12 Tips for New Short Story Writers

hey guys it's Jalen I'm here today with another video so today I'm gonna be talking about one of my favorite like some sets of topics to discuss and that's short fiction so a lot of you guys have requested more videos on short stories and I was kind of trying to think about what to do specifically I do have a video on just how to write a story then I will leave a link to that's just kind of like the basics but I tried to make it as comprehensive as possible on writing for fiction and I also have one on publishing short fiction today though I wanted to talk about tips for new short story writers so these are not like rules they're not things you have to implement into a short story you will certainly find short stories that break all of these abundantly because they're not rules at all but I do think if you're new to short fiction and you're trying to break into the form these things will help you and they might just help you if like even if you don't need to perfect these are still things I come back to in my writing if I'm struggling so I've got 12 tips here if you're new to short fiction and you're struggling to get into it or you're struggling to keep the story small or focus because that's something people struggle with a lot is keeping the scope appropriate to the form and not letting it get out of control I think that these things will help so my first tip is to not worry about the stories point quote-unquote it's very easy to get caught up trying to make a philosophical point or a thematic point and lose track of just the story with short fiction more than novels people get caught up with it a short story can be just like a novel where the purpose is to take you along an interesting journey with the character it's okay for the purpose of the story and the point of the story to be to tell a cool story about interesting people if that's what you want it to be it doesn't really need to be like this deep somatic revelation and I think people worry about that too much with short fiction in particular and as readers even you know saying oh I didn't get it you're thinking about what your story is about as being about a theme so like my story is about the importance of family rather than being about like a concrete situation with a concrete character or set of characters you're probably off the mark a little since that's a really really important distinction so think about your story in terms of its situation and character not in terms of its theme obviously it's okay to have a theme it's hard to not have a theme it's okay set up to tell a deeper point make a deeper commentary on something but if you're too focused on that the story itself can lose specificity so tip number two is to use specificity a I've got a whole video on specificity that I will leave link to it is such an important tool in all writing but in short fiction it's one of the most important techniques I think for good for fiction if you struggle with say character development in the short space try to have a short paragraph or even one sentence that includes three specific interesting unique details about the character especially if those facts reveal more about them speak to something deeper but just think three facts three things include them near the beginning of the story and you can create a really specific character there's a huge range in short fiction you'll get stories where the characters are they feel about as developed as in a novel obviously we can never have the same amount of knowledge as in a novel because a novel is just so much bigger but you know we know so much about them and they're developed for you deeply but you also have short fiction where we we don't really know anything about them we might know like the deep twisted root of their psyche but we don't know like their name or anything concrete about them you see that all the time in short fiction I've got quite a lot of stories I've written where like we actually don't really know anything about the character like you couldn't pick him out of a crowd you know I've got this one story that I wrote called pine in space which is about an astronaut who gets in an accident in space and it's like him dying once a friend of mine asked me if I knew his name and I was like I don't you know like I never gave him one so now I can't even conceptualize I have your name and then she also asked me like do you know what he looks like and I said no because every time I try to picture this character all I can see is this man in spacesuit and I'm like who is inside I don't really know anything about this person I know some like really deep internal stuff about him you know if you're writing a very short piece like a two thousand word try to identify those revealing specific um I talked about things like revealing detail in my video on character which you can also check out but specificity all around think specificity of event if the character is going to a party like the party more specific are they celebrating something is there a theme is the party set in like an interesting plate like a more specific with the event with your detail with your language a specific detail does a lot more work than a vague detail and in when you have not a lot of space you want everything to be doing as much work as possible my next tip is to put the inciting incident in the first paragraph this is also not a rule and not necessary and you will find abundant stories that don't do this but if you're new to short fiction if you haven't written a lot of short stories challenge yourself to just have the inciting incident in the first paragraph and I say that because this is where a lot of new short story writers go wrong I remember my first ever fiction workshop the first round of stories the biggest issue that was probably in 90% of the stories was that there wasn't an inciting incident or the inciting incident was too late the incidence and if my story was halfway through the story in a flashback and as you gain more confidence