15 Tips for Writing Better Short Stories! | Writing Tips

hey guys it's shaylyn and i'm here today with another writing video so today i'm back with another video on short fiction as you guys know short fiction is like my favorite thing and so today i'm doing a follow-up to a video i posted a couple months ago that video was called 12 tips for new short story writers and it was basically just a compilation of little tips and tricks that you can implement into your short fiction when i made that video i really thought i was very clever with myself and i had really scraped the bottom of the barrel in terms of tips and tricks for writing for fiction but it turns out that i had more little smart brain moments and i've compiled some more actually 15 of them so that wasn't even half of what i say it turns out just like in the last video i really want to make it clear that these are not rules you're going to find short stories that don't do these things and they're successful in not doing these things you're going to have your own stories that don't do these things there are things that i myself i think for the most part have learned by struggling so like i was writing a story and it wasn't working and then i realized that the core issue was one of these things and it was a big light bulb moment so don't feel like you have to apply all this to every story these are just things that i find i come back to and often solve my problems and make me love my life so my first tip is that every single character and actually if possible every element of the story should be an antagonistic force and this includes the protagonist themselves i think short fiction is different from say a fantasy novel even if the situation is very morally complex you would have kind of like the characters who were on the side of the protagonist and the characters who were on the side of the antagonist maybe you have some floating in the middle short stories aren't really like that it's more just that every single character is antagonistic in some way so they're causing some kind of friction some kind of tension their goal opposes the main characters something this includes the setting a lot of the time they don't necessarily want to undermine the protagonist it's more just that whoever they are living their own lives creates some kind of tension within the main character i talked about this in the first video how your story should have three planes of conflict um societal interpersonal and internal the core conflict might be rooted in one of them but you should still have all three this is kind of a way of extending that so tip number two instead of having a message or theme think about having a core idea i did talk about theme also in my first um short story tips video where i said that you should try to base your story around a character relationship or a situation rather than a theme not that your story can't have a theme because it can be great to have a theme and it's probable that one will emerge without intention even one way i like to think about it is instead of having a theme that's like a thesis i'm trying to prove or a message i'm trying to extend instead i like to just think of a core idea and that core idea it's not trying to prove anything it's not necessarily trying to say anything in my story cherry and jane in the garden of eden which is linked in the description if you want to read it the core idea that i was aware of as i was writing the story was um temptation i mean in a way it was a theme but it wasn't trying to say anything i wasn't trying to say anything in particular about temptation i really don't like to think of short stories as having message which i'll talk about in just a moment instead i just like to think of them as having an idea that they're kind of rooted in um and a lot of times this can just be emotion a central emotion so this leads to tip number three which is specify your theme rather than having a universal theme when you think about the theme of your story think about what you want to reveal about your character your main character or a relationship your main character has rather than human nature in general i think it can feel very didactic when a writer tries to use a story as a way to say something universal about human nature because to be honest like who is me or any given writer to make any kind of claim that large you know like who am i to say that i have the wisdom or wrath of experience to make a universal claim about human nature any kind of universal claim or message can feel kind of condescending can feel just not true or not convincing or it just feels very obvious so instead when you're thinking about theme just think about what you're trying to reveal about this specific character in this moment that really is what the essence of a short story is it's finding a moment that reveals something crucial about a character what you're revealing doesn't have to have any application beyond this character it doesn't need to apply to any other person on earth necessarily that's what i mean about specificity rather than universality if you have a moment in your story where your character is reflecting on a theme or symbol or idea try to root that reflection in their own life in their own experience can kind of feel a bit like fake deep for a character to have a revelation about human nature as a whole and basically when you're writing a story you don't want to ask yourself why is this significant to the world just ask why is this significant to this character it's too much pressure to put on a story to ask it to provide a unique philosophical insight on life just let it provide a unique insight on this specific character that's more impactful and it's much more possible one of the best ways i think to see just like the base structure of a short story is to put your character in a situation that challenges their deepest misbelief about the world or themselves this is ultimately kind of like what the core of a short story is you know short stories don't have these grand arcs and long