Conceptualizing a Short Story | Short Fiction Deep Dive #1

[Music] hi everyone i'm shaylyn here with read see so today i'm really excited to be starting a new series on this channel we're going to be doing a deep dive into short fiction we've done a few of these deep dives in the past we did one on developing a book five parts on the process of developing a book we did another on editing and this one is going to be on short fiction so this series is going to be in four parts conceptualizing short story which is what we're going to be talking about today drafting your story editing your story and publishing your story so let's jump into it in this first part we're going to be talking about conceptualizing a short story so we're going to cover kind of like the building blocks of a short story so first of all how long is a short story the interesting thing about this is that there isn't actually really kind of a universal agreed-upon word count most people will kind of tell you that a short story is a piece of writing in that 1500 to 8500 word range shorter than 1500 words and you have flash fiction or even micro fiction which are still short fiction they're just shorter forms of short fiction but there are definitely stories that are over 8 500 words you'll find short stories that are upwards of 12 000 words even the line between a short story and a novelette is pretty shaky and going to depend on who you ask you won't find many short stories over around 15 000 words at that point you're starting to get into novella territory so instead of talking about word count let's instead ask the question what does a short story do what is it meant to accomplish well the answer is kind of whatever you want it to do the key with the short story is that you have something you want to accomplish and then you try to accomplish that thing in the fewest words possible that might require 8 000 words that might require 5000 words that might only require a thousand words but you're trying to take the most efficient route to saying whatever it is you want to say let's take the same theme and ask ourselves how we could look at this theme through a novel versus a short story so let's say you want to write a story about how greed within a family is kind of harming them intergenerationally in a novel you might look at the whole history of the family so maybe we've got four different generations that we're going to look at we could go into the backstories of multiple different characters explore a lot of different relationships look at kind of the pivotal moments in a lot of these characters lives see how this theme has developed over kind of the lifespan of this family we might have a single catalyst event but it could lead to a long fallout or the ability to look way into the backstories of a lot of different characters but we could also look at the exact same theme in a short story so in a short story you might try to identify a single event that's going to allow you to explore this theme within this family so just find one event where this theme is really brought to the forefront um and we're kind of just going to look at one little event but that little event is going to serve as like kind of our lens into the family we're going to look at the same theme in a really really precise way whereas in a novel we're kind of going to go as deep as possible into every aspect of this theme and all of the characters of course the effects will be different but they can both be very effective the novel will give us a very detailed portrait of the family whereas the short story will explore the same idea as precisely as possible it's really important to keep in mind that a short story isn't a compressed novel it's not taking a novel and just whittling it down what you want to accomplish with your story could be thematic it could be moral it could be political it could be satirical it could be aesthetic it could be emotional it could be character based or it could just be for the purpose of entertainment there isn't just one thing that a short story can do it can really do anything the key is that it does that one thing really well throughout the rest of the series i'm primarily going to be talking about character and approaching short stories through the lens of character just because i think this is how most short fiction writers approach their short stories but your end goal with your short story could really be anything so while we normally talk about novels as having long arcs long journeys in a short story you're trying to find a key event that can serve as a moment of reveal for your themes for your character or whatever it is you're trying to explore or accomplish so let's talk about creating your concept your short story idea can really come from anything you might have an interesting character you want to write about you might have an interesting situation that you think would be cool to explore you might have a setting that you want to place a story in or you might have a theme or an idea that you want to talk about try to identify that little something that compels you i've had stories that started from just a single image really be anything it could be a line that you think would make a great first line and you want to develop the story from there in fact i think brainstorming first lines is one of the best places to start if you need an idea and you don't have one it's so much easier to edit a short story versus a novel so don't worry too much about having to do a lot of editing because it's not that big a deal i know when i'm writing a novel i'm always worried about creating a ton of work down the line for myself but you don't really have to worry about that with a short story let's say you do need to entirely change rewrite the story it's so short that it's really not a big deal you don't have to worry about having all the answers right away or know exactly what it is you want to accomplish you can certainly