Short stories can be a creative exercise used to explore a new idea. They can be entered into anthologies or submitted to magazines, and they can be repackaged into collections by the single author.
I've found short stories to be some of the most challenging writing I've done, and some of the most fulfilling. In today's post, award-winning short story writer and novelist, Alan Baxter, gives some of his tips.
First of all, I feel like there needs to be a small caveat at the start here. Writing and selling short stories is not a great way to pay the bills. Some people manage this feat, but most don’t.
As with the majority of writing, a variety of different income streams contribute to an overall living. This is true of short stories too.
While you can certainly work your way up into the realms of pro-rate paying magazines and anthologies, that won’t happen overnight. You can also make money from short stories by selling reprints to podcasts, having collections published (or publishing them yourself), and so on.
A successful short story career can also work wonders to spread your name and open other doors of opportunity for you.
And it can serve as a gateway to your novels. So there’s definite benefit to writing short fiction, but only if you love the form and want to add it as one string among many on your writing bow. However, if you do love the form and you want to make a go of short story writing, here are my ten tips for writing short stories that sell.
- Understand that a short story is different to a novel, but it shares a fundamental similarity: it needs to have a coherent beginning, middle, and end. Anything else is a vignette, or something experimental. To sell a story, you need to tell a whole story. The skill is in only telling enough to keep it short, but retaining all that’s required for a satisfying read.
- You need to know way more about your story than you tell to your readers. What finally makes it onto the page is a distillation of the ideas, world-building, characterization and so on that you started with. You need to know
everything about all your characters and your story so that you can write with confidence in a tight and succinct form. You don’t have to tell your readers everything about a person’s history, but you need a good idea of it yourself, so that the small hints you do seed throughout the story are assured and authentic.
- Don’t try to write for a market. This applies to novels too, but it bears remembering. You need to write the stories you want to write, the stories you want to read. Tell the stories only you can tell in the way only you can tell them, then go looking for markets to sell them. There are so many online and print magazines and anthologies these days, that you’ll surely find somewhere eventually if the story is good enough.
- Rejection is the default. Thousands of stories pass through editor’s slush piles every year. You need to be persistent and understand that rejection happens more than anything else. A few people can sell pretty much anything they write based on their name alone, but for most of us, a 10 to 20% success rate is pretty good. So a story will likely be rejected several times before it finds a home.
- Accept semi-pro payments as you build your name and career. Eventually, it would be nice to only ever get paid pro-rates for all your work, but sometimes it pays to get your name noticed, to get published in places that will showcase your stories to readers and editors even if that doesn’t mean you get paid much. Never give your work away for free except in particularly worthwhile places (like a charity anthology, for example) but a low payment that puts your name among others more famous than you in your field will be a great career-building move and help you sell more stories in the future.
- Have a theme. You don’t need all your stories to follow a theme, and it doesn’t need to be a narrow theme, but have something recognizable. For example, I write science-fiction, high fantasy, crime and other stuff, but the majority of what I write is dark weird fantasy and horror. I’ve built a name for myself in that genre more than any other and I’ve won awards in that field. My new collection of short stories, Crow Shine, contains 19 stories, including 3 originals, that all fit under that dark weird fantasy and horror umbrella. The publisher picked up the collection based on the coherence of voice and style, even though the stories in there range from the wild west to Caribbean pirates to the modern Australian outback and beyond. There’s a thread of consistency in style, subject and voice that means those stories fit together into a collection, and therefore they get sold again, read again, and continue to further build my career.
- The biggest problem with most short stories is that they start too far back. More often than not, any short story by a beginner can be greatly improved by cutting away the first page, or even page and a half. Think about where the story really starts, right in the meat of the action or conflict. You can seed any backstory sparingly throughout as you move forward from there.
- Don’t just go for a twist. A lot of stories have a twist ending, but when you think about it, so do a lot of novels. Think about how many books you’ve read where you thought, “I never saw that coming!” That’s just good storytelling. If you buy into this idea that short stories need a twist at the end, the whole thing will become a vehicle for the twist and it will be trite and unsatisfying. Tell a story, not a joke.
- The best stories are when something else is happening too. Rather than just move forward with the single idea, because you’re constrained by a tight word count, develop the skill to flesh out your story with other stuff, just like real life. For example, you may be fighting a dragon, but perhaps you’re also going through a messy divorce. Or maybe you’re trying to deal with the ghosts that dog your night-time hours, but you’ve also got exams and the last year of college to complete. Monsters and single-parenting; a magical cave and bullying at school; a lake full of mermaids and a home full of anger. You get the idea. Don’t restrict your story to something completely isolated and linear, because life isn’t like that. Your story may be short, but it needs to be as complex as life. Balancing those two things is one of the real skills of good short story writing. And with regard to this, remind yourself about point 2. above.
