Hi all and happy (coffee) Monday. Last week, I touched on the challenges of short stories and I thought I would expand on them. Let's dive into what those challenges are and how to help tackle them.
1. Word Length. A short story needs to be 30,000 words or less. It could be less than that, depending on who you're publishing with or what you're planning to do, but that's your box. You have 30,000 words to tell a story from start to finish. It is doable because you're going to be following a simple story structure in either the three acts or the bell curve (start, rise to midsection, let out the tension, spike in an near ending twist, finish) or something else that works for you. How to tackle this is to know where your plot is going and really pick the scenes that will work best for the story. If you're telling a short story fantasy, then I would cut out travel scenes. If you're doing a romance, have the meet-cute early / begin the story and have everything go quickly from there. For mystery, they find the body and the clues come quickly. Another thing is to read short stories in the genre that you want to write in and see if you can get clues from there.
2. Characters. As I've said before, I'm a character driven writer. My plot revolves around the characters instead of the other way around. My problem with characters is that they never seem to flesh out the way that I want to but I also have too many. The best way to tackle this is two fold. One, don't have a cast of millions. Pick out characters that you're really going to need and weed out the rest to make sure that you're going to maximize your story. Two, make the characters you have count. Make sure they're driving the plot and not on the sidelines. If you have a character that is on the sidelines and you need to cut words, that character goes. So really pay attention to what characters you're using and how you're using them when writing a short story.
3. Not giving enough details / summarizing / telling more than showing. Yes, I gave a complete thing about not having enough words, but there's also the trap of falling into using too little words. As with any good story, you need to show what is happening, engaging the reader, instead of telling the reader what is happening. You also need to explain what's happening around the characters, like the room they're in, but don't summarize it in a way of "character X walks into a blue room". Give the reader a bit more and explain how the room is blue. Is it the wall coloring? Is it the fact that every thing in the room is a blue color? Those little details make a story and give it depth, so don't forget them.
4. Not being a complete story. I fall into this trap a lot when I'm writing short stories. I like keeping a door open to write more but you can't. You have to end the story with a definite end and not leave room open for more. The character wins the battle and is rewarded and that's it. There's no foreshadowing of battles yet to come or struggles - you just have the ending. This is something that can be helped with editing and practicing your writing. It'll come but it's also best to make sure that you have the happily ever after / complete ending.
So, those are the challenges for short stories, especially for me, and also for others. What are the challenges that you have with writing short stories? Feel free to share in the comments below or on Facebook or Twitter. Until next time, keep on writing.
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