How to Write a Short Story | Writing Tips

hey guys it's shaylen and i'm here today with another video so today i'm gonna be talking about how to write a short story maybe two years ago I did a video called my short story writing process and it's one of the most viewed videos on my channel I made that video back when I was pretty new to writing short stories so it's just like a chat on my process I think at the time I wrote that I'd only written four or five story and I think and I've written like 14 my process actually stayed relatively similar to what I discuss in the video I don't think it's really changed but now I feel like I have a lot more experience to actually just talk about how to write a short story and actually make like a video tutorial on it there is so much to say on this topic I spent basically two years of my degree focused on learning and on how to write short fiction I'm gonna try to cover kind of the essentials in as much detail as I can so first let's start with the idea lots of people struggle with this area of writing short stories and I see a lot of people who say that they can't write short stories because the idea gets too big and that just turns into a novel if that is a problem you have it's possible that the ideas you're choosing are basically novel ideas not short story ideas because there is kind of a difference so the way I like to see it is that a novel focuses on a journey that transforms the character whereas a short story focuses on an event that changes or reveals the character if your story is a journey and it's focused on this long transformation then it might be a novel if your idea is more focused around an event a smaller change or revelation in the character it might be a short story and ultimately don't be scared of whatever idea you have a short story doesn't have to be a simple idea short stories are actually one of the best forms to explore really strange ideas because you can just get really experimental I think short stories are probably better for experimentation than novels you know it's easier to carry an experiment for a couple thousand words than it is for ninety thousand words so in the end don't really be scared of what I you have even if it's really really bizarre but kind of just think about that distinction between transformation and change and journey and event so let's start with some kind of just general principles to keep in mind so first of all short stories are extremely versatile they range from like the flash fiction side which I'm not really gonna talk about flash fiction I don't really have experience rain flash fiction everything I've written has kind of been the two thousand to eight thousand range they're extremely versatile in structure in concept in form just everything about short stories is extremely versatile that's why I think short stories are such a great forum for people learning how to write because you can try so many different things you can try literally anything and it's not the commitment of a novel so the first thing that I would say when approaching a short story is you might not know this on your first draft but at some point you're probably going to want to figure out the crux of the story the crux of the story or what it is you want to reveal about your character and generally in a short story you're kind of focusing on this revelation you want to make about your character so at some point you're gonna want identify this I talked about this in my video on character I talked about what's called the dark room basically it's that really deep-seated thing in your character like I think about it as if your character was in therapy it's that thing the therapist would have to spend years uncovering and it's the thing that we never say on the page but it's what the story is about just basically the crux of the story some people might call this the purpose of the story or kind of what it is the story is accomplishing but it's not what you want identify that and I'm gonna be referring to the crux of the story a lot throughout this video you'll also want to identify the tone or central feeling or emotion with short stories you're probably gonna want to be focused in on a relatively narrow specific emotional note rather than a big emotional range in a novel you'll have a big emotional range but a short story is probably going to be a capturing of a specific emotion it's probably gonna be steeped in a specific emotion or feeling and I think it really helps to really think about the tone or atmosphere that I want my piece to have I also think it helps to think of an event rather than a theme I know I was talking about thinking of the crux but the crux isn't really the theme the theme would be the ideas in the story and you can run into issues when you set out to write about a theme rather than a person or an event stay grounded and what's grounded is with your character it can be a problem when you set up to make a big statement about humanity instead try to find what you're saying about this specific person and also it's not wrong to tell a story that's just an interesting story one thing I think that trips who will short fiction is I noticed a lot of people read short stories and then they say I didn't get it but I don't find that people say that as much with novels and I think it comes from this idea that in a short story there should be this like thematic point and that's what you're supposed to take away from the story and if you don't see the thematic point you didn't get the story the point of the story can literally just be to show interesting characters in an interesting situation it can just be to tell the story if that's what you want the purpose of the story to be it's totally fine that's the purpose of a lot of novels you don't need to root your story in making this like big philosophical statement that the reader has to get but know what it is you want your story to do if you want your story to just be to tell an interesting story for me usually it's I want to reveal something about the character and sometimes that takes a lot of drafts to figure out what I want that revelation to be like I usually start out wanting to tell an interesting story writing the story is like me trying to figure out what I'm trying to reveal about the character and then revision is me steering the story properly in that direction whatever the crux of the story is so that purpose of the story you want everything in the story to contribute to that crunch short stories are very much about unity and cohesion every element should be cohesive with the others so that's unity of character setting plot form voice everything every word should play into that unity a big difference between novels and short stories and novels you will get a range you might get a range of emotion a range of subplots because it's a journey whereas with a