character transformations so we start with a character who has a misbelief about themselves or the world they have some kind of flaw or world view whatever it is and you put them in a situation that challenges and by doing so reveals that flower misbelief a lot of the time we just say that you know all stories are about character change and i would say that in short fiction it's it's more accurate to say that stories are about reveal whether the character changes or not which they probably should but they don't always it's more about how our perception of them changes that something is revealed about them so i've got two points on setting to actually build off of that the next point is to just set it somewhere weird this is actually one of my favorite tips because i think if you have say a character or a character relationship you want to write a story around but you don't really know how to turn it into a story try just putting it in a weird setting so many of my stories have begun from setting because there was a setting that compelled me i wanted to set something there and i built the story from there i think in a short story especially you've got so little space that the best way to make a visual impact is to set it somewhere bizarre i avoid setting stories in like a house or an apartment a setting that everyone is familiar with instead i try to set them somewhere kind of strange somewhere you don't go every day for a while i was really into liminal spaces and i wanted to set all my stories in limitless spaces that probably explains the entire tone of my collection i know that i think about it you'll have so much more to work with if you're writing in a unique setting because you're gonna have way more interesting details to draw on it's gonna be way more sensory there's not gonna be as much to just sink into in terms of detail if the story is set in the main character's apartment you know off of that use the setting to put pressure on the character and that's why i think weird settings help it's rare that your own house puts pressure on you but if the setting is somewhere kind of bizarro it can put pressure on the character and that itself can become the root of the conflict i talked about in my first video on this topic how you should try to give your characters something to do and that this pairs really well with this tip putting them in a weird setting where they also have a unique task that they have to accomplish while whatever they're working through internally is revealed that's kind of like my tried and true formula for a short story a core of so much of short fiction is that the character is in a place that's putting pressure on them forcing them to face or reveal or challenge whatever that misbelief that they hold is if the setting itself is forcing a character to deal with some kind of internal stuff it's almost inevitable that you'll have symbolism emerge which is nice symbolism without any work this is one that i realized again because i was writing stories and they were hard to write and it was because of this and it's to avoid binary choices this is kind of why i think sports movies are super hard to do well in a sports movie there are basically two things that are gonna happen in the end they're either gonna win the final game or they're gonna lose the final game neither is gonna be surprising by the end and neither is going to be satisfying obviously it's great for the story to end with a character making a choice that reveals their misbelief this can be super super hard when that choice is binary working towards a choice great if it's a binary choice you're probably going to run into issues i've had this emerge with two stories that i can think of the first was actually i will never tell you this and then i also had this come up recently i'll kind of explain the context of the story so you can kind of see what i mean about a binary choice so i was writing a short story it's called how you'll feel after the war and it's like light fantasy it's set in a city where the sun has stopped setting and it's about a couple and at the beginning of the story they find like an oasis where night still falls the story is kind of about how ten chin emerges between them because the main character the narrator thinks that they should just keep it to themselves like as a personal refuge because it's a tiny oasis it can only fit two people anyways um and then the other character thinks that like the greater good should be prioritized and they should kind of share it with everyone even if it means losing that refuge for themselves it's a very binary choice because you're basically working towards an end where the main character is either going to keep it for themselves or tell everyone else but it was a really difficult aspect of writing this story and that's why i put this point on this list because i noticed that as i was writing it i was like hey this is really hard and this is why so if you can avoid those choices from the get-go you won't write yourself into a corner like i have now done on several occasions tip number eight is based on a quote that i saw recently try to in a short story just create one thing just one single thing that is extremely memorable whether that is just a single image or like a specific moment when i think about short stories that i've read it's usually this one singular thing about them that i really remember like one action the character did that was really interesting or weird or one scene that was really bizarre or one just image that stands out to me so this is based on a quote i saw recently the quote is by julio cortazar and it's the novel wins by points the short story wins by knockout i saw that it was on a lit meg's submission page and i was like that is so true how have i never heard this before even if it's a very subtle story what is the moment of knockout just it can just be one moment just one singular moment but if i don't have one maybe that's a missed opportunity so my next tip is about point of view i can't not i can't help myself my tip