Give the reader someone to root forĪgain, every story needs a protagonist. This is a great example of how you can build a story with just a single character. The reader needs someone to cheer on, someone to hate, and, occasionally, someone who serves to advance the character arc for either the protagonist or antagonist.Ī short story can even have as few as one character. In the Tom Hanks film Cast Away, the main character is alone for most of the movie. It’s difficult to properly develop a larger number of characters in a short story, and it's hard for a reader to keep track of them.Ī short story only needs three characters – a protagonist, antagonist, and what is referred to as a wrench or relationship character. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard that Keith Cavernaugh got murdered last night.”įred almost dropped his rake. Since a short story starts close to the final conflict, it needs to hit the ground running and catapult the reader headlong into the action from page one. Normally, the pace increases as the hero approaches the final conflict. Keep up the paceĪ fast pace is essential for short stories. Bypass the “before” and the “also related” and the “vaguely interesting thing that is also true of my character’s life” snapshots. So, get the reader right into your unfolding story. Good short story writers do this as well, sharpening their opening lines and paragraphs to ensure readers are pulled in off the bat, and keep reading. Why? Because giving a reader the details upfront is one way to let them know whether they want to read on. Newspaper articles include the entirety of the story as close to the opening of the article as possible. This is why short stories, unlike novels, usually focus on one aspect of a character’s life, or one aspect of a problem/relationship in a character’s life. And they need to resolve problems quickly. To tell a complete story on a smaller scale, they have to cut their stories down to the bone, excluding all fatty detail. Whereas novelists decide the length of their books, short story writers have to work within the confines of the word limit they're given. That means they both need to have these elements: inciting incident, rising action (progressive complications), climax, and falling action. And, no matter the length, they need to tell a story.
They need to be coherent, grammatically correct, and have proper spelling. Novels and short stories share some common characteristics. Understand that a short story is not the same as a novel So how do you go about writing a short story that will be accepted by a publication or website? Here are my top ten tips for writing a great short story. In fact, you can earn more money per word writing short stories than you can publishing a novel. Short stories are in demand by magazines, newspapers, blogs, and anthologies, and many of these publications pay authors for short stories. If so, writing short stories might be for you.
Or maybe you do write novels but want to try something different. Not every writer has the passion and time to write a novel.
Guest post by Willie Handler, author of two satirical novels, The Road Ahead and Loved Mars Hated The Food.
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