Whether you’re just starting in your writing career or looking to expand into a new format, short stories make an excellent and often profitable fiction-writing pursuit. An engaging story of 1000-8000 words can highlight your storytelling skills while drawing in readers eager to become lifelong fans of your work.

Make no mistake—these stories aren’t easy to write just because they’re short. When you pack so much into so little space, you’ll face the potential of having your story spin out of control. Sometimes, these concepts turn into full-length novels. Other times, they end up half-completed drafts on your hard drive, unfinished due to a lack of planning or motivation.

You’re far less likely to abandon your work when you’ve properly planned. Furthermore, knowing some general rules about what makes a great short story will give you a focus point as you work through your first draft.

This five-step process isn’t an iron-clad list of rules or a mandate for everything you do. It’s merely a guide for you to use as you start thinking of your next story. When you understand how to make your writing work for your style, you’ll be more productive well into the future.

1. What Inspires You?

The conciseness of short stories makes them among the most personal of fiction genres. With a limited word count, you won’t be able to craft an immense Fantasy world or explain the history of space travel in your sci-fi universe. Instead, writers of short stories hone in on smaller experiences—a single day in a small town, a childhood memory, or a crime committed and exposed by the end of the tale.

The very best short stories take these normal incidents and add a page turning twist, even if they only last a few pages. Shirley Jackson’s small town in “The Lottery” is anything but normal, and the wrenching reality exposed by the end made it The New Yorker’s most controversial story of all time. Stephen King brings us into an idyllic forest in his “The Man In The Black Suit” before drawing out his trademark horror in his award-winning short. And Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” adds a psychological element to a murder tale that influenced authors for years to come.

These are among the most famous short stories of all time, yet they don’t have a single origin for their storylines. Instead, each tale comes from the author’s particular interests and style. When you read Nabokov or Hurston or Cheever, you know it’s them within the first few paragraphs.

That’s not to say you can’t write short stories that are wildly different, spanning genres and time periods and content. You’re free to write whatever you like—you’re a writer, after all. The key, however, is in deciding what makes your story unique. What ideas inspire you, either throughout your entire life or more recently in current events? What incidents do you remember from growing up, good and bad? How can you take your own thoughts and experiences and turn them into something that will wrap up in under 10,000 words?

It’s a challenge, to be sure. Yet the best way to start a stellar writing career is by knowing yourself first.

2. Know Your Characters (Or Don’t)

There’s an interesting trade off when it comes to short stories, especially when compared to longer works. We can’t get to know your characters entirely too well, unless they recur across stories, or are adapted from previous works. When it comes to creating (and perhaps ending) a character in a single brief narrative, you’re working with the time you have, and nothing more.

Yet this opens up a bit of freedom. While creating character sheets ahead of time may help you plot, readers will find too much detail a waste of time. In fact, holding back information about a character, as well as their situation and background, can create an atmosphere of mystery, provoking a reaction from your reader by the time they finish your story.

A few facets of your main character(s) should stand out, whether they be symbolic physical traits or background details revealed in the course of the story. Don’t make the mistake of creating too much exposition in the beginning; instead, draw in your reader with one or two intriguing details, then let your characters move, speak, and act their way to the conclusion.

Of course, you’ll have to know where you’re going first…

3. Outline Your Way

With apologies to all the pantser purists out there, you need some kind of outline when you pen a short story. A rambling short story turns into a novel at best and a forgotten writing exercise at worst.

You don’t need a fully-crafted outline that lists every detail down to the characters’ blood type—unless being O-negative is relevant to the story. What you do need is an outline that works for you. This can be a post-it note with bullet points that list of the main beats of the story, or a template you found online, or anything that sets out the main details in a way you prefer.

Be wary of keeping the outline in your head. Write the details down somewhere where you can reference them as you type. Continuity errors and plot holes may be less frequent in short stories compared to longer works, but the flow of the story is more essential. Get your thoughts down and feel free to edit them as you go along. A Word document works perfectly fine, though some authors prefer the tactility of a dry erase board, or enjoy rearranging scenes and ideas with post-its.

Above all, make sure your method works best for you. When you feel as though you’ve got your thoughts down in a way you can use, move on. The outline is there to help you write—it won’t be published on its own.