is to specify your point of view this is not going to be uh news to you if you've watched my channel before because i never shut up about this the philosophy i hold on point of view is that there aren't just like this set number of point of views that you may have been taught which you know normally we're taught that there's first person second person and three types of third person objective limited and omniscient the way i see it there are infinite point of views and every time you write something you build a unique point of view it might fall under an umbrella of one of those five when you're writing a short story that angle is needs to be so specific because the moment is so specific and so i think you need to think about specifying not only the events the language the character but even like the craft elements you use as part of the form and i think a huge part of that specifying the point of view rather than just saying i'm writing in first person knowing like okay it's a first person retrospective told from this point in the character's life with these specific qualities really breaking down your point of view and knowing really specifically what it means and what it's doing um i've got several videos on point of view that i think will help with that so um i'm not gonna go into the whole theory of point of view but if you want to learn more i've got a video on point of view and one on unconventional points of view which kind of talks about like more specific point of views that you could implement again even if you're implementing one of them specifying it to your unique story maybe it's just cause i'm a point of view nerd but i think that this is um a game changer for stronger writing and understanding where your story is being told from how it's being told the relationship the character has with the narrative all that jazz point number 10 is think about your story's form not its structure short stories are so short that they don't really have structure the way novels do you know novels tend to follow a more universal structure not all of them obviously but they might have like beginning mini middle end rising action fall in action whatever they might even follow something like the hero's journey or whatnot obviously they don't have to i think the longer your story gets it's almost like it gains more gravity that pulls it into that shape whereas short stories are so short that they almost don't have enough pieces for those pieces to start to resemble any kind of universal shape i think that the more important concept rather than structure is form rather than being like what's my beginning middle and all of that short stories don't really work like that i mean they do have beginning middle and ends by the nature of the fact that they're stories but not really in the same traditional sense of novel what they have more than structure is form and sure structure is a part of form form is not just what order are the events in and how are they paced it's how is the story told it's everything from the point of view it's the use of language and learning to understand how to create a specific form to package your story rather than learning how to structure it well is more important for kind of long-term success and learning to write a good short story in a repeatable way because there is no really universal short story structure or even a short story structure that you can use most of the time because they're they're too little to be contained in something like that i have an entire video on form that said while we're talking about structure if you are still struggling with structure most short stories are merely about connecting two points in my opinion now those two points could really be anything but two really common setups i think our point a is opportunity point b is revelation or point a is crisis and point b is epiphany i mean obviously you could label these whatever you want they might be different in different stories but the way i see a lot of short stories is you basically have just two moments on the board the inciting incident so something that is going to allow for change to occur and then you have the revelation which is basically the story's climax where the story is ending i would seriously recommend reading a couple short stories and breaking down the structure like where are the scenes how many are there how does it move through time probably they have an entry point to change and then they have the change actually being realized a novel is kind of like you're setting up a row of dominoes you knock them all down and they all fall a short story is more like you have a puzzle board imagine you have a board with like two set points so one is that inciting incident or that opportunity and one is that change revelation the end of the story and then you have the scenes or the pieces and they're all like really weirdly shaped you have to figure out how to connect those two points with maybe only like four or five puzzle pieces fit them together in the most seamless way possible so my next tip is one of the first tips that i ever learned when writing short fiction and it's to cut the connective tissue now this works in novels too but i think it's especially important in short fiction because concision is so key and i mean to be honest concision is so key in a novel a novel should be told as concisely as possible you just have more events and a longer story i think but this is something that i had a professor who would always say you know circle a paragraph and be like this is connective tissue it's the little bits that connect scenes but aren't actually part of the scene and don't actually further the scene so let's say you have a scene where a character is at one location and then the next scene they're at another location let's say you have a paragraph either at the start of the second scene or just bridging them where the character is in the car driving from point a to point b that's connective tissue it doesn't actually contribute to the story connective tissue doesn't always