Or, what if use discovered you could fly? The starting point for a great short story is always an interesting idea.įor example, you could build a short story around the question: What would happen if dogs suddenly started talking? This short story concept must be interesting and simple since it will provide the skeleton on which your short story will be built. Great short stories tend to be built around one engaging idea. Employ a recognizable short story structure.īefore you write a short story, you need a great short story idea.This technique employs four simple short fiction writing tools: Think of this as a jump-off point, a starting point from which you can build. So, below is ONE place you can begin to write your short story.
However, for new writers looking to flex their short story writing muscles for the first time, they must have some kind of understandable structure on which to build their first stories. There are just so many types of short stories, ranging from intense pieces of character development to expansive short stories that create new worlds, that pinpointing just one type of story is impossible. It is almost impossible to define just one way to write a short story. One of the most beautiful and frustrating aspects of deciding to write short stories is the freedom it brings to the process. You can see from the image below, which looks at the average short story length from different short story writers, that the length of their short stories differs from writer to writer. The thing is, even short story writers produce stories of different lengths. Perhaps the most famous example of micro-fiction is Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Stories less than 500 words are considered to be micro-fiction. Stories that range from 500 to 1,00 words are classed as flash fiction ( here’s a great example). The creative writing landscape contains several types of fiction.Ī story around 40.000 words is considered a novella, and one between 7,000 and 17,000 is a novelette.Ī short story length is typically around 5,000 words in length but maybe as long as 7000 words. It is easy to assume that any work of fiction that is shorter than a novel (about 80,000 words) can be classed as a short story, but this is not the case.
One of the first questions short story writers often ask when they start to write a short story is 'how long should my short story be?'
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