Writing Compelling short stories.

I love short stories because they’re… short.

They’re straight to the point, entertaining and don’t need as much commitment as a three-hundred-page novel would. Medium is my favourite place for short nonfiction—I’m a sucker for blog posts that read like journal entries. Your average short stories are about 500-1500 words long and can be 2000 words if you feel like pushing it. I sense a lot of you—the audience I’m writing for anyway—need tips for submitting short stories for magazines, publications and competitions. This blog post will teach you not just how to write short stories, but how to write the ones that sell and stand out. Here are the sub points that’ll be covered.

·       General points for writing.

·       A deep dive into short story structure.

·       Editing your story.

General points for Writing

1.     Figure out what kind of story you’re writing.

Before you write, you need to know if you’re writing a fictional story a non-fiction or a mix of the two. You also need to determine what genre you’ll be writing. I know this tip sounds obvious but a story where the genre isn’t clearly defined can easily become disjointed. You need to know the kind of prose you’re writing so you’ll be able to add the necessary details. You don’t want to have a story that reads like a murder mystery when its actually a vampire story.

2.     Outline. Always, have an outline.

Short stories aren’t your classic novels where you can get away with writing with the flow. Usually, you have a word limit to stick to so, before you start writing you need to know exactly what story you want to tell and how you’re going to tell it. There’s a different segment for the story structure where I’ll give you a more detailed explanation about outlining and what each part of your short story should be like.

3.     Go for something emotional.

Since you’re writing something short you need to realize that you have a limited amount of time to impress your readers. If you’re going to leave a lasting impact on your audience, it’ll be good to go for a plot that’ll affect them emotionally. This doesn’t necessarily mean you should pick a negative emotion. It isn’t just sad stories that touch people. But make sure you pick an emotion you’re really good at infusing in your writing. You need to actually feel excited while reading your text if it’s going to make anyone else excited.

4.     Use names that aren’t so popular.

This isn’t something you need to do if you don’t want too. But if you want your short story to be even more unique, I don’t think you should go for overused names. Take the time to give your characters special names with unique meanings. And for extra points, you can have the meaning of their name relate to the plot or the role that character has to play in your story.

5.     Pay close attention to the theme, instructions, and other details.

If you’re submitting to a competition or a publication, this step is the one that’ll make or mar your entry. Read through the instructions at least twice before you even start your outline. This will prevent you from having to start over later. If the competition has a theme see if there’s a creative, “out of the box” way you can interpret it. E.g., if the theme is “make hay while the sun shines.” I don’t expect you to write a story about a farmer who was actually making hay. If you’re lost on what to do, read past entries if you can find them. Study and analyze them but don’t plagiarize.

6.     Write satire.

This isn’t compulsory but it’s a pro tip. The thing is, if a publication’s theme is “light” and you write about how the sun has been shining since your childhood while I write a piece of fiction about the national grid in Nigeria, I’ll be more likely to win. Satire is a piece of literature that brings the ills of society to light. If you’re able to write about a current issue and fit it under your theme or requirements, please do. It’ll definitely resonate with whoever is reading your work.

7.     Use a device that displays the word count.

A lot of writers—myself included—struggle with staying within the wordcount. It’s understandable, really and it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with your writing style. But now that you’ve discovered this issue, you need to make sure it doesn’t stress you out. Use Microsoft word or google docs to write and always have your eyes on the wordcount. I think we both know how irritating it can be to exceed a wordcount and then have to start cutting words away after.

I’ve given you some general pointers but that’s not all…

A deep dive into short story structure.

Typically, a story should have an inciting incident, climax, denouement, resolution, etc. But I think I’ll do a more in-depth explanation of those in a separate post, we don’t want to deviate after all. So, just to simplify the explanation, your story is going to have a beginning, middle and an end.

1.     Beginning.

The beginning of your story is the part that’ll determine whether or not what you’ve penned down is worth reading or not. The beginning can be anything you want its preferrable that you start with an intense scene or in the middle of a scene. You could also start with a quote or phrase that’ll leave the readers itching to find out what happens next in your story. I understand that as a writer, you’d want your readers to understand the why behind every single thing in the story but info dumping is the LAST THING you want to do here.

Here's an example of an introduction from a short story I wrote;

“T-pain isn’t the only problem Nigerians have. We lament every day about how life would’ve been better if he’d never been elected. We drag Buhari—whenever he is unfortunate enough to be remembered—condemning the APC as a whole. But what if I told you that the government wasn’t the only thing causing worry lines to form on our faces? What if I said, we, the Nigerians were also part of the issues that were keeping us awake at night?”

Your inciting incident, is the event that starts off your story. It’s an unexpected event that flips the script upside down and starts the main character off on an adventure. They spend the rest of the plot trying to fix or come to terms with whatever happened. In a good girl’s guide to murder, the inciting incident was Pip’s project. It forced her to open up a mystery that had already gone cold and embark on an entirely new investigation.

Let your first incident be interesting, jaw dropping or at least emotionally gripping.

2.     Middle

The middle of the story will contain your climax. Things will get really spicy and intense here. You could include an argument between characters, a hidden truth that they suddenly have to deal with or someone could just drop dead in the middle of the plot. It’s important that you don’t get carried away while writing this part so that you don’t exceed the wordcount.

Also, make sure that there’s dialogue in your story. Except if there’s a specific reason why you don’t want it that way, there should be dialogue in your story. This gives room for more showing and less telling. You don’t want your story looking like one elongated status rant. Don’t get carried away while writing, make sure you give your characters some space to speak as well.

3.     End

You don’t have to resolve all the conflicts in your short story. In fact, to leave a better impression a cliff hanger is encourage, you could also use an open ending. Where the readers are free to come up with their own conclusions as to what happened in your story. If you want to tie up all the loose ends in your story, that’s fine too. But make sure your ending leaves your readers gasping for breath, smiling ecstatically, or bawling uncontrollably. They need to be thinking of your story for the rest of that day.

Editing Your Story.

This is the easiest as well as the hardest part. For some extensive tips on editing, you can check out the last subpoint of this blog post.

In addition to the tips listed there, its important that you’re patient with yourself. It’s possible that you might’ve written too much and have to find a way to cut off five hundred words. In a scenario like this, take a break from your phone or laptop. Go and touch some grass. Then, when you’re less frustrated you can come back and make a clearheaded decision. You can decide to find a way to cut out 500 words or rewrite the story. It’s your decision. But go with your gut, don’t make a decision based on laziness.

You can also give your story to someone to edit (not rewrite, edit) if it’s that tough for you. Please don’t use AI to rewrite your stories because it’ll definitely tell on itself later on. Also, I don’t advise you use Grammarly to edit creative stories, fiction or nonfiction, it takes away the human emotion and tries to make everything sound formal and straight to the point. You could use Quillbot instead but even at that, don’t let it strip you of your creative voice.

I really hope you found this article helpful. Leave a comment if you have any suggestion or corrections. Till next week!