Writing: An Easy Way To Write Short Stories

Okay, I’m all done with philosophy for a while, so this week’s kind of regular post is going to be on a really simple way to come up with, and finish, a short story.

Most of the stuff I ever read, out in the world, about writing is about how difficult it is, and structure this and character that, and that’s all well and good.  Most of it is solid advice.  But most of it is also advice that harps on one thing and, even though I understand that the point is to challenge and bring out the best in the individual writer, it’s mostly advice that will stop you dead in your tracks if you think you have to conquer it or master it before you’re worthy of moving on.

I have a much more laid back approach to writing short stories.  It still requires some amount of work (There’s just no getting around the fact that you’re going to have to put words on paper - I’m dating myself now ;) , but it’s not nearly as difficult or stringent as a lot of instruction on the web would have you believe.

To that end, here’s my three step process for writing a short story.  And, remember, it’s just a process.  Just a method.  It’s a formula, by definition, but it’s not intended to (nor will it) make your writing formulaic.  Only you can do that.

What you actually write may or may not be any good (and that’s still subjective), but the process isn’t ever to blame for that.  In fact, I’m a big believer in writing a crappy story, if that’s what I’ve got in me at the moment.  You can’t spend your life waiting for the perfect idea to come to you.  In point of fact, if you don’t write the crap out of your system, you may be blocking that perfect idea from ever presenting itself to you.

I’m guilty of being lazy, myself, from time to time.  I accept full responsibility for that.  But let’s move on, because, if I let my stream of consciousness go, I’m going to end up repeating information as we go through this.

So, for the three step short story method, here we go:

Step 1:  This part is purely mental.  You just need to be ready to write.

You need to be able to accept that what you write may be crap.  It may start out good and end up bad.  More often than not, it will start out bad and end up good, and then you’ll have to rewrite the beginning.  The most important thing is that, once you’ve got your really simple structure laid down, you just start writing.

A lot of times, in fact almost every time, when I write, whatever ends up being the beginning of the finished product, was originally about a half a page or more into what I originally wrote.  Because, once I’m ready to go, I just start writing.  At that point, I haven’t decided yet what voice works best, what point of view I should be using, or what tense.  It just doesn’t matter.  That stuff will figure itself out for me while I write the story.  And it will do the same for you.  You just have to trust that it will.  That’s step one.

Step 2:  Step two requires a little thought, but it’s still simple.  Come up with an idea (or premise, if you prefer) and a theme.

Your theme should be some message you want to deliver with your story.  It can be that “life is wonderful and we’re all just wasting it, and why can’t we see that?”  Or it can be that “technology is slowly killing us and, if we don’t do something soon, the machines will take over and kill us all,” or it could be that “chocolate ice cream is the best ice cream ever.”

It doesn’t really matter what your theme is.  The most important thing about your theme, or message, is that it should be something you believe in or care about.  It can be something you don’t believe in or care about, but the writing will certainly come a lot easier if you’re passionate about what you’re writing, and you won’t have to reach for emotions and feelings that don’t exist within you in order to get your point across.

The second part of step two is to just have an idea for your story.  The idea is different from the theme in that, while the theme is your story’s message, the idea is the thing you’re using to get your story started.  Some people call this the premise and some people think that the idea (or premise) and the theme are the same thing.  But they’re not.

For instance, one of the best ways I’ve found to generate ideas is to think in terms of “what if?”  Or “what would happen if?”, etc.  And you can find an idea doing this very easily just by writing lists of “what if?”s.  It doesn’t matter if half, or all but one, of them are complete garbage.  Just like it doesn’t matter if what you write initially is any good or not.  And you can also come up with your idea before you come up with your theme.  Either way works, as long as the process makes sense to you.

The idea and the theme feed off of each other, which is why they’re so often confused.  So, to get you started, you could just start writing “what if?” lists.  I would suggest making them completely insane on purpose.  That will get you thinking about basic things more creatively.  Like:

What if a beaver and a hot plate decided to overthrow the government?

What if ten people got lost on an island and they decided that the only way they were ever going to get off was if they drank lots of orange juice and started a vigorous exercise routine?

What if a down on his luck janitor found the cure to cancer in a professor’s wastebasket and decided to take credit for the work himself?

And elaborate on those “what if?” points.  The more detailed your “what if?” the more ways your story can end up going.  Of course, the same could be said of a less complicated “what if?”.

The point here isn’t to, necessarily, find a great story idea, but to get you thinking in terms of story.  Every story poses a question, and short stories, for the most part, generally pose more limited ones.  At the end of step two of this process, you should have a general idea and a theme.

For instance, a short story I have out there, that’s already on the market, has the loose theme of “Belief is more powerful than what we think we know.  And it can colour our perception such that it can become our reality (even if that is only an illusion) to the point that we’re eager and willing to believe it, or be deceived by it” and a question of “What if a wrongly convicted prisoner used the knowledge he gained, training his mind and reading books in the prison library, to just walk right out the front door?”

The theme and “what if?” in the preceding paragraph probably sounds crazy, right?  But the story actually makes sense when you read it, and it’s not quite as grandiose as my little summation might make it sound.  It’s only about eight pages long, something like three thousand words, and it could use a rewrite.  In fact, the version that’s out in the wild on the Internet, isn’t the final version that I like better (I’m not happy with the tense or point of view, ending, etc  but it’s here if you want to check it out:).

