by Simon Wright

Created on: February 21, 2007   Last Updated: May 03, 2009

Short stories can be a great way to flex your writing muscle and are often a good stepping stone towards becoming a fully fledged novel writer. They can help the writer to learn the basics of character creation, plot development and writing convincing dialogue. The fact that you are writing a short story, which by its very nature will have some sort of word restriction, also forces the writer to be concise and cut out the waffle. This may actually be the biggest single benefit that short story writing may bring to the budding novelist as editors come down very hard on work that is unnecessarily padded.

The first stage of writing a short story is to come up with an idea. Often, writers may be responding to a short story competition which may have laid down some guidelines in terms of story length and topic or genre. Once you've got that initial seed of an idea, you need to start to nurture it to bring it to fruition. Some of the questions that you should ask yourself include:

- What central point are you trying to convey?

- Who are the main characters and what makes them interesting?

- How is the story going to finish and can I tie it up within the wording restriction?

- How am I going to keep the reader interested?

You should also think about whether you're going to write the story from a first person or third person perspective. First person can be very powerful where you have a main central character that the story resolves around but it can be limiting, whereas third person enables you to describe action that takes place beyond your central character's view.

Before you actually put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), I'd also strongly recommend that you take the time to read a few short story anthologies. Two that I would advocate are 'Barcelona Plates' by Alexei Sayle, and 'Things snowball' by Rich Hall. Both are very funny and helped me to understand the art of telling a story in short form as opposed to a novel.

When you are ready to start writing, you should begin by sketching out a rough plot. I've found that the main difficulty in writing short stories is keeping them short - having a pre-defined plot will help you stick within the short story boundaries and reduce the likelihood of you getting halfway through the story and then getting stuck.

You can then move onto the fun part of actually writing the story. Consider what the most dramatic point is to start the story, and whether you want to tell it in chronological order or via flashbacks. Then, it's just a case of starting to get those words down and going through the writer's usual phase of fervered inspiration. You will undoubtedly have your own writing style but take care to ensure that your pacing and dialogue are consistent.

Finally, having written the story, go back and review it. Are there ways that you can improve it? Are there any inconsistencies or typos? You should then have a finished script which you can start to show to other people and get feedback on. As well as providing usual exercise for prospectve novelists, there is also a reasonable market for short stories with magazines and some websites, so it's certainly a genre that is worth exploring. Also, if you do manage to win some short story competitions, then that's a great thing to be able to display on your writing CV!

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