Writers.com

How to Write a Short Story: The Short Story Checklist

Rosemary Tantra Bensko and Sean Glatch  |  November 17, 2023  |  6 Comments

how to write a short story

The short story is a fiction writer’s laboratory: here is where you can experiment with characters, plots, and ideas without the heavy lifting of writing a novel. Learning how to write a short story is essential to mastering the art of storytelling . With far fewer words to worry about, storytellers can make many more mistakes—and strokes of genius!—through experimentation and the fun of fiction writing.

Nonetheless, the art of writing short stories is not easy to master. How do you tell a complete story in so few words? What does a story need to have in order to be successful? Whether you’re struggling with how to write a short story outline, or how to fully develop a character in so few words, this guide is your starting point.

Famous authors like Virginia Woolf, Haruki Murakami, and Agatha Christie have used the short story form to play with ideas before turning those stories into novels. Whether you want to master the elements of fiction, experiment with novel ideas, or simply have fun with storytelling, here’s everything you need on how to write a short story step by step.

The Core Elements of a Short Story

There’s no secret formula to writing a short story. However, a good short story will have most or all of the following elements:

  • A protagonist with a certain desire or need. It is essential for the protagonist to want something they don’t have, otherwise they will not drive the story forward.
  • A clear dilemma. We don’t need much backstory to see how the dilemma started; we’re primarily concerned with how the protagonist resolves it.
  • A decision. What does the protagonist do to resolve their dilemma?
  • A climax. In Freytag’s Pyramid , the climax of a story is when the tension reaches its peak, and the reader discovers the outcome of the protagonist’s decision(s).
  • An outcome. How does the climax change the protagonist? Are they a different person? Do they have a different philosophy or outlook on life?

Of course, short stories also utilize the elements of fiction , such as a setting , plot , and point of view . It helps to study these elements and to understand their intricacies. But, when it comes to laying down the skeleton of a short story, the above elements are what you need to get started.

Note: a short story rarely, if ever, has subplots. The focus should be entirely on a single, central storyline. Subplots will either pull focus away from the main story, or else push the story into the territory of novellas and novels.

The shorter the story is, the fewer of these elements are essentials. If you’re interested in writing short-short stories, check out our guide on how to write flash fiction .

How to Write a Short Story Outline

Some writers are “pantsers”—they “write by the seat of their pants,” making things up on the go with little more than an idea for a story. Other writers are “plotters,” meaning they decide the story’s structure in advance of writing it.

You don’t need a short story outline to write a good short story. But, if you’d like to give yourself some scaffolding before putting words on the page, this article answers the question of how to write a short story outline:

https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-story-outline

How to Write a Short Story Step by Step

There are many ways to approach the short story craft, but this method is tried-and-tested for writers of all levels. Here’s how to write a short story step by step.

1. Start With an Idea

Often, generating an idea is the hardest part. You want to write, but what will you write about?

What’s more, it’s easy to start coming up with ideas and then dismissing them. You want to tell an authentic, original story, but everything you come up with has already been written, it seems.

Here are a few tips:

  • Originality presents itself in your storytelling, not in your ideas. For example, the premise of both Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden are very similar: two men and two women, in intertwining love triangles, sort out their feelings for each other amidst mischievous forest spirits, love potions, and friendship drama. The way each story is written makes them very distinct from one another, to the point where, unless it’s pointed out to you, you might not even notice the similarities.
  • An idea is not a final draft. You will find that exploring the possibilities of your story will generate something far different than the idea you started out with. This is a good thing—it means you made the story your own!
  • Experiment with genres and tropes. Even if you want to write literary fiction , pay attention to the narrative structures that drive genre stories, and practice your storytelling using those structures. Again, you will naturally make the story your own simply by playing with ideas.

If you’re struggling simply to find ideas, try out this prompt generator , or pull prompts from this Twitter .

2. Outline, OR Conceive Your Characters

If you plan to outline, do so once you’ve generated an idea. You can learn about how to write a short story outline earlier in this article.