4. Hone In On Setting

Think back to your favorite short story. No matter the author, time period, or subject matter, one facet stands out: a memorable setting.

This can be a specific region in the real-world, the way Lauren Goff so expertly illustrates the state in her anthology Florida. It can be a locked room or single location, as Edgar Allan Poe preferred, particularly in stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Even authors like O. Henry—more famous for his twists than anything else—used setting to its greatest advantage, as in this early line from “The Gift of the Magi”:

“…we can look at the home. Furnished rooms at a cost of $8 a week. There is little more to say about it.”

– O. Henry

This sparse description of the main character’s home is essential to the story’s twist. While we do get some description of the room later on, the more important aspect is how it reflects the characters. These are people who struggle to survive and live in a place almost unremarkable—yet by remarking on it, Henry draws our attention to their plight.

Never pass up an opportunity to do double-duty with your literature. If your setting can reveal character—or vice-versa!—then don’t waste the chance to help your readers see your vision. 

Short stories are efficient pieces of literature; they need to be tightly-constructed yet detailed when it’s important. A well-realized setting puts images and ideas in your reader’s mind. Quite literally, you’re helping them see what’s great about your story when you establish a firm setting early on.

5. Structure Your Tale

Short stories remain popular among writers because they’re fertile grounds for experimentation. Authors such as Hemingway, Joyce, Hurston, and Tolstoy used short stories as a way to try out new concepts and ideas that they weren’t quite ready to adopt into a longer novel. 

Readers are sometimes wary of short stories for the exact same reason. No matter the length, readers expect structure in their narratives, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. You might not set out to spurn these fundamental rules when you write, but you may end up with a meandering yarn if you don’t plan ahead.

Everything listed above will help you structure you story. The outline can be rearranged to assure your events happen in a sensible, interesting order. Good characters—just a few, perhaps even one—will make decisions your readers’ relate to, because they’ve been fully realized ahead of time. Finally, an intriguing setting motivates its own plot. Your characters and your readers will want to explore the area and find out what’s behind it—or the means of escaping the situation will be enough to drive the story.

You can, however, have all the right ingredients and still end up with a poor dish. If every facet of the story isn’t in the right order, your readers will be left confused.

As you write, consider the following details, as well as any other questions that may come to mind.

• Is this character or idea being introduced at the correct time? Would it make more sense to bring this up earlier or later?
• How do my settings change over time? If the characters go to new locations, make sure it’s clear why, and that the change in setting is appropriate.
• Where is the beginning, middle, and end? You don’t have to strictly follow Three-Act Structure or have a clear moment demarcating each transition. You do, however, need to provide a sense of progress for your readers. If things aren’t changing, they’ll feel as though nothing’s happening.
• What feeling does my ending create? The ending is either the easiest or the toughest part of your story to nail. Either way, you want to make sure the emotional pay-off is in line with your intentions.

These questions—and there are certainly more—can seem arduous for a writer to grapple with when all they want to do is tell a story. In a way, they are unimportant, but only in the sense that they shouldn’t stop you from writing. The worst-written story in the world can be polished into something good, perhaps even great. A story that’s left unfinished—or not even written at all—never becomes anything good or bad.

Putting It All Together

You may write the first draft of your story as you plan, or only maintain a list or notes, or not write at all outside of your outline. Whichever method you choose for story planning, at some point, you’ll actually sit down and write your short story.

And then you’ll be finished… with the first draft.

None of the advice above changes when you have your story set. You still need to have interesting characters, a notable setting, an engaging structure, and answers to your key questions. All of this will be backed up by a solid outline in a story that, hopefully, hasn’t moved too far away from your initial inspiration.

Once the first draft is finished (and proofread), you can start editing it yourself or, if you’d like, bring friends and colleagues in to take a look at your work. Expect criticism, but don’t accept anything malicious. Only constructive advice is valid—“this isn’t good,” or any variation on an insult, isn’t advice.

Your story won’t be the greatest in history. It may not be everything you’d hoped for when you began. Yet with time, effort, and proper planning after these five steps, you’ll have something far better than you did after the first draft. From there, you’ll continue to grow and develop as a writer, mastering your style as your skills slowly improve.

But it all starts with an idea.

So take a moment and think: what inspires you?

Then start writing. There’s no time like now to get started on chasing your literary dreams.