short story you want that really singular focus and that's what's hard about writing a short story is having to learn to zero in on that focus and I think it's a really good skill to have and of course there should be changed this is kind of a standard with any story stories thrive and are made of change so you want there to be change it can be very small it can be very subtle there are story where the change is more so in how the reader understands the character than in the character themselves so you will see short stories where the character doesn't necessarily change but our understanding of them does there should still be at least change in the situation and ideally the character should change so before we get further I'm gonna break down kind of the structure of a short story pretty simply you don't have to necessarily outline your stories this way I just wanted to show this to illustrate kind of what a short story is in its simplest form so you have a character that the story is about and they yearn for something and they have an exterior goal and then they also have a textual goal which is the reason for that goal what they want and specifically why they want it is really the most important part of the story and really that's the crux in a lot of cases not just what they want but why they want what they want they want to achieve that but there are forces of antagonism in their way you can usually break down your forces of antagonism into three different types societal interpersonal and internal so you have one societal antagonist which is kind of the environment you have one interpersonal which is their conflict with other people and then you have one internal which is within themselves not all stories have all three and most stories are primarily focused on one of the three but it helps to try to identify all three in your story if you can you know some of those forces will be more in the background some will be more in the foreground the internal is very important though then you have an inciting incident that occurs and the inciting incident is the thing that happens that causes a story to happen and that causes this chain of events which could be any number of scenes really from one to however many scenes you need that's basically the basic breakdown of what a short story looks like I just wanted to cover that before I get into kind of some different components so now let's talk a little bit about form there's this really important idea in short stories especially but also in novels and that's this idea of unity of form and concept so it's basically the form you use to tell the story is in unity with what the story is itself so this starts off with your point of view choice choosing the point of view that is what the story is if that makes sense choosing kind of the most beneficial point of view for telling your story the one that makes the most sense with the crux of the story you can think of other components you might want to include like I said short stories are great for experimentation you can try things like having true stories in parts or including I don't know whatever it is you want to do from the point of view of like an inanimate object really there are so many things you could try out and it's really worth experimenting because you kind of in the short space you kind of have the freedom to do so so now let's talk about structure and plot and how this kind of looks in a short story so to start off you should have an inciting incident you should have a climax basically the only two points that you need and there are going to be exceptions your story probably in almost all cases will need to have a climax it probably needs an inciting incident although there are occasionally stories that don't have one or the inciting that student was kind of before the start of the story I wouldn't recommend that for your first story I would recommend when you're just starting out trying to have an inciting incident that happens on the page and once you get more comfortable understanding the structure of a short story if you have one that you really feel doesn't need an inciting incident playing around with that when you're getting started I would recommend trying to include an inciting incident because not having one can be the downfall of many stories however in a short story a key plot point like the inside ensign or the climax could be one paragraph it could even be one sentence and they could be scenes but it could be as small as a sentence in a short story oftentimes the inciting incident is just the character deciding to do something we're deciding to go somewhere or whatever and a lot of time the climax is also a choice or it's a revelation now instead of that I wouldn't worry too much about standard structural things like 3x structure or the hero's journey or save the cap those things are really designed for long-form stories thing with novels is that because they're so long they kind of naturally start to fall into more of a standardized shape I know that seems counterintuitive short stories are so short that they don't really have time to become standard don't worry about any kind of structural template for your short story now like I was saying earlier short stories usually focus around an event this doesn't mean that necessarily the whole story takes place there often time there's kind of a core event it might be the inciting incident and then the story is reaction to that it might be the climax and the story is lead-up to that the whole story might be one scene but if you're struggling I would ask yourself what the core event of the story is in melting point which I'm using that because I think a lot of you guys have read melting point the event of the story is burning down the house that happens at the end of the story it's the climax of the story but it's also the goal of the story like the characters are setting out to burn down this house that's the exterior wall it's not like the subtextual goal the subtextual goal is to destroy each other as a means of self harm that's like the crux the exterior goal is to burn down this house and the event of the story is the burning down the house so even though that happens at the end everything is kind of building up to that or in relation to that and every single thing in the story it is into that event which is the burning of the house also in my short story I will never tell you this which is in the Puritan I don't know if it'll be out yet if it is out I will leave a link to it in the description the event of that story is flensed drowning so that story starts with the character Flynn drowning it's kind of like the whole story is or between that event important to remember in saying that is that extraneous scenes are especially a bore in a short story they're a problem in a novel but in a short story if you have four scenes and