Short Stories – Update, Tips and Advice

Hi, so recently I’ve been looking at short stories and why they’re so popular. Alongside this I’ve also been writing a few of my own, that who knows, may be published in the future (hopefully!).

I started off by borrowing a few short story magazine issues from my Dad, including the Jan-Feb 2011 issue of Interzone, one of the leading Science Fiction magazine. This issue featured short stories by authors such as Douglas Lain, Michael R Fletcher and Sue Burke.

There are a variety of structures that short stories can have, the most common one in my opinion is where you have a protagonist with a problem, they then try three times to solve it with each try getting harder and more complicated. The character will then either succeed or fail on the third go and will come out wiser and better from the experience.

Alternatively a short story could be a shortish action scene or a fantastic piece of descriptive writing. Either way it has to be gripping, exciting and well-written.

After I’d read a few of these stories I found that I had several ideas forming so I began to write them down, just in brief bullet point form at first before I began to further develop the plots.

One thing I have found with writing a few short stories is that because you only have a few pages to fill, you have to start as close to the action as possible, cut out anything that isn’t relevant and get rid of those background characters that don’t do anything for the story.

In my opinion, an ideal short story won’t completely finish the story, but leave a few questions unanswered that the readers can begin to further speculate about. A short story is designed to be read in one sitting so it has to introduce the characters, setting and problem pretty quickly as well as delving into the plot at the same time. In general short stories can range from 500 words to 10,000 words, although I think that 2,000 to 8,000 is about the average.

So, I’ve started two short stories, both of the fantasy/sci-fi genre; their ‘working titles’ are Caught Out and The Rats In The Attic.

If you’re thinking of writing a short story to be published, my advice to you is: read a lot of short stories first, find a publisher (this may be an online magazine, a best-selling short story magazine, or a company looking to publish a collaboration of works) and read what sort of stuff they’ve accepted before. Pull apart and analyse these previous publications and find out exactly what they are looking for and write specifically for them. Avoid using ‘cliche’ plot lines and characters, come up with something new and exciting. For example, don’t use vampires and werewolves as these have been done so many times before, but if you do use them give your a story a unique twist that makes it stand miles apart from anything else. And be patient, accept criticism and keep writing. Remember you can’t expect all of your short stories to be accepted.