write from an outline if you want to and we'll talk about some different methods for drafting a short story in the next part of this series but also don't be afraid to free write if all you have is that single image or that single line you might want to just start writing the story from there and see what emerges that's totally okay you don't even need a developed concept to start writing so now let's talk about some different aspects of short fictions and different components these are all components that if you've studied novels you'll be familiar with character plot setting but we're going to talk about what they look like in short fiction in particular the key with a good short story is that you use every aspect of the story to contribute to your goal so the key when thinking about all these different elements is thinking about how they can work together so let's start with character most short stories are going to be character focused this is because you don't have much space to really develop a super exciting compelling plot with lots of twists and turns though you can if that's your goal there are plot driven short stories out there most are character-driven just for the reason that you don't have much space to develop a plot so character is definitely a really important aspect of short fiction you want to ask yourself what is the most compelling thing about this character and how can i create a story that explores that thing you don't really have time to create super detailed backstories for all of your characters and explore every aspect of them in a not like in a novel what you do in a short story is you just find the single most interesting thing about your character and you write about that you're not necessarily writing about the character as a whole but you are writing about the most interesting aspect of them and that can create the sense of a full rounded character that's really the challenge of short fiction you need to create the sense of a full rounded character in very few words the key is with the quality and not the quantity of the details that you choose to reveal about your characters you want to pick what you choose to share about this character very carefully and then really make it count language itself is paramount the way your character talks their voice their dialogue and even the form of the story which we'll talk about in a second can contribute to teaching us about this character so personally i like to think of the details that i reveal about my characters is falling into two different camps the first type is a beam and the second type is a window so if we think of our character as a house the beams are just what make the house right they're the basic building blocks of this character their age their name their gender where they live maybe their job their appearance fairly straightforward things that you would probably find in any given character profile you may not even share all these things that's the thing in a novel you're probably going to share most of these things but in a short story you may not you know there are plenty of short stories where we don't know the main character's name we don't know their age we don't know what they look like the second type of detail is what i call a window detail so these are the details that rather than just giving us basic information about the character actually teach us something more complex about them now the thing is there are details that could be a beam for one character and be a window for another you know let's say a character's appearance seems like a beam right it's pretty straightforward it's just what they look like but it could actually be a window how they describe themselves how they see themselves the language that they're going to use to describe themselves can actually be a window because we're going to use it to learn something more complex about them without a window the story is as small as it is if we're in a room with no windows this is all that we can see but if there's a window we can see outside to something more vast something more complex and even though we're still stuck in this room and we can only walk around the room in this small space we can still see beyond so that's kind of an analogy to kind of describe how by using good details and creating interesting themes and creating complex characters a short story can be so much greater than the sum of its parts the other really important thing to consider about characters in short fiction is to give them a goal the basic formula is character wants a thing character tries to get that thing we learn about the character through them trying to get that thing now let's talk about plot the key with plot in short fiction is that you don't want to take the scenic route like i was just saying about that general formula for a short story that's basically what plot is so you have a character who wants something the plot is them trying to get that thing and the theme is what we learn about them as a result this is also where we're going to find our conflict so we have a character who wants something we have them trying to get that thing and then the theme is what's being said about them the conflict is basically going to come from that how they try to get what they're trying to get aspect of the story right if they could just get what they wanted with no consequences you'd have no conflict but as they try to get that thing that they're trying to get they're going to be faced with different types of obstacles depending on your story they might be interpersonal obstacles or social obstacles there will be internal obstacles there might even be you know physical obstacles within the setting and through them kind of butting heads with all these different obstacles and creating all that conflict we're going to be able to learn something about the character we don't really have plot structures in short fiction like the hero's journey or anything