If you don’t plan to outline, you should at least start with a character or characters. Certainly, you need a protagonist, but you should also think about any characters that aid or inhibit your protagonist’s journey.

When thinking about character development, ask the following questions:

  • What is my character’s background? Where do they come from, how did they get here, where do they want to be?
  • What does your character desire the most? This can be both material or conceptual, like “fitting in” or “being loved.”
  • What is your character’s fatal flaw? In other words, what limitation prevents the protagonist from achieving their desire? Often, this flaw is a blind spot that directly counters their desire. For example, self hatred stands in the way of a protagonist searching for love.
  • How does your character think and speak? Think of examples, both fictional and in the real world, who might resemble your character.

In short stories, there are rarely more characters than a protagonist, an antagonist (if relevant), and a small group of supporting characters. The more characters you include, the longer your story will be. Focus on making only one or two characters complex: it is absolutely okay to have the rest of the cast be flat characters that move the story along.

Learn more about character development here:

https://writers.com/character-development-definition

3. Write Scenes Around Conflict

Once you have an outline or some characters, start building scenes around conflict. Every part of your story, including the opening sentence, should in some way relate to the protagonist’s conflict.

Conflict is the lifeblood of storytelling: without it, the reader doesn’t have a clear reason to keep reading. Loveable characters are not enough, as the story has to give the reader something to root for.

Take, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story The Cask of Amontillado . We start at the conflict: the narrator has been slighted by Fortunato, and plans to exact revenge. Every scene in the story builds tension and follows the protagonist as he exacts this revenge.

In your story, start writing scenes around conflict, and make sure each paragraph and piece of dialogue relates, in some way, to your protagonist’s unmet desires.

4. Write Your First Draft

The scenes you build around conflict will eventually be stitched into a complete story. Make sure as the story progresses that each scene heightens the story’s tension, and that this tension remains unbroken until the climax resolves whether or not your protagonist meets their desires.

Don’t stress too hard on writing a perfect story. Rather, take Anne Lamott’s advice, and “write a shitty first draft.” The goal is not to pen a complete story at first draft; rather, it’s to set ideas down on paper. You are simply, as Shannon Hale suggests, “shoveling sand into a box so that later [you] can build castles.”

5. Step Away, Breathe, Revise

Whenever Stephen King finishes a novel, he puts it in a drawer and doesn’t think about it for 6 weeks. With short stories, you probably don’t need to take as long of a break. But, the idea itself is true: when you’ve finished your first draft, set it aside for a while. Let yourself come back to the story with fresh eyes, so that you can confidently revise, revise, revise .

In revision, you want to make sure each word has an essential place in the story, that each scene ramps up tension, and that each character is clearly defined. The culmination of these elements allows a story to explore complex themes and ideas, giving the reader something to think about after the story has ended.

6. Compare Against Our Short Story Checklist

Does your story have everything it needs to succeed? Compare it against this short story checklist, as written by our instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko.

Below is a collection of practical short story writing tips by Writers.com instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko . Each paragraph is its own checklist item: a core element of short story writing advice to follow unless you have clear reasons to the contrary. We hope it’s a helpful resource in your own writing.

Update 9/1/2020: We’ve now made a summary of Rosemary’s short story checklist available as a PDF download . Enjoy!

how to plan a short story

Click to download

How to Write a Short Story: Length and Setting

Your short story is 1000 to 7500 words in length.

The story takes place in one time period, not spread out or with gaps other than to drive someplace, sleep, etc. If there are those gaps, there is a space between the paragraphs, the new paragraph beginning flush left, to indicate a new scene.

Each scene takes place in one location, or in continual transit, such as driving a truck or flying in a plane.

How to Write a Short Story: Point of View

Unless it’s a very lengthy Romance story, in which there may be two Point of View (POV) characters, there is one POV character. If we are told what any character secretly thinks, it will only be the POV character. The degree to which we are privy to the unexpressed thoughts, memories and hopes of the POV character remains consistent throughout the story.

