Greetings from the edge,
Funny thing, but as soon as you tell someone you’re a writer, they ask for advice on how to write. It doesn’t matter if you’re any good or not. It doesn’t matter if you’re published. Once you tell anyone who likes books that you write, after the standard “What do you write?”, which is usually the point where people begin edging towards the nearest exit, the question always comes:
“How do you do it?”
Well, without ego or self-aggrandisement, here are the five main rules I’ve pieced together from years of reading and a modest amount of failed writing.
Make your reader feel something real
A short story is really just a 1,000 to 7,000-word exercise in making your reader feel something. Regardless of your genre, horror, sci-fi, literary fiction, or something wonderfully niche, like a torrid romance about a vampire and a banshee opening a karaoke bar, the reader needs to feel delight, sadness, hope, shock, fear, disgust, or joy.
If your story does not move them emotionally, it has not truly landed.
Keep the story built around one main arc
Keep in mind the “short” part of short story. Ernest Hemingway supposedly did it in six words:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
The point is that a short story is not simply a novel in miniature wearing Groucho Marx glasses and a fake nose. You do not have room for half a dozen point-of-view characters, three subplots, and a detailed history of the local tax system.
Stick to one main problem, one main character, and one clean narrative line.
Build everything around an “Oh crap!” moment
Good short stories revolve around a central conflict. Great ones revolve around one enormous emotional moment that has the power to change everything for the protagonist.
You can place that moment anywhere you like: before the story begins, at the start, in the middle, at the end, or even implied after the story closes. But there should be a moment that lands like “a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick,” to borrow from Douglas Adams.
Sometimes that moment can be quite small. A man decides to stop smoking in Quitters, Inc.. Sometimes it can be huge, like Charlie Gordon volunteering for the experiment in Flowers for Algernon.
Show emotion through action, not explanation
This is the old chestnut of “show, don’t tell.” Entire books have been written about those three little words.
For our purposes, all you need to know is that even if the word count rises a little, it is always more vivid to say:
Wolfgang gasped, clutching at his chest as pain-wracked cries echoed into the night.
Than it is to simply write:
Wolfgang was in pain.
Readers connect more deeply when they can see emotion unfold through behaviour, dialogue, and imagery rather than just being handed a label.
Story ideas are everywhere if you train yourself to notice them
The most random, strange, and downright ridiculous things can spark story ideas. Pictures, overheard conversations, dictionary words, news stories, memories, and odd encounters are all fuel for the furnace.
Writing often starts by asking “What if?” until you eventually stumble into the thing that would shatter your character’s world.
An old improv rule is to say “yes, and…” and keep building until you have something complete. It turns out that is pretty solid advice for writers too.
Well, that’s about it from me for today. I’ve got a pile of reading to get through, and a few more article ideas bouncing around in my head, including one about running one-shot adventures.
See you in the margins,
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