Whose story is it?

A short story is all about creating a satisfying and believable character arc within a finite number of pages. So the last thing you want to do is go back and forth between two POV’s or try to give two characters an arc (trust us, it’s hard enough to do one). Even if you want two characters to be within the central action of the story–even if you want the events of the story to change multiple people in some way–the story should only belong to one character. And that should be the character who is going to be most drastically affected by the events that unfold. Ultimately, if a reader reads your story and can’t answer the question, “Whose story is this?” by the end, you’re doing something wrong.

Why now? Why today?

As we said before, the biggest challenge of a short story is that you basically have to do what a book does in terms of character arc within a short number of pages. Because of this, it’s crucial that you ask yourself- why is this story happening today? When attempting to write a short story, a lot of writers make the mistake of focusing solely on forming an interesting and engaging character and failing to focus on why this day specifically is important to the character’s life as a whole. Character drives plot so of course, it’s important to have an engaging character to carry the story, but the story needs to be happening on an extremely important day in their life.

When reading about this, a lot of writers then make the mistake of thinking that means that a huge event needs to happen in this character’s life. They’ll assume their parents have to get divorced or they need to be involved in a school shooting for the story to be purposeful enough. However, it doesn’t have to be a huge monumental event on the grand scale of things, it simply needs to be a huge monumental event to this specific character.

For example, perhaps the story starts with a character in his fifties and his wife tells him the doctor called to set up a checkup. A reader may assume its something dire, but perhaps this man just has refused to go to the doctor’s for the last thirty years, insisting that they’re wackjobs while secretly just being afraid of finding out something is wrong. Perhaps this is a fight he and his wife have been having annually all of this time. And, by the end of the story, he decides to finally go. To most people an annual check-up with a doctor isn’t life or death- but if it is to the character, then you have a good story.

What does the protagonist want? What is keeping him/her from getting it?

Another core aspect of a short story is character desire. While in a book-length manuscript we say that character drives the plot, in a short story it’s more specifically character desire that drives it. It needs to be made clear right from the beginning what the protagonist of the story wants and they need to want it badly. It’s not engaging to write a wishy-washy character that sort of wants something or might want it, because then the story has nothing at stake. The character has nothing to gain or lose over the course of the events that take place. And to be clear, they can have a negative desire as well. For example, in the above scenario, our main character desperately wants to avoid the doctor–that’s his core desire that drives the plot. In addition, the conflict comes in through whatever forces are keeping the protagonist from getting what they want. For example, in the above scenario, the conflicting force is obvious–the conflict is his wife insisting he go to the doctors.

Choice

Ultimately, the climax of a short story should always be a choice that the protagonist faces. In books, a climax can be a long battle scene or something with a lot of action, but in a short story when the conflict comes to a boiling point it must lead to the character making a choice. And the events of the story up until that point should make it clear what the cost of the choice will be.

The choice can’t be black and white, right or wrong kind of choice, either. It should present two options or paths to the protagonist and we should see that they will gain and lose something no matter what they choose. So let’s take our previous example for instance. Let’s say the story leads to the couple fighting and the wife making it clear that their marriage hangs on the balance of whether he goes to the doctor. In this choice, our protagonist either loses his wife or loses his sense of safety. And he either gains another year of peaceful denial or he gains a wife who feels happy in her marriage.

The post Genre Spotlight: Short Story appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

As Vonnegut points out, reading is a really intimate experience happening between your imagination and a complete stranger. A person you’ve never met (and likely never will meet) is taking precious moments of their life to dive into your work. Don’t waste a single moment of that engagement and make sure they walk away from your work with things to think about. Whether that be about morality, history, self-help or love, try to teach them something new so they walk away feeling they gained something positive from your book.

2) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

This doesn’t mean every character has to be perfect. Heck, it doesn’t even mean that a single one of them has to be perfect…perfect is boring. It just means at least one of them has to be likable in some capacity. This could mean a super sweet character, but it could also mean a damaged or jaded character who is trying to get their life together. Imperfections don’t make people unlikeable (in fact, they often do the opposite). But if your book is filled to the brim with incredibly harsh, evil, or frustrating characters, your reader isn’t going to care what happens to them.

We can’t overstate how crucial this one is to any and all writing. The character is the main driving force of any novel and character desire is what drives the character. A book where a character is just wandering about and events just fall into their lap isn’t an interesting read because they don’t have any stake in the events of the story. For example, a story about a character who gets rejected from a college isn’t interesting unless that character desperately wanted to get in. Perhaps it’s been their dream since they were a child and now we get to see how they react and cope with losing that dream. That’s far more interesting than a character getting a rejection letter, shrugging, and walking away.

4) Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

This goes along with the first rule, this is just more specifically what needs to happen to make your book worth your readers time. Make every sentence matter in the arc of your book. As we’ve said before, even setting and character descriptors should reveal character in some capacity.

5) Start as close to the end as possible.

Novice writers have the tendency to start their book in the wrong place. The first chapter of their book gets bogged down with exposition and backstory or even pages of build-up before the real action/arc of the story begins. You should start your book immediately in the action of the story, cutting out as much exposition and build-up as possible.

6) Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

We love our characters, it can be hard to make bad things befall them. But, as Vonnegut says, it’s in those times that we really see someone’s true self. That’s one of the key parts of any good story, revealing your characters (faults and all) to your readers.

7) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Write for you and for your characters- that’s it. If you’re constantly worrying about pleasing everyone your story is either going to be super jumbled and confusing or so general that it feels unrealistic and boring. Don’t be afraid to create characters with very specific quirks and personality traits instead of writing a protagonist that everyone could see themselves in. Trust us: your readers will thank you for it.

8) Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Very comically put, but also very true. Never convey suspense in a way that readers don’t understand what is happening to your protagonist. The story is driven by character and the choices your character makes is what defines them. Those choices should be very clear to the reader or the weight behind them will be lost. For example: let’s say you’re writing a suspense novel where your protagonist decides to seek revenge on the person he believes killed his father. Even if later it will be revealed that it wasn’t who our protagonist thinks it is, the reader needs to know that they had their mind made up. It says a lot about who they are and also will inform the guilt they’ll feel later upon realizing they’d been mistaken.

The post Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Writing appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.