You avoid head-hopping by only having one POV character per scene, even in a Romance. You avoid straying into even brief moments of telling us what other characters think other than the POV character. You use words like “apparently,” “obviously,” or “supposedly” to suggest how non-POV-characters think rather than stating it.

How to Write a Short Story: Protagonist, Antagonist, Motivation

Your short story has one clear protagonist who is usually the character changing most.

Your story has a clear antagonist, who generally makes the protagonist change by thwarting his goals.

(Possible exception to the two short story writing tips above: In some types of Mystery and Action stories, particularly in a series, etc., the protagonist doesn’t necessarily grow personally, but instead his change relates to understanding the antagonist enough to arrest or kill him.)

The protagonist changes with an Arc arising out of how he is stuck in his Flaw at the beginning of the story, which makes the reader bond with him as a human, and feel the pain of his problems he causes himself. (Or if it’s the non-personal growth type plot: he’s presented at the beginning of the story with a high-stakes problem that requires him to prevent or punish a crime.)

The protagonist usually is shown to Want something, because that’s what people normally do, defining their personalities and behavior patterns, pushing them onward from day to day. This may be obvious from the beginning of the story, though it may not become heightened until the Inciting Incident , which happens near the beginning of Act 1. The Want is usually something the reader sort of wants the character to succeed in, while at the same time, knows the Want is not in his authentic best interests. This mixed feeling in the reader creates tension.

The protagonist is usually shown to Need something valid and beneficial, but at first, he doesn’t recognize it, admit it, honor it, integrate it with his Want, or let the Want go so he can achieve the Need instead. Ideally, the Want and Need can be combined in a satisfying way toward the end for the sake of continuity of forward momentum of victoriously achieving the goals set out from the beginning. It’s the encounters with the antagonist that forcibly teach the protagonist to prioritize his Needs correctly and overcome his Flaw so he can defeat the obstacles put in his path.

The protagonist in a personal growth plot needs to change his Flaw/Want but like most people, doesn’t automatically do that when faced with the problem. He tries the easy way, which doesn’t work. Only when the Crisis takes him to a low point does he boldly change enough to become victorious over himself and the external situation. What he learns becomes the Theme.

Each scene shows its main character’s goal at its beginning, which aligns in a significant way with the protagonist’s overall goal for the story. The scene has a “charge,” showing either progress toward the goal or regression away from the goal by the ending. Most scenes end with a negative charge, because a story is about not obtaining one’s goals easily, until the end, in which the scene/s end with a positive charge.

The protagonist’s goal of the story becomes triggered until the Inciting Incident near the beginning, when something happens to shake up his life. This is the only major thing in the story that is allowed to be a random event that occurs to him.

How to Write a Short Story: Characters

Your characters speak differently from one another, and their dialogue suggests subtext, what they are really thinking but not saying: subtle passive-aggressive jibes, their underlying emotions, etc.

Your characters are not illustrative of ideas and beliefs you are pushing for, but come across as real people.

How to Write a Short Story: Prose

Your language is succinct, fresh and exciting, specific, colorful, avoiding clichés and platitudes. Sentence structures vary. In Genre stories, the language is simple, the symbolism is direct, and words are well-known, and sentences are relatively short. In Literary stories, you are freer to use more sophisticated ideas, words, sentence structures and underlying metaphors and implied motifs.

How to Write a Short Story: Story Structure

Your plot elements occur in the proper places according to classical Act Structure so the reader feels he has vicariously gone through a harrowing trial with the protagonist and won, raising his sense of hope and possibility. Literary short stories may be more subtle, with lower stakes, experimenting beyond classical structures like the Hero’s Journey. They can be more like vignettes sometimes, or even slice-of-life, though these types are hard to place in publications.

In Genre stories, all the questions are answered, threads are tied up, problems are solved, though the results of carnage may be spread over the landscape. In Literary short stories, you are free to explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and inchoate, realistic endings that suggest multiple interpretations, and unresolved issues.