- The real skill in short story writing is editing. No matter how good you think your story is, it can be shorter, tighter, more compelling. Learn to strip the fat relentlessly, hunt out and kill repetition of words, make every sentence sing. Flense your work to within an inch of its life before sending it out into the world.
Just like anything, short story writing is a skill, an art, and a craft. Read as many as you can to learn other peoples’ methods. Write as many as you can to develop your own ability. And, like all writing, never give up.
Have you every felt drawn to writing short stories? Have you sold a short story? Do you have any experience to share or questions to ask? Please do add a comment below and join the conversation.
Alan Baxter is a British-Australian author who rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. He also teaches Kung Fu. He lives among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of NSW, Australia, with his wife, son, dog and cat. He’s the multi-award-winning author of several novels, including The Alex Caine Series, and over seventy short stories and novellas. His collected volume of short fiction, Crow Shine, is out now. Read extracts from his novels, a novella and short stories at his website – www.warriorscribe.com – or find him on Twitter @AlanBaxter and Facebook, and feel free to tell him what you think. About anything.
Such a great article with very sound advice. Enjoyed it a lot!
I’ve written short stories for most of my life and only recently (like 6 years ago) I’ve come to novels. It is a widely different experience, though in many cases (like your advice too) what is good for short stories is likewise good for novels.
The contrary is true as well, as I learned when I finally came to novels 😉
I agree with your suggestion to have a complex situation, not just a linear plotline, but I do think that what makes short stories different from novels is that there have to be one strong, obviously ‘main’ idea to the short story, an idea that makes all others accessory. Otherwise the short story will break and will lose cohesion. That one main idea is what allows the short story to be tight and dense, what allows the authors to decide what to keep and what to lose in the prose, even to decide the plotline. That’s why I think themes are particularly important to short stories.
Just my two cents 😉
That’s true, but we also need to focus on one central idea with a novel too. That elevator pitch needs to be sharp. We just don’t talk about all the subplots until later. The short story is focussed almost only on that central idea. But everything else needs to be hinted at and intimated.
I’ve sold one short story – “Home Is Where the Rat is” – published in a Weasel Press “Typewriter Emergencies” anthology of tales of anthropomorphic animals. Otherwise I’ve had something like 50 – 75 rejections. So I have a way to go to get to the 10-20% success rate. But, I am totally thrilled to have one published. I continue to write and submit.
Thanks for this piece of success with short stories.
Congrats! Keep going.
Congratulations on selling one of your stories! That is a wonderful feat in itself.
I could probably write short stories all day. Writing seventy thousand word novels feels like trying to press a mountain. I never considered making a living from it, but it’s good to know there’s an option if one has the tenacity.
Not easy, but it can be part of a living.
For literary short stories, it’s fine to sell for “nothing.” They’re mostly published in very good small press literary magazines. If you win a prize, you can earn money. Otherwise you usually just get a copy of the magazine your story was published in.
Otherwise, I totally agree with you!
I disagree. You should never give your writing away for nothing unless there’s a really good reason.
I fell into a similar trap with my poetry. I have been published in a few lit magazines with no reading fees and no prizes for publication… which meant they were glorified chapbooks with no audience and went defunct within months. Once I noticed this, I set my sights a little higher.
Great advice here. I recently just started writing “lists of ten” and find much of this blog entry useful. I definitely plan to incorporate some of this into my writing plan. So far I have submitted two lists to listverse and both have been rejected so safe to say #4 above resonated strongly. I am currently working on my 3rd and tell myself daily not to give up and be persistent. I did find a clever way to turn rejection into a positive. I started using my rejected content as blog posts in my new blog, rejectedlists.com. I look forward to learning more here!
Other than inserting too much backstory, is there anything else beginners do that they should quit doing?
Usually starting too soon. Cut off the first page and see how your story reads then. And look for repetition in words – when yo have so few to work with, repeated words really stand out.
Confession: I have never completed a short story. I’ve always been more partial to building a universe with a huge ensemble cast– which is why I’ve gravitated more to writing novels. Either that or poetry. Lots of poetry.
This has answered a lot of questions I’ve had about short story writing; thank you! I’m ready to step outside of my comfort zone and start pitching some short stories.
