Writing a Short Story

We tell stories every day of our lives. “What did you do last week?” “What happened with your cousin and that girlfriend of his?” “How did your mom break her leg?” –the answers to these, and a million similar questions that make up our everyday conversations, are stories, narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. Usually there’s some kind of static situation at the beginning; then complications happen, with unexpected turns for the better or worse, so that things as they were at the beginning more or less fall apart. But then, because of someone’s ingenuity or good (or bad) luck, everything refashions itself into a brand new state of being, one we might never have imagined.

In the Moment: A Write-from-Experience Activity

This assignment asks you to craft a story based on personal experience. This is different from literary analysis or research paper assignments which ask you to open with a thesis to continually reference and support. Stories are constructed differently. Successful stories describe events in such a way that readers get to experience the story as if they were directly observing events. Consider the following when drafting, writing, and revising:

Place your readers into a significant moment you’ve experienced. Narrow your focus from the start. Select a story out of one, tiny, narrow corner of your life and avoid expanding on all the details around the story. Do not give us an introduction that explains everything before it happens. Let the story speak for itself and trust your readers work at discovering what your story is about. Try to drop your readers into the action of your story to create immediacy.

Going Long: Writing the Long Short Story

The art of the short story resides in the heft of details, characters and scenes that must necessarily remain hidden from view, trapped beneath a surface comprised of approximately five thousand words. Let’s say you write a short story in which the protagonist, a woman, drives down a narrow country road that cuts through a fictional town in Connecticut. She is on her way to visit her father, who still lives in the house where she grew up. The woman is fleeing her past, one that includes a recent ex-husband. In the back seat of the car is their three-year-old son.