In an age of constant distraction and novelty from a thousand different sources fighting for your attention, getting your writing in front of people and having them read it in its entirety gets more and more difficult with every addition to Amazon. However, if you can find someone with a few seconds or minutes to spare, putting a short story in front of them can be a good way to showcase your writing chops. Also, if novel writing is more your thing, you can use short stories to try out different methods of writing that can be brought into your core work. After writing several hundred, I’ve found a pretty good method to generating a self-contained short story that you can knock out in fifteen to thirty minutes. I tend to develop my stories by determining conflict, resolution, and a beginning in that order.
1. Conflict
You absolutely need to have a conflict to have a story. Anything else is more-or-less ‘slice of life’ writing, which absolutely can be interesting in its own right, but it’s not something the majority of the reading population demands. Wikipedia has a good starting list of different types of conflict that are commonly found in literature and every grade-school english class. There are an unimaginably large amount of ways to spin these conflicts into different settings or themes.
It is important to note that the conflict should not be overly complex. For a short story, only focusing on one character’s struggles is enough to keep it interesting while keeping the word count at bay. It’s extremely tempting to go above and beyond and write out every intricacy of what is going on, who is at odds with whom/what, etc, but this oftentimes takes time away from the next most interesting and important thing to have in your short story.
2. Resolve that conflict
If the conflict is not resolved, then the story is more of a cliffhanger than an actual tale: great to branch off of, but terrible to end with forever.
A lot of the time resolving your conflict with a twist or a big reveal tends to be more satisfying than doing what’s clearly obvious for the characters. Sometimes this ends up being a punchline, and can cheapens the story if it seems too random or there was no lead-up to it. When you’re done with your first draft, and you feel this is the case, try dropping in a few clues earlier in the story that make the ending more believable for the reader.
Regardless of what you do, make sure that your story has a conclusion before you start writing otherwise you risk writing yourself into an unbelievable ending. And finally…
3. Start your story
The last thing you should do, is actually start your story. This should be a cakewalk now that you know how your story ends and what your characters are struggling over. Here are two ways you can start yours:
Start the story with your conflict. Your reader will be dumped right in the middle of the action and can pick up the pieces of setting and characterization either through the conflict, or towards the resolution. If your readers need more background revealing your conflict, move on to the second method to start a story.
Give your reader some background. One or two sentences of some information that is necessary for the story should be enough. It is really important that the information sticks to being necessary, otherwise meandering may occur. If you do find yourself wanting to expand the story,or write an additional one, go for it! Just make sure you finish the one at hand before sending your characters off on another adventure.
Everyone has their own method, I just find that this works best for me. If you give this method a try, feel free to share. Creative feedback on shorter works can definitely be applied to longer pieces, and you get the chance to explore characters, events, and worlds!
This is the draft that I’m working on right now. It was rainy this morning, my kind of weather (❀ฺ´∀`❀ฺ)