I guess my point in bringing that story up (blatant self promotion of my lesser work aside ;) is that I used this method to generate that story and many more like it.  Some of them as short as 4 pages, some of them as long as 35 pages.  All of them, I would consider short stories.

Also, it occurred to me that , perhaps, taking the theme and idea that I’ve described above and reading what initially became of it, might help this step make more sense to you (By the way, if you are interested in checking out the story above, it’s for sale on Amazon.com, but they wouldn’t let me price it under 99 cents, which seems ridiculous, so I also made it available for free at the link above and here.  All you need is a PDF viewer to read it and, trust me when I tell you, there’s a better version out there.)

Step Three:  Step three of this super simple formula is to set up your plotting.  You should do all of this stuff (parts one, two and three) before you write a word, but I’m guilty of breaking this last step many times over.  I sometimes like to get the theme and the premise in my head and just start writing, because, a lot of the time, the setup to a story doesn’t really have to do with the plotting of it.  It just serves to set the mood and establish the theme.  The premise is dealt with more directly in the plotting.  But I’m getting away from myself again.

In order to do plotting, which is pretty much essential to your writing if you want it make sense to anyone, it’s generally best to know where your story’s going before you start writing it (steps one and two).  That being said, if your story is short enough, you can probably write it all off the top of your head.  It’s been done.  It can be done.  It can be done well.  I know for a fact.

The following is what some people call “however-many-point plotting.”  Usually it’s three to ten points.  Basically, what you do is that you write the progression of plot points down before you start writing your story (one per line), and then you use that progression of plot points to help guide your writing.  It’s actually an invaluable practice if you’re not used to writing structured story, and it’s still helpful even if you are.

The trick to using this method most effectively is to use the plot points (examples coming up) as a skeleton for your short story.  Actually start writing your story on the same paper (or in the same electronic document) that you have your plot points listed on.  Then, when you’ve finished writing the first plot point, you’ll have the second one there, on the page, to remind you what you were going to write next.  And you’re free to write and not have to think about the bigger picture while you paint your scenes.

It doesn’t matter how esoteric your story is either.  It’s going to go from point A to B to C, and, even if it goes from point A to C to B, those non-linear events will still appear linear in your story because, even if you guide a reader through time in an non-linear matter, not many people are going to just pick up your short story and read the beginning, skip to the end and then come back and read the middle.

So you write out your story very simply.  As simply as possible is best practice, in my opinion, because (and I know I come with a million disclaimers) creative writing is creative, by definition, and it almost never works out the way you originally intended.  Generally, it works out better.

I find it’s best to start with just a beginning middle and end, and then build on that until you feel comfortable  So your initial plot outline might look like this:

1. Bob is happy with his life

2. Something bad happens

3. Bob fixes the bad thing and everything goes back to normal.

Sure, that’s simple, but you can put as many points in between those points as you need to.  Anything that outlines the story you have in your head.  For instance.

1.  Bob is happy with is life.  His wife is satisfied with being a wage slave, too, but Bob dreams of living bigger

2.  An opportunity comes up for Bob to really make something of himself, but it will mean leaving the security of his job.

3.  Bob discusses the opportunity with his wife. She is dead set against it.

4.  Bob decides not to accept the opportunity, but he keeps the information to himself

5.  Bob’s best friend takes him out for drinks that night and convinces him to accept the opportunity, even though he knows Bob’s wife doesn’t like it.  She’ll be happy when everything works out, and thank him for it later.

6.  Bob agrees to accept he opportunity, but he doesn’t tell his wife.

7.  The opportunity turns out to be a disaster and Bob is left in financial ruin.  His wife finds out and all seems lost.

8.  etc, etc, etc…

I’m assuming you would finish this story up with a path to a happy ending, but maybe it would be better with a miserable one.  Although I may never write any fiction with the theme that “going out and taking a chance is a good way to ruin your life” (unless the real theme was that “ruining your life can make you see it for what it really was, and grant you opportunities to make it even better than it ever could have been”), your story is your story.  Tell the story you want to.  Who cares what story I want to tell (at least, when it comes to your writing)?

In fact (as is often the case for me when I start writing), I’ll have a random amount of plot points written up, but, usually by the time I get to the second or third one, I’ve already decided (or my characters or story have decided for me) that things are going to work out differently and the remaining plot points never happen or get changed.  I generally don’t write out the new plot points or complications, but you definitely should if it helps you.

And that’s it.  You now have a solid little method to crank out short story after short story.  You can use the same method for writing longer fiction, or even non-fiction, but I usually stick to this level of simplicity for short stories.  Because, in short stories, the character development and everything else is quick and immediate and you can keep those things in your head for the duration of the writing more easily.

There’s really no point, to my way of thinking, in over-complicating a simple thing.  My apologies, of course, to those of you out there who know that short story writing isn’t simple.  I couldn’t agree more.  It can be incredibly complex.  You have to pack more information into a smaller space, and layers of meaning, theme, premise, subtext, etc, make for a much better story and a more involving one.  But this article, and this method, deals with the very basics.

And, if you want to make your story more complicated, and have several themes or premises, these same three steps will still help you achieve that end, because the real magic is in the writing.  That’s where all of the creativity, complications and beauty (and everything else wonderful) of the story are actually born.  If you don’t have to worry about what you’re writing while you’re writing it, your writing will be better.

The three step method described above is merely a method to get you going and to keep you on point.

As always, I wish you the best of luck in your life and in your writing!

Peace,

Mike