THE LONG AND SHORT OF SHORT STORIES
By Simon Wood
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© 2007 Simon Wood. All rights reserved.
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Cover art: Julie Wood © 2009
SHORT STORIES: DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF
Blaise Pascal wrote, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time." This sentiment highlights the problem of short story writing. A short story is storytelling in its purest sense. It’s concentrated expression. The prose has to be streamlined because every word is an expensive commodity. No wonder so many writers have trouble writing short stories or just steer clear of them. Writing a short story is tough, but it’s no tougher than any other writing discipline.
To write a short story well, you need to understand the key elements of this story form. It’s easy to flesh out a character and plot over the course of a novel, but over a handful of pages, there’s a tendency to overcompensate. Novel size themes get squeezed into the story and then the whole thing reads like a synopsis. Let’s get one thing clear. Short stories aren’t compressed novels. They are their own species. Begin thinking in those terms and short stories get a lot easier to write.
The following points will help you write a better short story:
Get to the point. Short stories don’t have the time for long setups. The story needs to begin with a crisis or conflict and not the back-story about how the conflict came about. Back story should be woven into the tale and not appear as indigestible, expository lump at the beginning. The reader needs to be inserted into the story at the earliest possible moment. In novel terms, by the end of chapter one the story’s conflict is established. In short story terms, the same needs to be achieved by the end of the first page or even earlier when it comes to flash fiction. The use of action or dialog can really help here. A provocative statement from a character can provide the perfect setup for getting to the conflict. Example: in a story about a little league baseball team, a strong opening line would be, “I don’t want to lose to the Tigers again this year,” Mikey said. This line shows the reader the conflict, source of conflict and the character’s motivation.
Scope. By their nature, short stories are limited by the size of the story being told. They can’t afford a cast of thousands and an endless number of location changes. Short stories should be thought of in stage play terms. The story is going to take place in a finite space. Set changes are going to be limited by this small space. Only so much can happen on the stage and it can only support a limited cast. The key word for a short story is intimacy. It’s a snapshot in the lives of a handful of key characters. Unlike a novel, if a short story develops dozens of scenes, characters and locations, the tale doesn’t gather strength, it falls flat. There’s so much going on the depth is lost and characters become one-dimensional.
Think small. I don’t mean in theme or complexity. Sherlock Holmes saved the British Empire in a few thousand words on a regular basis. I mean think small in the execution. The conflict may be big but it must be solved swiftly. A novel might deal with the social injustices of poverty by highlighting the ineffectiveness of the welfare system, whereas a short story might demonstrate the same with the struggle of a homeless person trying to get a meal.
Short stories have beginnings, middles and ends too. A short story may be a snapshot, but the story needs to begin with a conflict and end with a resolution. A series of actions need to occur to reach that resolution. Just because it’s a short story doesn’t mean these elements may be omitted. Too often, novice short story writers write stories that are simply vignettes or secondhand accounts of something that happens. The reader is going to expect to be taken on a journey and they will want a destination. If the story is about the chicken crossing the road, it shouldn’t simply highlight the chicken’s journey across the road. The conflict is that the reader is told that the chicken desperately needs to cross the road, but there is an obstacle standing in his way. The resolution is whether the chicken actually achieves his mission.