Hi Joanna,
I love all the valuable information you deliver, and this was a very nice article on short story writing. I just have a teeny suggestion – could you possibly use a thicker font? I know white space is all the rage on websites and blogs, but I really have a difficult time reading it, even when I enlarge the page. The actual letters are very thin. I copied and pasted your interview with Mark Mcguinnes so I could change it to Times New Roman 12 point and not have an eyestrain headache for hours. Thanks for all the hard work!
First up, I would like to thank you for your input, It’s very helpful. I have written five short stories over the last three years. One SciFi, one horror, one detective, one western and the most recent, erotica. They range from 50,000 to 28, 000 words. I have not tried to publish any, but looking into self-publishing through Smashwords. I went through cutting out the “Fluff.” I’m now looking for a professional editor and I was wondering if you could offer some suggestions and referrals.
28,000 to 50,000 words is a novella. A short story is up to 7,500 words and a novelette is 7,501 to 17,500 by SFWA standards.
This may be covered in here but how do go about sending your short stories and where?
That’s a huge question. The short answer is to first research who’s publishing stories in your genre and then read the guidelines of those markets.
I wrote 2 short stories that were for kids and supported an animal charity. I was shocked that both first attempts were accepted. I am wrapping up my first short story that will use my real name and preferred genre.
It is written first person and begins after the main event has completed. I am not trying to be annoyingly elusive doing this, by the second paragraph it is clear that my character has been searching for people for months, on the road, and his only companion is his beloved dog. I hear advice that says to never write in first person, how true is that?
When I tried a rewrite in 3rd person, the story sounded detached. There is no dialogue for much of it. He could be writing or thinking and I left that out purposely. Knowing that added no value to the story and could raise questions. “This guy has no flash light on him, but carries around pens and paper? ”
Chicago had been a lifetime home and he arrives in FL same time a big storm, maybe hurricane, rolls in. So he tells what he knows and some ideas he has for the gaps about what happened, almost as if defending himself and saying, “I had no involvement and a darn good reason I am still here. ”
I tied up my lose ends, added a pinch of comic relief, and the ending should satisfy the reader. There is a clear path ahead and it is a good place to part ways with my character.
I’ve written loads of stories in first person. I’ve won awards for stories in first person! It’s very common in short fiction and novels. Write in the voice, tense, etc. that feels right for your story.
Nice one – ‘Flense’
For a long time, I reallly resisted writing short stories, because I naturally gravitate to large-scale projects; I have a lot going on in my head and it tends to go waaaay past the usual “short story” marker of 7500 words.
However, I had the idea that maybe I could try writing short stories as an exercise in word restraint, mystery, scene-setting, and just plain old trying out story ideas. I have the rather unfortunate tendency to “tell” in exposition with lots of words rather than “show.”
I don’t know if I will ever publish whatever comes of my “short story” exercises, as I’m thinking it will just be, as a friend of mine calls it, “sandboxing,” or just playing around and experimenting.
The ultimate challenge is gonna be that word count limit. But I want to take a crack at it anyway, just to learn how to tighten up my writing, overall. So, this article was indeed quite helpful! 🙂
Thanks,
Kat ^.^
It’s an excellent exercise. Writing short stories makes me a better novelist. And you’re bound to get good enough to sell them if you work at it.
thx for the wonderful guidance… i always wanted to write a book..
Thank you for the tips this article has really been helpful I am a South African author of some sort I write short stories about my experiences of growing up in South Africa plus a few fictional short stories and people are responding positively to my writting and now I plan on putting all my stories into a collection
I have written a few stories and poems and I sent a few pages to three different publishers and I got a really quick reply from all of them asking for more of my work. Its all just stuff about my life and feelings that I have scribbled occasionally. I haven’t followed them up yet. Am planning to do so in the new year 😊
Hello, Can you please add me to your mailing list. Regards, Barry Revill
Hi Barry, You can signup at: http://www.TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint Thanks 🙂
Thanks for those ten tips. For the past three years I have enjoyed a 50% success rate with my short stories. Then for some reason for the past 6 months I have received only rejections. It was good to analyse my efforts against your tips. Yes two were driven by the ‘brilliant’ twist I thought I had created. One was taking three pages to get from 0 to 60 mph. And one was written solely to ‘fit’ a particular magazine. (My training was always study the magazines in depth, and write specifically for them).
It has been an eye-opener discovering how sloppy I have become. Thank you for giving me a fresh approach to my writing.