Writing Good Fiction: Ten Tips for Creating Compelling Short Stories

Maybe you have an idea for a short story and are wondering how best to start writing it. Or maybe you’ve written your short story and are now looking for ways to revise it for a more complex and engaging narrative. You can create compelling prose and deepen your short fiction with the following strategies:

1) Start in action or movementPrayed in half beef, which in Latin means “in the midst of things”. Due to the space constraint of a short story, you want to engage your reader immediately. Movement immerses us in history faster than stillness. Let’s say, for example, that you are considering writing a story about a teenager who decides to rob a liquor store for the first time. Instead of introducing the character before he walks into the liquor store, why not have him already in the store, taking his gun and dealing with his inner conflict of committing his first crime? On review, the actual action, when the central character and conflict is first introduced, may not appear until, say, page 5, and the earlier pages are full of background and background situations. Try starting on page 5 and add background as the story unfolds, making it part of the escalating action.

2) Include your contract, or story promise, within the first two paragraphs. This gives readers context for what’s unfolding and lets us know what’s at stake for the central character. It is here where we are shown what the character wants, and we can intuit that from the events that begin to unfold, regardless of whether or not he achieves his wishes, this character will be altered at the end of the story.

3) Use specific and concrete details as much as possible. Specific details resonate more with readers than lofty statements. General or abstract statements tend to be melodramatic. Connect them to reality with particular and tangible details. This creates a more experiential reading of your story.

4) show Y telephone We’re all familiar with that saying, “show, don’t tell,” but it’s impossible to remove all “telling” from a story, especially in short fiction, where we have limited narrative space. Summarizing events is essential to cover extended periods of time or to convey recurring actions that provide context to the present action of the story. The trick is to make the narrative seem like a demonstration by using specific details that dramatize the narrative. For example, let’s look at a section on The snows of Kilimanjaro to see how Hemingway hides his narrative with very specific and concrete details:

He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betraying himself and what he believed in, by drinking too much to dull the edges of his perceptions, out of laziness, laziness and snobbery, pride and prejudice, by hook and by crook. bad. (60)

The narrative is full of stories, but what masks the story is the insertion of “too much to drink,” a simple phrase that fills in the blanks and grounds all abstract statements with real, concrete terms.

5) Use the internal monologue to create more depth for your character. While you don’t want to go out and explicitly state your character’s feelings, such as “he felt sad” or “she was happy,” you can express your character’s impressions, judgments, and reflections to convey her emotional complexity. Looking back at the Hemingway quote, notice how the character reflects and concludes that he wasted his talent by drinking. Without actually expressing the emotion, Hemingway was able to convey the depth of the character’s regret and shame.

6) Create tension by hindering the character’s wishes. This is at the heart of the escalating action in his story. Your character wants something (what’s at stake?) and conflict arises in his efforts to get the desired result. The tension is created when we see the character struggling with these obstacles.

7) Allow your characters to be vulnerable and flawed. Stop protecting them. They are much more interesting when they make mistakes, say the wrong things, or get into trouble. It is their vulnerability and flaws that make the characters in your stories human and sympathetic to your readers. This is also part of creating the character arc. Sometimes the obstacles to a character’s desires come from the character himself, and it is in overcoming (or not) these obstacles that he changes.

8) Insert your flashbacks (the past as scenes) strategically in the story. Flashbacks interrupt the present moment and can slow the pace of the short story, especially during a key emotional moment. If the flashback is long, try making it a stand-alone scene and use simple, unobtrusive time markers (like “three months ago” or “last spring”) to locate your reader. If the flashback is brief, consider inserting it well enough in advance, possibly in an earlier scene, so that your character can experience the emotional moment in the current action without interruption. Readers will have the flashback in mind when your character is acting in the present.

9) Have flashbacks and recaps inform the present action in your story. In other words, the past should provide context for your character’s actions or beliefs in the present moment.

10) Stay in the emotional moment. Writers sometimes find it hard to hold on during a pivotal emotional moment. You may feel uncomfortable. And sometimes, we feel inadequate to express it well, so we have a lot of development and detail in the telling of the story before and after, rather than during the emotional moment, but when we read such a significant moment, readers will feel like they are rush or even miss it entirely. Worse yet, the ending will feel undeserved. Dwelling on the emotional moment can mean going deeper into the character’s thinking. Try to extract the thought behind the thought. Or, if your character doesn’t look inward much, you can still make the moment feel emotionally significant by enhancing details of the character’s senses (smell, sight, hearing) or physicality (how the body feels or what it’s doing). ). ).

Incorporating these craft tips into your writing will go a long way toward creating a more visceral reading experience, a more believable arc of change, as well as a more meaningful relationship between character and action. You’ll be well on your way to writing an engaging and compelling short story.