in skill you can play around with wearing the inciting incident is but for your first story or if you struggled to get going just make that your goal at least have it on the first page but even just aim for the first barrier my fourth tip is to keep it to a cast of only two characters where people often struggle which were fiction if they're coming from a background of writing novels is that the scope gets too large they're essentially trying to write a novel and it turns into a novel and then they're like oh god it multiplied but one really easy way to contain that is to just contain your cast keep your cast to two people many many effective short stories only have two characters they might reference other people in flashback but really they only have two characters the story is about a relationship between two people and keeping it - a relationship between only two characters will give you a really specific focus keep the scope really inherently small span it to three or four characters when you feel more confident four characters is a lot in a short story I have not written many stories that have four characters and the ones that do are the longer pieces or they have like some weird thing where it's like like if you've read my story cherry and gene in the Garden of Eden and Adam is online it's linked in description cherry and Jane are kind of one character like there are two characters but they function as a unit so it's more like the story has three characters I'd suggest keeping it 2-2 for your first piece my next tip is to limit flashbacks this is another really common pitfall for new short story writers they overload the story with flashbacks it's like the first device that they tend to go to my first story was all flashback again there's nothing wrong with flashbacks flashbacks can be really effective tools I really enjoy using flashback central fiction and I think they can be super effective be really careful be really sparing and when you're new to it it's more important that you learn how to write a short story where the fictive present can support itself and has that like structural integrity then learning to use flashbacks well you know like focus on flashbacks later for your first story or first couple stories try to keep them minimal and try to focus the story in the fictive present so you can learn how to create a focused tight narrative in the fictive present that doesn't need flashbacks to give it momentum number six is to just make sure you have enough conflict how much can be very subtle in a short piece it can also be very over one good way to think about this and this is something that we used to actually have to break down in my writing workshops when we handed in our workshop comments we had to identify this in the story is to think about the conflict on three planes so the internal conflict the interpersonal conflict and the societal conflict so the conflicts the character has within themselves the conflicts they have with other characters and the conflicts they have with society or their environment try to identify all three even if one or two of them are more subtle we're in the background this will just give you more fuel and more tension my next tip is for those of you guys who struggle with plot in short fiction and struggle to keep the plot short enough if you don't really know how to craft such a short piece try to just focus the story around one singular event the story doesn't have to necessarily be entirely set there it could be entirely set there it could also be that the story is leading up to that event it could be that it's kind of circling that event if your story is a linear it could be reaction to that event so like try to identify that core event and how all the other scenes if there are other scenes kind of like how they're magnetized to that main event also similarly tip 8 try to keep the timeframe as short as you can there are of course many effective short stories that take place over a long period of time months years even they're harder to write in my opinion I think they're much harder to write it's hard to tell such a long story in such a short amount of space it's a valid pursuit and it's certainly worth trying but if you're new to the form and it's like your first story I would recommend keeping the timeframe as short as possible so longer the timeline gets the harder it is to navigate the more you will deal with clarity issues keep it as short as possible try not to get into like month or year long stories until you have like maybe a couple stories under your belt my next tip is to give the characters something active to do I think that this avoids probably one of the biggest pitfalls of for fiction and this is the phenomenon of a story that is merely about two people having a conversation at a place and that's kind of it I learned this tip this is one of my favorite tips from a professor who was saying that you know she had a story that she wanted to write about these two women it was like an affair or whatever it was like the woman and the person who'd like had an affair with her husband or whatever a boring interpretation of this character relationship would be to just have them discuss the situation over coffee whereas an interesting version of the story which was the version she ended up writing was to give them something active to do one of the things she gave them that was activity was to have them slaughtering chickens together give your characters a specific unique interesting action that they need to accomplish in order to act as like a support beam for whatever their interpersonal conflict is this is great for novels too like any scene where the characters have to have a conversation give them something active to do while they have that conversation this is I'm gonna bring him setting to like I wrote a short story it's not published believe me I've tried cold cuts and girls it's about a relationship between these two young girls they're 12 character has a crush on her best friend but their relationship