The Short
Story Author
By
Northwind of Otters
Short
stories are one of the more popular literary works. Their delightful charm, intense
plot line, explosive characters (no, not the Ben Miff explosive…), and the
general pleasure people get from quickly reading one promotes their writing. I
myself especially enjoy writing short stories and hope that, after this, you
will too.
If you’ve
attempted to write a short story and hated it, there is still hope for your
soul—yes, you heard me right. Knowing how to write a good short story and enjoy
the process will save your bacon upon occasion. First of all, you need to know
the “definition”, or purpose, of a short story. Secondly, you need to know that
there are many different kinds of short stories. There’s the short-short story,
and the longer short-story (which resembles a novel of sorts). And lastly, it helps to know how to make your
short story flow.
THE DEFINITION OF A SHORT STORY:
The short story is a fictional work that depicts a character’s inner conflict
or conflict with others and is usually an attempt to produce a single focused
emotional response from its audience. The novel, on the other hand, is typically
a conflict including many characters and many different episodes. This brings
out a variety of complex emotional responses from the reader.
If you
didn’t understand that, that’s okay; we’ll go over it. Basically, a short story
aims to convey a thought, emotion, or belief. Just think, you may not have
intentionally included it, but reread the story. It might just have been
something you came up with out of the blue, but emotion is evoked by the story
and it produces those emotions through a sad ending, a happy ending, an angry
ending… All you’ve got to do is decide where you want to go with the emotions.
THE SHORT-SHORT STORY: The
short-short story can range anywhere from a paragraph to about four pages of
material and is very concise and to the point. In a short-short story (SSS),
there are usually less diverse characters and a much more basic plot. The key
to writing a good SSS is to nail the “simplistic style”. In a novel, you would want
to (and should) include thousands of juicy details and descriptive paragraphs;
however, these will destroy your SSS and you will be forced to throw those out.
Keep your story to the point! Go off on tangents as little as possible and keep
your feet beneath you (meaning state things outright—don’t play the guessing
game with your audience). This could mean everything in the challenge of
getting your point across to the reader.
If you are
writing a SSS for a contest or assignment, you will most likely be given a word
limit. These are challenging to work around sometimes, but will strengthen your
abilities at conveying your writing skills. Keep details minimal, but be sure to
include these three points: Setting (time, location, and mood), description of character
(physical, mental, and social conditions), and finally environment (place,
characteristics of place, language, etc.). These are vital to the understanding
of your story.
THE
SETTING: The setting is where you address those three little questions—“where,
when and how”. You want to go into some detail about the place you are set in later (point number three, environment),
but the time is important to state and/or describe. If you’re writing in a
fairy land setting, it doesn’t matter as much, but be certain the reader doesn’t
get the impression of cars and ray guns as opposed to medieval or ancient
history. The mood is really hard to intentionally keep the same and express,
but happens rather naturally. You set it every time you put pencil to paper, or
fingers to keys. The mood is the emotional “river” that will carry the audience
through the story. What emotion, you ask? Whatever you so choose.
DESCRIPTION
OF CHARACTER: The description of your character is a big part of the story.
Everyone wants to know what the person they’re reading about is like. So let’s
review the three sides of the description of a character—physical, mental and
social characteristics. Now, physical is rather easy and usually gets written
in; tall, blue eyes, fair skin, etc. Emotional/mental is often done also; this
involves their outlook on life, their feelings and their general sanity. Social
characteristics are not usually ever mentioned directly, but can be assumed or
discovered through the course of the story. In an SSS, you never want to forget
that sometimes you will be unable to fully introduce your character and so you
may want to be at least conscious of this detail.
ENVIRONMENT: This is pretty
self-explanatory. It is a good idea to tell where you are in the story, and to describe
the place. As far as detail goes, most of it should come out through a natural
process of occurring events. For example, you could have the character describe
their feelings about the place they are in currently, adding some nice juicy
details, or you could just give an overview during some of the story action. (Say, for instance, that there’s a sword fight
going on in
THE LONGISH
SHORT STORY: The longish-short story varies very little from the SSS, really.
In a longer short story, you have room to expand and provide more details, and you
are allowed more space to finish your initial thought. Usually these
mini-novels run for about 100 pages or so, but can easily be a good 20 pages
and still be longish-short rather than our buddy, the short-short. In an LSS,
you find that the basic three principals (setting, description of character,
and environment) still apply, but now, since you have more room, you’re
expected to expand upon them. A fourth element is also added; it is called background/history.
BACKGROUND:
Your character didn’t just fall from the sky, right? Even if they did, you
would want to go into that a little. In an SSS you haven’t the time for much
history, and so you slide little hidden details in there, hoping everyone will
catch on. In the LSS, you have room to complete the history, so do so! It’s
important to know where the character is coming from in order to better the
chances of the readers bonding with the character.
LET THE
STORY FLOW: Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow! It’s time to forget snow and
focus on your story. What makes a great short story progress smoothly? Why, the
action, of course. In a novel you can afford to stick several long, more tedious
parts that you know will slowly allow the reader to go to sleep before you pop
the next big twist in there, but with a short story it’s a completely
different, well, story! You have to keep things going, using action, suspense,
romance and other key factors that will get the reader into the story, and
quickly. Usually in a novel you try not to add too many odd twists and turns
that will leave your reader confused and distracted, but in a short story it’s
important to keep everyone hooked. So twist and turn,
guys! Keep it different and surprising—maybe even try killing some main
character off occasionally.