Writing Short Stories

There are many good reasons to create short stories. They might be your preferred creative writing outlet. If you like the thought of a novel but the speed and quickness of a short story, you might enjoy writing short stories. They are great to practice, as well, even if you do want to write and publish a novel eventually. While there are many great reasons to write short stories, sometimes you can get stuck when you do sit down to write it. Here are some ideas to starting your short story, accomplishing your short story, and making it worth reading.

Before you begin writing anything, you have to have an idea. You can look for ideas for writing almost anywhere. Search around you for character ideas or you can even use ideas from your own experiences. When you have an idea, you can start writing your short story. Often the idea is the hard part. If you always have something to say, you are lucky.

Once you have your idea, you should plan out your story. It’s only a short story, so you don’t need a big outline. You could write down a few points about what is generally going to happen. You should also plan out your characters, too. If you don’t know your characters well beforehand, you will have trouble writing and may make some mistakes when trying to keep everything straight. Decide what your plot, conflict, and resolution are going to be.

When you start writing your short story, don’t stop to fix things. When it starts to flow, you won’t want to stop to fix mistakes. You might lose your train of thought. Luckily with short stories, they are pretty fast to write so the time it takes to start editing isn’t long. As you are writing, if you find that something in your story doesn’t work, go ahead and change it. This is something you will want to correct as you write to keep from rewriting too much.

When you finish writing, edit your work. You may want to take some time away from your story to refresh yourself before editing. Be critical with your work as if you are a professional editor looking to publish a good piece. If you aren’t sure about any words or ideas in your story, change it until it works for you. It is your story and there is no reason why you should have to write just an okay story. You should always love what you write. If you hate it, your reader will, too.

When you are done editing, look over your work one more time. Make sure you have a beginning, middle, and an ending. Make sure that there are no inconsistencies and that you have dialogue, descriptive writing, and any other parts of a story that fit well with your individual work. Have other people read your work and give you their opinion. Once it is polished to your liking, submit it to magazines, add it to your collection of short stories to publish, or do whatever you like with it.