mean the character is physically moving from location to location but it's those little extra bits hanging off the end of the scenes that you don't really need my next tip is to implement a technique called patterning i think i talked about this technique in an old video on voice and this is also like language that i had a professor who would always use this specific language and she would talk about instead of having symbols have patterns you know instead of trying to make this apple mean something instead create a pattern of apples when i was talking about core idea you can do this with your core idea so a pattern is exactly what it sounds like it's literally just a recurring image or just element that you weave throughout a story this is one of those things that i feel like it's a specific term that like my cohort has really absorbed and we use all the time you know critiquing someone and be like can you pattern up to this reveal more helps create unity short fiction is all about unity don't waste anything two things that i think are commonly wasted are the title and the first line the first line obviously is your first opportunity to hook the reader but in a way the title is actually your first opportunity i like to think of the title of a short story as almost like a preliminary first line if a title is interesting i want to read the story already before i even know anything about it there's an article i'll see if i can google it right now and it's literally the most common short story titles number one is dust number two is the gift and number three is home don't call your story any of these things it just does nothing for the story it's cliche it's overdone and it's a waste that's the thing it's a waste of a very important space like that title that is some prime real estate same as the first line when in doubt an interesting image an interesting thought something interesting that the character does if you're submitting to magazines that first line is so important to grab a reader's attention so my final tip is something i've been doing recently and it's something i'm finding very fun you can use this to implement patterning actually and it's to create unity of language and atmosphere with a word bank i have two lists one of them is a list of verbs and the other is just a list of words or details that i like that i want to use at some point now i've gone into this habit where before i start writing a story i go through my list of verbs and i go through my list of details and i pull the ones that to me fit the tone or the atmosphere i have in mind i don't have to end up integrating all of them but it almost becomes like a little puzzle to try and integrate as many as i can but i think it's a really great way to hone in on and isolate the atmosphere this is a great way to make your word choice really intentional and to create a specific atmosphere by pulling those words especially if there's a cohesive feel to them i call this an ecosystem of language because to me language is like the habitat that the story can grow in right doing this kind of creates that like symbiotic relationship between the language and the story and all of the different words in the story so as a little exercise i went through two of my short stories i pulled words that stood out to me as like that thread of language that kind of creates that ecosystem or creates that atmosphere just to kind of contrast how two very different linguistic ecosystems can create very different feeling stories so the first one is from hold me under until i see the light so the words i pulled were kaleidoscoped dandelion gauze cotton potpourri polyester citrine trellis porcelain sepia opal sinew muslin and honeysuckle which is actually the last word of the story to me these words are very pale and dreamy i didn't put it in here but there's a lot of mention of sunlight in the story all the colors that are described are very pale so it's all very washed out to me this story is very dreamy you know there's a lot of fabrics in here i also did this for another story um so this story is not published this is a story that i wrote a couple months ago called suggs wong i think it's how you pronounce that i don't know it's a i think german rooted chess word you will notice a very different set of words but the words i pulled were industrial solar plexus bismuth bitumen carbon ozone styrofoam saber hydrogen novocaine scalpel helix tungsten neon scintillate sonic quark oxidized electron there's a lot going on there are a lot of elements there are a lot of words pertaining to like i guess like molecules it's pretty sharp like there's the word scalpel there's the word saber i also i didn't include it but i used the word syzygy if that's even how you pronounce that word i'd literally been looking for an excuse to use this word for like four years i never had a story where the linguistic ecosystem could grow that word so much of this comes down to the verbs verbs i think even themselves can be a sense of movement in the piece if you have really energetic verbs to me that just lifts a piece alive and it's not just about what the verbs mean but like how they sound so much of word choice for me and picking word choice is literally picking words that sound right really honing it on that word choice but not just in a sense of every individual word is chosen nicely but every individual word is chosen with care to the words around it that is all i've got for this video i'll leave some of my other videos on short fiction in the description thank you so much for watching if you have any questions you can always send me an ask on tumblr and i'll see you in another video bye [Music] you

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 stories, how to write short stories, tips for writing short stories, how to write better short stories, short story tips, how to write a short story, short stories for beginners, advice for new writers, short fiction, tips for new writers, short story

Id: Fxb8TZbTlZc

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021