Some Literary stories may be nonrealistic, such as with Surrealism, Absurdism, New Wave Fabulism, Weird and Magical Realism . If this is what you write, they still need their own internal logic and they should not be bewildering as to the what the reader is meant to experience, whether it’s a nuanced, unnameable mood or a trip into the subconscious.

Literary stories may also go beyond any label other than Experimental. For example, a story could be a list of To Do items on a paper held by a magnet to a refrigerator for the housemate to read. The person writing the list may grow more passive-aggressive and manipulative as the list grows, and we learn about the relationship between the housemates through the implied threats and cajoling.

How to Write a Short Story: Capturing Reader Interest

Your short story is suspenseful, meaning readers hope the protagonist will achieve his best goal, his Need, by the Climax battle against the antagonist.

Your story entertains. This is especially necessary for Genre short stories.

The story captivates readers at the very beginning with a Hook, which can be a puzzling mystery to solve, an amazing character’s or narrator’s Voice, an astounding location, humor, a startling image, or a world the reader wants to become immersed in.

Expository prose (telling, like an essay) takes up very, very little space in your short story, and it does not appear near the beginning. The story is in Narrative format instead, in which one action follows the next. You’ve removed every unnecessary instance of Expository prose and replaced it with showing Narrative. Distancing words like “used to,” “he would often,” “over the years, he,” “each morning, he” indicate that you are reporting on a lengthy time period, summing it up, rather than sticking to Narrative format, in which immediacy makes the story engaging.

You’ve earned the right to include Expository Backstory by making the reader yearn for knowing what happened in the past to solve a mystery. This can’t possibly happen at the beginning, obviously. Expository Backstory does not take place in the first pages of your story.

Your reader cares what happens and there are high stakes (especially important in Genre stories). Your reader worries until the end, when the protagonist survives, succeeds in his quest to help the community, gets the girl, solves or prevents the crime, achieves new scientific developments, takes over rule of his realm, etc.

Every sentence is compelling enough to urge the reader to read the next one—because he really, really wants to—instead of doing something else he could be doing. Your story is not going to be assigned to people to analyze in school like the ones you studied, so you have found a way from the beginning to intrigue strangers to want to spend their time with your words.

Where to Read and Submit Short Stories

Whether you’re looking for inspiration or want to publish your own stories, you’ll find great literary journals for writers of all backgrounds at this article:

https://writers.com/short-story-submissions

Learn How to Write a Short Story at Writers.com

The short story takes an hour to learn and a lifetime to master. Learn how to write a short story with Writers.com. Our upcoming fiction courses will give you the ropes to tell authentic, original short stories that captivate and entrance your readers.

' src=

Rosemary – Is there any chance you could add a little something to your checklist? I’d love to know the best places to submit our short stories for publication. Thanks so much.

' src=

Hi, Kim Hanson,

Some good places to find publications specific to your story are NewPages, Poets and Writers, Duotrope, and The Submission Grinder.

' src=

“ In Genre stories, all the questions are answered, threads are tied up, problems are solved, though the results of carnage may be spread over the landscape.”

Not just no but NO.

See for example the work of MacArthur Fellow Kelly Link.

[…] How to Write a Short Story: The Short Story Checklist […]

' src=

Thank you for these directions and tips. It’s very encouraging to someone like me, just NOW taking up writing.