like that however you do want your story to start with an inciting incident and you want that inciting incident to be as early in the piece as possible if you can place it in the first paragraph or at least the first page plenty of stories even have them in the first sentence if you don't know about the inciting incident i'll leave our video on the topic in the description you only want to include full flashbacks when necessary a lot of new short story writers and i definitely did this when i was new to short fiction get into the habit of including way too many flashbacks you can definitely include bits and pieces of backstory but only include a full flashback if it's necessary we don't need a detailed look into every character's backstory um and a flashback can be a really strong important part of a story if it's used well and along with that you do want every scene to be causally connected so cna causes scene b c b causes c z scenes c causes c d however many sins you have you don't have time for side plots or any kind of side tangent but it should be very direct kind of dominoes boom boom boom boom right you might only even have one seam and finally i would recommend keeping your timeline as short as possible there are short stories with longer timelines there are short stories that span years or a character's whole life but as a new short story writer it's going to be easiest if you keep the timeline as short as possible the longer the timeline gets the easier it is for the timeline to become confusing or for narrative slack to emerge like i said earlier there isn't a short fiction structure but you're basically just trying to bridge two points the inciting incident and the climax in short fiction i like to think of these two points as the opportunity and the revelation so the inciting incident is when the character is presented with a opportunity to seek what they want so now let's talk about form they're basically two parts to any piece of writing there's what you say and there's how you say it so what you say is going to be the story you know what actually happens in the story form is how you say it what point of view will you use what tense will you use scene structure how you order the scenes um the writing style that you use the character voice so it's very very important form is so important in short fiction in many ways it's more important than plot not much is going to happen in 4 000 words so how you tell us what happens is almost more important than what happens so in the very little space how you tell the story is going to be really important the form can even be part of the themes or part of the characters this can be as simple as choosing the point of view that will give you the best access to your character's psychology but could also even be doing something more experimental short stories are so short that it's really easy to experiment maybe you feel like it would make sense for your story to be written just like a stream of consciousness with no punctuation that would be very hard to pull off for a novel but in a short story you could do it so think very carefully about the formative choices you make if the point of you or the tense isn't contributing something maybe it could be maybe that's something you want to explore i'll leave some videos that we've done in the past on tents and point of view so finally let's talk about setting intro fiction i like to think of setting not as a backdrop but kind of the soil that the story grows from when possible try to avoid i guess dull settings that won't give you much to work with such as a coffee shop a character's apartment you know an office stuff like that there are stories set in those places that can be really effective so if you feel like that's the best place to set your story then go for it but if you just have a situation you want to explore and you're not really sure where it needs to take place and you just kind of reach for the most obvious setting you're kind of missing a valuable opportunity you know use settings like that when the story requires them but otherwise uh you can actually make your story way more compelling and make the writing easier for yourself by choosing a more compelling setting if you want to explore a relationship between two characters and you know they need to you know meet and have a conversation it's probably going to be more interesting if they have that conversation in like an abandoned corn maze than if they have that conversation at the mall you know a more interesting setting will give you more interesting images to describe it'll give you more interesting um details to draw on and that can lead to symbolism so if you feel like your stories are a little dull and you want to spice them up a little putting the characters in a more interesting setting is one of the best ways to do that and it can contribute to a lot of great symbolism so those are the different aspects of a short story kind of the anatomy of a short story and some things you want to think of when writing a short story in the next part of this video we're going to talk about the actual drafting process now of course there's so many different ways to draft a short story but i'm going to be looking at different methods that you can use for drafting your story so thank you so much for watching remember to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss any new videos from us we publish new writing editing and publishing tips every week on this channel but for the next three weeks we'll be talking about short fiction so make sure to stick around to not miss the rest of this series so thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye you

Channel: Reedsy

Views: 30,465

Keywords: how to write a book, authortube, writing tips, writing advice, writing tip, self publishing, self publishing tips, how to self publish a book, writing

Id: hXEbjjSNxaY

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021