one of them is extraneous that's going to be a really big issue you want to be as efficient as possible and really think about only telling us what we need to understand what the crux of the story is they stay very focused on that crux and that event and don't try to get too much outside of it your character might have other interesting components of their life and you might let some of that seep into the narrative but as soon as you get too much into full scenes that are in relation to the crux in the event then it starts to become extraneous for the context of this story even if it is interesting for the context of the character as a whole one thing that's really key in short stories is that there's clear causal relation between all of the events again everything should be tied together by the thing that it orbits when you look at your story as a linear chain of events it might not be linear in the actual piece short stories don't need to be linear if you were to lay the events out linearly you want there to be clear you know causal relationship between all of them so every event causes the next event and even when your scenes are nonlinear also want there to be a causal relationship in the nonlinear plot as well that explains why the story is being told in this order if even if saying a happens after scene B may be seen B as a flashback there should actually still be caused a relationship going from A to B so that we understand why B is being told now you'll also probably find in short stories that there's no space on either side of the arc so in a novel you might have setup and an Huma before the inciting incident and after the climax in a short story there's really not a lot of space on either side of the arc the inciting incident happens right at the start the climax happens right at the end we usually don't really explore falling action or setup in most cases you also want to be sparing with flashback this is definitely something I was very bad at when I started writing short stories I would include way too many flashbacks if you read I will never tell you this you might be like but shaylen that story is all flashback that's because in that story like the present is a frame to look at the past but if your story is in the present you don't want to get too crowded with flashback trying to be really efficient and use as few flashbacks as you can and try to use just like contextualizing the narrative in the present more than you would just use flashback another key thing to remember when you're structuring a short story is to continually raise tension never resolve tension you do not have enough space in short story to any point resolve tension in a novel you might you know raise tensions close tensions open new ones in a short story never close the tension until the end and with each scene you want to think about whether or not the scene is escalating the tension or not if that scene is an escalating tension you maybe don't need the scene or something is fundamentally not working with the scene now when you're thinking about the end of a short story most short stories will end one of two ways either the main character makes a choice or the main character has a revelation but short stories are very character-driven creatures because you don't have much space to get into plot typically the ending has to show us or reveal us the character or their Chi and their change an ending where the character makes a choice and does something active is stronger an ending where the character just has a revelation but you want that choice to do you know is to reveal the character so again I'm using melting points the example at the end of melting point the main character locks her twin brother in the cabin when they're burning it down and she keeps him trapped in it for a second but then she lets him out this is revealing her character her desire to destroy him but her inability to actually do it so I'm gonna talk about the ending I want to touch on the beginning of a short story more so than in a novel you want to start with the hook if you are submitting your short stories to magazines that story needs to be as interesting as possible as early as possible strong first lines are really important you don't want it to seem contrived but even if you can just start with like a really strong interesting image that can work really well but some kind of hook is really important you don't have a lot of time to capture an editor's interest with a short story another thing you want to consider which were stories is to condense your timeline as much as possible stories can get really like spread out I'm also again using melting point as an example I'm sorry appeasing my own stories in this example it's just cuz it's easy to see like the first drafts and the issues that I had with them and then how like that ended up getting fixed but in that first draft of that story the main characters decided to go burn down the house three months before the fictive present and then the fictive present was them actually going to burn down the house made so much more sense and was way less confusing in the version of the story where they decided to go burn down the cabin and then just immediately went the longer your timeline is the more confusing it will be because the reader has to orient themselves and so many different points on the timeline you also want to cut basically what's called the connective tissue anything that's kind of bridging your scenes together but that we don't need to have and then the final thing I have to say on plot in structure is to just share the information with holding too much can be a big issue in short stories you don't have a lot of time you want the reader of questions but you don't want them to be confused I would recommend if you have information that the reader needs to know just state it yes its exposition but better one sentence of exposition well-written exposition at the start of the story then a reader who's confused the entire way if you have information just offer it up say it so that the reader has clarity and make it interesting exposition doesn't need to be bad thing it can be a really useful tool for clarity if you just write it in an interesting way and you make those sentences strong and in a piece this short there's no good payoff there so it's better to just tell us what we need to know so now I want to get into character character is the most important element of short fiction you don't have time to develop a plot like I said earlier so the story is probably really rooted in character when you're trying to flesh out your character the information you need to tell us about a character is probably not as much as you would share in a novel but you want to share enough about the character for us to understand the character in the context of this story and for the crux of the story