The Short of It

Penguin in a Jayne hat, of course

I wrote a short story. I was talking about it last week, wondering if I remembered how to do the little tricks that make a short story work since I’ve been so focused on novels the last few years. The obvious difference between writing a short story and writing a novel is the word length. My novels run about 100,000 words. This short story was only allowed to be 6,000 words.

There are a *lot* of similarities in tackling the writing of both lengths of stories: w...