Sakaduski - How to Write Winning Short Stories

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge. Writing short stories requires Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart and some help from Gregory Hines. We are the cat burglars of the business: in and out in a relatively short time, quietly dressed (not for us the grand gaudiness of 600 pages and a riff on our favorite kind of breakfast cereal) to accomplish something shockingand lastingwithout throwing around the furniture.

Amy Bloom, The Fierce, Elegant Challenge of Story Writing: Amy Bloom on Why Short Is Good

Humans began telling stories as soon as they developed language. They may even have used sign language before speech was used for communication. And with communication came stories. People used stories to warn others about danger, to procure food and other necessities, and to pass on knowledge. They may not have given these early stories titles, but they passed them on from person to person and generation to generation.

Different groups of people shared various sets of stories (we call them folk tales now) as part of their cultural traditions. These stories were often a shared narrative (the work of more than one author) and evolved over time, as they were passed along, much like an Internet meme goes viral and then may be changed by others. With the invention of written language, people were able to write these stories down, and a new means of storytelling emerged.

Given how important stories are to individuals and cultures, it is no wonder that so many people enjoy writing, telling, listening to, and reading stories. From the moment children understand language (and perhaps even slightly before that) until they are nearly too old to comprehend, human beings love stories. People also enjoy creating and passing on stories, whether they are the stories of their lives, stories about others, or stories from their imaginations.

Today, when the phrase short stories is used, for most people it means short fiction. Short stories are ideal for people who like entertainment in small doses. Readers sometimes either dont have the time or cant find the interest to commit to a book. Short stories take just a few minutes to read and can be read on a bus or train, in the car (if youre not driving!), while waiting in a doctors office or carpool lane, during a lunch break, or just before bed. And for people who have poor memories, being able to read a complete story in a single reading is a big advantage.

Publishing guru Penny Sansevieri has said that short is the new long, and she is right. Kindle Singles (fiction and nonfiction of five thousand to thirty thousand words in e-book form) was launched by Amazon in 2011 and sold two million titles in fourteen months. Twitter fiction, flash fiction, microfiction, and six-word stories are now making the rounds.

While short forms of writing may be enjoying a comeback, the concept is certainly not new. Readers Digest has published short memoir pieces, jokes, advice, and other little nuggets for ninety years. Best American Short Stories is a bestseller every year, indicating strong interest in short fiction. Anthologies are also hot right nowfor readers, but also for writers. Several professional writing organizations publish anthologies. These include Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and Romance Writers of America. Authors can get together and publish a book of short stories easily through self-publishing. And the addition of a better-known author or two can help sell the entire book.

Some people assume that a short story is just a pared down novel, but that isnt true any more than a single joke is a short version of a stand-up routine. Short stories are an art form of their own. There are some stories, particularly those that require long passages of time or a slow unfolding of the inner lives and motivations of the characters, that simply dont work as short stories. Extremely complex plots are also not conducive to short forms. This does not mean, however, that short stories cant take on big issues or fundamental themes such as love, death, or why people are so fascinated with Kim Kardashian. The number of scenes (and their length), number of characters, number of points of view, complexity of the plot, length of time covered, and length of descriptions and dialogue are reduced when writing short stories.

Different authors have offered various metaphors to compare short stories to novels. Sen Faolin has said that a short story is to a novel as a hot air balloon is to a passenger jet. Like a jet, the novel takes a long time to get off the ground, carries a lot of people, and takes them a long distance from where they started. On the other hand, the short story takes off vertically, rises directly to a great height, usually carries only one or two people, and lands not far from where it took off.

Della Galton calls short stories a painting in miniature and says that short stories should have all the depth and colour that a full size canvas allows but with no room for waffle. According to Edith Wharton, one builds a novel but hatches a short story. Dawn Raffel (author of Further Adventures in the Restless Universe ) says about the short story, The story is a sprint in which every step and every breath and every flicker of an eyelash matters; a novel is a marathon, a test of stamina, faith, and will.