to be impactful you're probably not gonna go as in-depth as you would in a novel by any means but you want to share the few imports and key details personally I have a preference for more information I like it when in a short story I know a character's age I know what a character looks like I know like a character's job or whatever just like the basic facts some short stories or some authors prefer to give you nothing there are short stories where they don't give you like the main characters gender I am usually on the side of preferring more information especially for longer pieces for flash fiction I don't know is different different thing but for like a longer short story I like to know who I'm reading about but other people have different preferences for that again you want to be efficient instead of telling us a lot you want to choose your details sparingly but make them really good details instead of a lot of kind of generic details give us just a couple really interesting ones rather than trying to paint the character in broad vague strokes try to paint them in a few specific points one very interesting piece of specificity can almost be enough to carry the character throughout the whole story it can even function as the crux if there's something really weird your character does that can do a lot it's also I think really important that a character in a short story surprises us also important in a novel but especially in a short story we're spending so little time with this character we want our understanding of them to be subverted at some point or them to just do something that surprises us oftentimes this comes into what I was talking about where the end the story is the character makes a choice we want that choice to be something surprising to us or we want the character just do something unexpected or surprising but still congruous with who we understand them to be ultimately in the end most of what I said about character in my video on characters which I will leave a link to still applies heaped I want to talk about setting I actually think short stories are a great Avenue for weird setting you have a very short space so in order to make it vivid a weird setting can actually be really helpful with that I'm not one like if I'm ready to short story I don't want to set it in just like a house someone's apartment like you know in a novel some of the novel might be set in someone's house but if I have a short story I would rather set it something somewhere really weird like a magical line infested green house or a outer space a lot of my stories start from setting we're like I have an interesting setting and then I want to put characters in the setting and use the setting as like a way to explore their relationship mostly for me that's kinda like my formula of crania stories I have a set II and I want to explore I have two characters with a relationship I want to explore and I put them in the setting see how they interact with their setting and therefore how it tests their relationship and creates conflict we're kind of like reveals their relationship or whatever setting can also really be used to your advantage give the characters something to do and interact with so that they act more than just think setting can actually be the thing that makes it a story you could have two characters who are going to have a conversation about something and that could be not a very interesting scene or interesting story put them in an interesting setting where there's something interesting for them to do and suddenly it could become a story you can use that needs a kind of guide and reflect and reveal character it can also be really important for creating that central mood and atmosphere and emotion that I talked about in the beginning so I quickly want to talk a little bit about line level stuff I'll be scared of a weird voice again short stories are the best avenue to experiment with don't be scared of strange voice even if the voice is really difficult to carry you've got no better place to do it then here again be efficient efficiency is really key in all elements of a short story more showing rather than telling but like most of all think cohesion like it's all about cohesion words that fit the unity of the story images that fit the unity of the story if you don't know where to start or end the story just think about creating strong images that reveal your character's worldview as first and last lines and then finally just a couple nuts on process for short story really you can approach it however you want you can outline it or not outline it I usually don't outline my short stories unless the whole story like comes to me in a vision and then I might make a really brief outline usually the method I take is I have an image in mind and maybe a couple other things they want to include and then I just kind of start exploring the world usually I would just write it sentence by sentence like write a sentence and then just write what feels necessary and continue writing the next necessary feeling sentence and a lot of the time some of those sentences reveal things that turn into extremely important components of the story so I definitely do a lot of discovery writing there's no right or wrong way to approach this but especially if you're not the kind of person who likes to plan you can go into a short story with like no planning it's the ideal form for no planning some people try to write them in one sitting I don't I usually write stories that are a little too long for me to do one sitting for some people they're a big fan of just like getting a full draft out I usually don't know the story like what's gonna happen and I can't get it all out of one's the name and then finally when you're editing focus on two things first of all when you're editing focus on being concise and making everything as concise as possible cutting anything that's extraneous and second of all think about refining the story's crux so by the time you're getting to editing you want to start to really narrow in on what the story's crux was identify it and make sure that everything is contributing to it and nothing is contradictory to it now that you have figured out what the crux of your story is make sure everything leads up to it that's everything I have to say on writing it for a story I sing so much to say thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions you can always tell me to ask on tumblr and I will see you in another video bye [Music]

Channel: ShaelinWrites

Views: 138,968

Rating: 4.9128933 out of 5

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 fiction, how to write a short story, short story ideas, how to write short stories, short stories, how to write better short fiction, how to write short fiction

Id: Q8DellQae18

Length: 24min 16sec (1456 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019