Della Galton - The Short Story Writers Toolshed: Your Quick Read, Straight-To-The-Point Guide To Writing and Selling Short Fiction

For Liz Smith, who has been a wonderful source of help and inspiration with so many of my short stories.

With love and thanks

Della

About Della Galton

Della Galton is a freelance writer and tutor. She is best known for her short stories, and sells in the region of 80 short stories a year to magazines both in the UK and abroad.

She is a popular speaker at writing conventions around the UK and is also the agony aunt for Writers Forum.

When she is not writing she enjoys walking her dogs in the beautiful Dorset countryside where she lives. Her hobby is repairing old cottages, which is lucky as hers is falling down.

Find out more about Della, her books, and her speaking engagements at DellaGalton.co.uk

Introduction

The Short Story Writers Toolshed was originally written as a series for Writers Forum Magazine. This paperback version has been amended and updated. It is intended to be a quick guide for the writer who doesnt want to wade through a lengthy tome. It complements my more comprehensive guide, How to Write and Sell Short Stories, published by Accent Press.

How The Toolshed Works

Every writer has certain tools at their disposal. We all in fact use the same tools when it comes to writing short stories, but were not necessarily that adept when we set out. This book is a little like an instruction manual, which Im hoping might save you some time.

So, what exactly do we have in our toolshed? Well this particular toolshed is divided into shelves and on the shelves you will find the following tools:

Shelf one: ideas and getting started; shelf two: plot; shelf three: characters and viewpoint; shelf four: dialogue; shelf five: structure; shelf six: time span, pace and theme; shelf seven: flashback; shelf eight: cutting and editing; shelf nine: putting it all together; shelf ten rejection and motivation.

If you like you can work through the entire toolshed, or you might prefer to go straight to the relevant shelf. But to begin let me take you on a whistle-stop tour of the toolshed. Lets examine what a short story actually is, as well as having a quick look at some of the available tools.

A Look Around The Toolshed

What is a short story?

This might seem like an odd question to ask writers. We all know what a short story is, dont we? Its a story thats short; its less than the length of a novel; it has a beginning, middle and end and gives the reader the chance to spend a brief time with some interesting characters. Simple enough, you might think. But actually no, its not that simple at all.

Its shorter than a novel, yes, but theres so much more to writing a successful short story than size. The techniques used, the tools if you like, are exactly the same as the tools for writing a novel. Except they are used differently!

In this book which I hope will be useful to both beginners and more experienced writers alike we will look at how to use the tools we have at our disposal.

We will look at not just what makes a story work, but also examine the reasons why some stories which on the surface have all the right ingredients dont work.

To my mind, writing a short story is like painting in miniature. It should have all the depth and colour that a full size canvas allows, but there is no room for waffle. Dont make the mistake of thinking they are easy to write. Many successful novelists will tell you that short stories are one of the hardest forms of writing. They are a craft.

Length

The length of a short story changes with the fashion. If you are writing to sell, then your market will dictate what length you should aim for, be it magazine or podcast or radio. If you are writing for a competition then the rules will dictate the length. Even if you are writing for your own pleasure and have no desire to see your work in print, it is wise to set yourself a word limit. This is because length is relevant to the elements of a short story. For example, youll have trouble writing a story of 1000 or 2000 words if you have a cast of ten or twelve characters.

Theyve got shorter than they used to be. A quick search of the internet will reveal short story competitions that start with a length as short as 60 words. In fact, I even found one which had a word limit of 6 words. But most short story competitions these days have a maximum word length of around 5000 and this is probably on the long side. The vast majority of competitions ask for short stories of between 1000 and 3000 words.

Magazine lengths are similar. Podcasts may go a bit longer. So even if you are not setting out to place your work, then it might be as well to limit yourself to a saleable length just so you can get into the feel of writing something shorter. If you find your stories feel stretched at 3000 words then you might want to reduce it, but the best way to find out is to write a few. See if the pace suits you. Find the length you are comfortable with and then stick to it until you feel you have mastered the art of fitting your plot and characters into that space.

Characters

You wont have room for dozens of characters. In my experience one or two main characters are usually enough. You may of course need supporting characters, but look at them as bit part characters who dont necessarily need to be fully developed or even named. That doesnt mean they should be stereotypes. There are many ways of making minor characters spring to life with very few words.

We will look at this in more detail when we get to characterisation. Your main character or characters must be fully developed though. If they are not the reader wont care about them. If she doesnt care about them and cannot emotionally engage with them, theres a good chance she wont read on.

Interestingly, to return to the subject of length for a moment, when I first started writing stories longer than 1000 words I assumed Id need more characters to get the extra length, but I quickly realised that it wasnt about adding characters it was about developing the ones I already had. This is one of the most important things Ive ever learned about short story writing. I later realised it applied to serials and novels as well.

So to summarise, if you are writing a short story of 1000 2000 words you probably wont need more than a couple of main characters and one of them should be main, which takes us nicely on to viewpoint.

Viewpoint

Im not going to go into the different types of viewpoint at great length here. I will cover those in the viewpoint section (or should I say on the viewpoint shelf ). But just in case youre new to writing, viewpoint simply means whose eyes we are experiencing the story through.

For example, lets assume we are writing a story about a marriage break up where the wife has had an affair and left her husband. There are three characters in this story: the wife, her lover and the husband. The story might be told through the eyes of any of them, if it is the wife, then she will be the viewpoint character. Not only will we see the action of the story through her eyes, but the story will be coloured by her viewpoint.