All right, today’s the big day. I’m offering you some information to work with and inviting you to write a short story. When you’re done, put it on your blog or web site and link to it with a comment here. Or if you don’t want to post a short story and link to it, simply write a comment here and include the opening sentence or paragraph to your completed story for us to read.
I know it sounds obvious: The “hook” is the opening sentence or paragraph of your story and it is supposed to draw your reader’s interest, get them reading and, hopefully, keep them reading.
Read more on Tips for writing short stories — Hooks: What are they and how do you use them?…
Jill is 21 years old, just over 5′ 3″ tall, 130 pounds, short blond hair, blue eyes, lopsided smile which she compensates for by leaning her head slightly to the right when she smiles. It’s a pretty smile, made even more charming by a very slight but noticeable gap in her two front teeth. She was born with a club foot condition on her right foot, and is very self-conscious about the limp it gives her and the harassment she went through when she was a child. One week previously, she was brutally dumped by Andrew, a 23-year-old she was certain she would be marrying. He was extremely cruel and let her know that he’d been intimate with Jill’s best friend for the six months or so before the dumping.
Read more on Tips for writing short stories — Focus on a single character…
As part of the “short” in short stories, it’s important to focus your story on a single action or event in a character’s life. That doesn’t mean you won’t need background (“backfill”) for your story — it simply means making your entire story focus on one action or event and using the background material sparingly if at all.
Read more on Tips for writing short stories: Focus on a single action or event…
By definition, short stories are, well, short. Most magazine writing guidelines or anthology editors I’m acquainted with would consider a short story to be no longer than 1,500-5,000 words (that would be perhaps 5-20 manuscript pages). I have seen what I would consider to be “novellas” running to maybe 40,000-50,000 words referred to as “short stories.” For our purposes I’ll be discussing stories which run no more than 5,000 words.
Read more on Tips for writing short stories: ‘Short’ is the key word…
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