step 1: Idea mining

When you have a notebook or a note app full of ideas, fragments, character sketches, quotes, anything, you can use that for your short stories. I have a list of about 10–15 story ideas, with a synopsis. Pick an idea and start from there.

Step 2: Finetune your story setting

So, we’ve picked an idea. It’s important to think of a believable setting and background for our story. What does the world look like? What’s our characters’ motivation? What conflict is there in the story?

Observe your surroundings. Listen in on conversations. Read a book or watch a movie or documentary. Go to a museum. Take on anything related to your story.

Step 3: Research what you don’t know

The first steps are taken; we have a subject to write a story about and we’ve created a setting for the story. But what if it’s a subject you’re unfamiliar with? You have to do the research.

Jot down your ideas and things you’ve found in the Word file of your story.

Step 4: List your ideas at the end of your document and start writing

Transfer your best ideas, plot points, pieces of dialogue or other phrases to the bottom of your document. Now it’s time to write. At this point, you probably have an image in your mind as to how you want to start off your story. Go from there. Use the ideas at the bottom of your document as your guide in writing your story. Constantly refer back to them. Copy/paste and write.

Step 5: Bullet point paragraphs

So, you’ve started writing the story. Maybe it flows right out of you till the end. Maybe not. What helps me is to go back to my idea list at the bottom again and start mapping out the rest of the scenes of the story.

Step 6: Write 500 words every day

Now you can (easily) finish your story. If you would write down 500 words a day, you have a 5,000-word story ready in ten days. And remember, it’s your first draft! It doesn’t need to be perfect. Sculpting comes later!

Step 7: Edit

You’ve made it! Nice. Now you have a rough first version. Read it out loud. Then edit.

Carefully improve your prose, take out inconsistencies, solve problems and make sure you’re properly showing the reader what’s happening. Then, let other’s read it and give you their feedback

2.2 Finding your voice

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut… If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” — Stephen King

Every author has a style. How that style comes across depends on the choices you make, experience, and influences. Don’t worry too much about finding your writing “voice” though, it’s going to be an amalgamation of the things you’ve read and what appeals to you in prose.

My style comes from studying the craft of writing, following writing courses, reading lots of articles and analyzing the work of my favorite authors.

Study the greats

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?

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting.” — Ray Bradbury

Here’s a neat little trick you can use to find what styles of writing you like and to learn from the best. I learned this from a podcast interview with popular writer and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss:

• Study one classic from before 1900

• One classic from the last century

• And one from the last decade or so

What makes these books such classics? Is it because of their themes, their tone, the characters, style? How come they have stood the test of time? Can you find patterns between those three books? Find what you like in these stories and learn from them. Consciously or unconsciously, you will take what you have learned from these stories and put it into your own work.

2.3 Developing a writing habit

Some authors aim to write a book a year (Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson), others take ten years to finish a novel (Donna Tartt). Everyone’s routine is different. The most important thing is that you find both what works best for you and that you find a way to be productive, actually produce work, and bring it to the masses.

The following things help 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. I usually use the late afternoon for this.
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.

Find out your (daily) writing goals. Plan them in your calendar. Are you at your best early in the morning? Do you like to write at night, when the house is quiet? Stick to it and do it every day. Your work will accumulate fast.

The most important thing is that you find both what works best for you and that you find a way to be productive, actually produce work, and bring it to the masses.

2.4 Publishing and marketing your stories in the current age

Naturally, you want people to read your short stories. You need to publish them in some form.

First and foremost, you must decide what your aim is. Do you want to be featured in literary magazines? Do you want to get yourself on the radar of agents and publishers?

Publishing

With short stories, the best option you have is to send your story to literary journals. If you go the traditional route. There are tons of them out there. Just check Writer’s Market. In their yearly book, tons of publications and their focus are listed.

I launched my own website and to gain traffic I reached out to blogs whose message fitted my stories. This resulted in much traffic. I posted my stories on Reddit (which I didn’t like). I posted my stories on Medium. Plus, I published an eBook and Paperback with a collection of my short stories on Amazon.

Promoting your stories

Depending on how much time and effort you want to put into promoting your stories, I would at least suggest doing the following:

Start a Medium page and publish your stories there
If you have time, set up your own blog (I opted for Squarespace and picked a template and had a site in about two days)
Find out which traditional magazines publish short stories and enter contests
If you have some stories collected, publish them on Amazon and learn the ropes

Marketing

“Publish your writing in as many places as humanly possible and do as many different types of writing as well. A stand-up comic doesn’t build an audience performing at home — they go anywhere there is a mic. Same with writers.” — Ryan Holiday

To attract readers, you must first determine what you want to achieve with your stories. This is in line with the previous part about publishing. Once you’ve published your stories, there are several ways to attract readers:

Start your own blog with a goal: Set a goal of a number of monthly visitors you want to achieve. Be realistic, but make it challenging enough for yourself to work hard at achieving it. Then, even if you will not make the exact mark, you’ve stretched yourself and have reached more people than with a save goal.
Publish on Medium: You can tag your stories (obviously) to reach people who are interested in those subjects. If you write often and publish quality work, you can become a top writer on a topic. In addition, if you write quality work, Medium curators might recommend your story on certain topics. I’ve had that a couple of times with my short stories and I definitely noticed a bump in the number of readers.
Enter contests and apply to publications: Through websites like Submittable, you can upload your story to these publications. Most of them charge you for this and you’re never guaranteed to get published. Publications offer prices for your work if you get published. Sometimes thousands of dollars. I’ve tried this for a while, however, without any luck. I picked a handful of publications that fit the themes and styles of my stories. If you want to give this a go, I suggest you do your research first and then start submitting some of your stories. Do note that most of these literary journals want original work only. That means stories unpublished in print or online form. Since I was adamant on sharing my stories on my blog, I disqualified myself for 95% of the submissions.
Reach out to other blogs: What I used to do with every story I published, was to make a list of blogs that touched upon a similar topic as the topics in one of my stories. Usually, blogs post non-fiction articles, but a similar message can be really powerful through fiction, I think.
Try to get published on other platforms: Reddit, Wattpad, Thrive Global, etc.
Use Social Media: find out which one works best and focus. Join Facebook groups on writing and share your experiences with each other, share resources, or critique each other’s work. I started a Facebook group exclusively for Short Story Writers, you can apply here to enter.
Make and promote your Kindle books: Promote your book on your site, link to it in your articles (if appropriate), post about it on social media, promote it in a newsletter or in Facebook groups. Basically, use all the platforms I mentioned in the sections above. Invest time in setting the right keywords (works like SEO). Amazon’s KDP program is the best tool for this. Explore the platform and watch their instruction videos to optimize your book.

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Short Story Writing For Beginners - A Guide