is like very toxic instead of just having them like talk or confront this in kind of like a mundane situation I had them in this greenhouse that's been like swallowed by kudzu vines and basically they're like cleaning it out and like trying to remove the vines because one of the girls the the side character the friend wants to bring a boy that she likes there so that gave the character is like an active thing to do that also put them in conflict with their environment and it just gave the story more energy this is just like a great technique all around now the writing short story writing yeah so now I've got two tips relating to the end of the story the first one is to give your character a choice again if you struggle with plot ask yourself what choice is the story exploring and the end is just what's the choice that they make so again I'm gonna use I hate using my own stories but it's just it's easier to pull my own stories for my brain then other people's because I know what I was thinking as I was writing them the first story I ever wrote actually the reason this is a tip is because this is how I approached the first story I ever wrote and it really helped me I wrote this story called melting point I have a series of videos of me rewriting it so you can check those out this story is about the very destructive relationship between the main character and her twin brother and they really hate each other and they want to hurt each other and the story which also they have an action the action that they're doing is them burning down their family's cabin together the brother is like a arsonist so they're burning down the house together that's the action gives them something active to do it also gives the story an event which is burning down the house at the end the character makes a choice she does something active and what she does is she walks her brother in the burning building she lets him out before he dies but she likes when a burning building and so giving the character this very clear moment of decision and a chance to do an interesting character action made the ending of the story good you know I always struggled with endings and nians were so hard this story writing the story is what clicked endings for me because I was like oh it's about choice give her a choice make her do something active I think I talked about this in my video just on how to read short story the end can be a revelation but typically ending that the character does something active will be stronger than one where they just have a revelation and another way to approach the ending that you can pair well with their active choice is to think about the moment of let you start to look for you will see it in so many short stories where there's a moment near the end of the story kind of at or maybe right after or right before the story's climax for the character a sentence a little bit over the story and sees things from more of a bird's-eye view and has this moment of eternal reflection or thought it's often just like a pair graph that you'll find near the end and it often happens like right before a character makes a critical choice or whatever but it's just they've left above the story slightly it's often subtle this is a really powerful and effective technique to end the story in a way that wraps it up to matically without it maybe being too overt and then my final piece of advice is don't withhold information short stories are often less about reveals and more about exploration or like excavation of a character sure there are stories that have twist endings or fun reveals that's great if that's the goal but in most cases short stories aren't really about the surprise of what happens but about exploring how we got there it can be a huge pitfall for new short story writers to withhold information because of suspense you want a suspense in a short story typically a lot of the time to come from wondering how we end up getting there or engine coming from what the character is going to do rather than coming from wanting answers to things that we just haven't been told the readers not going to give you a lot of time because the story is so short so you kind of have to convince you have to get them on board with what is concretely happening stories that withhold basic information about what is going on for too long can lose the reader's attention the payoff for that isn't very good in a short story because the story is so short like if you're gonna keep me guessing about what is going on for seven pages out of ten it's just not worth it it's not enough time to make that kind of tension worthwhile so in most cases don't withhold information just offer up what is happening it's just such a huge pitfall I did it it was also one of the biggest pitfalls of my first short story is I withhold so much and all that happened is that the reader was confused the story's not long enough for that reveal to really earn itself so the story was much more effective when I just said this is what's going on right at the beginning and the story was about understanding the character and exploring the character rather than having to like wait around for 20 pages just to know what we were even reading about so offer up information unapologetically right at the beginning do avoid clarity issues which can be such a huge problem in short fiction can call the plot I say that because it was like my biggest issue that's all I had to say in this video my hope these tips were helpful thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions you can always I mean I was kind of lurk and I'll see you in another video bye [Music]

Channel: ShaelinWrites

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Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, authortube, writing tip, short story, short stories, how to write short stories, how to write a short story, tips for new writers, advice for new writers, short fiction, short stories for beginners

Id: rOj7Ko_3vwg

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020