[…] Writers.com. A great intro to writing. https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-short-story […]

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Related Topics

  • Short Story Writing Overview
  • Types of Writers
  • How to Become a Writer
  • Author Overview
  • Document Manager Overview
  • Screenplay Writer Overview
  • Technical Writer Career Path
  • Technical Writer Interview Questions
  • Technical Writer Salary
  • Google Technical Writer Interview Questions
  • How to Become a Technical Writer
  • UX Writer Career Path
  • Google UX Writer
  • UX Writer vs Copywriter
  • UX Writer Resume Examples
  • UX Writer Interview Questions
  • UX Writer Skills
  • How to Become a UX Writer
  • UX Writer Salary
  • Google UX Writer Overview
  • Google UX Writer Interview Questions
  • Technical Writing Certifications
  • Grant Writing Certifications
  • UX Writing Certifications
  • Proposal Writing Certifications
  • Content Design Certifications
  • Knowledge Management Certifications
  • Medical Writing Certifications
  • Grant Writing Classes
  • Business Writing Courses
  • Technical Writing Courses
  • Content Design Overview
  • Documentation Overview
  • User Documentation
  • Process Documentation
  • Technical Documentation
  • Software Documentation
  • Knowledge Base Documentation
  • Product Documentation
  • Process Documentation Overview
  • Process Documentation Templates
  • Product Documentation Overview
  • Software Documentation Overview
  • Technical Documentation Overview
  • User Documentation Overview
  • Knowledge Management Overview
  • Knowledge Base Overview
  • Publishing on Amazon
  • Amazon Authoring Page
  • Self-Publishing on Amazon
  • How to Publish
  • How to Publish Your Own Book
  • Document Management Software Overview
  • Engineering Document Management Software
  • Healthcare Document Management Software
  • Financial Services Document Management Software
  • Technical Documentation Software
  • Knowledge Management Tools
  • Knowledge Management Software
  • HR Document Management Software
  • Enterprise Document Management Software
  • Knowledge Base Software
  • Process Documentation Software
  • Documentation Software
  • Internal Knowledge Base Software
  • Grammarly Premium Free Trial
  • Grammarly for Word
  • Scrivener Templates
  • Scrivener Review
  • How to Use Scrivener
  • Ulysses vs Scrivener
  • Character Development Templates
  • Screenplay Format Templates
  • Book Writing Templates
  • API Writing Overview
  • How to Write a Book
  • Writing a Book for the First Time
  • How to Write an Autobiography
  • How Long Does it Take to Write a Book?
  • Do You Underline Book Titles?
  • Snowflake Method
  • Book Title Generator
  • How to Write Nonfiction Book
  • How to Write a Children's Book
  • How to Write a Memoir
  • Mistakes to Avoid When Writing a Book
  • How to Write a Book Title
  • How to Write a Book Introduction
  • How to Write a Dedication in a Book
  • How to Write a Book Synopsis
  • Business Writing Examples
  • Business Writing Skills
  • Types of Business Writing
  • Dialogue Writing Overview
  • Grant Writing Overview
  • Medical Writing Overview
  • How to Write a Novel
  • How to Write a Thriller Novel
  • How to Write a Fantasy Novel
  • How to Start a Novel
  • How Many Chapters in a Novel?
  • Mistakes to Avoid When Writing a Novel
  • Novel Ideas
  • How to Plan a Novel
  • How to Outline a Novel
  • How to Write a Romance Novel
  • Novel Structure
  • How to Write a Mystery Novel
  • Novel vs Book
  • Round Character
  • Flat Character
  • How to Create a Character Profile
  • Nanowrimo Overview
  • How to Write 50,000 Words for Nanowrimo
  • Camp Nanowrimo
  • Nanowrimo YWP
  • Nanowrimo Mistakes to Avoid
  • Proposal Writing Overview
  • Screenplay Overview
  • How to Write a Screenplay
  • Screenplay vs Script
  • How to Structure a Screenplay
  • How to Write a Screenplay Outline
  • How to Format a Screenplay
  • How to Write a Fight Scene
  • How to Write Action Scenes
  • How to Write a Monologue
  • Technical Writing Overview
  • UX Writing Overview
  • Reddit Writing Prompts
  • Romance Writing Prompts
  • Flash Fiction Story Prompts
  • Dialogue and Screenplay Writing Prompts
  • Poetry Writing Prompts
  • Tumblr Writing Prompts
  • Creative Writing Prompts for Kids
  • Creative Writing Prompts for Adults
  • Fantasy Writing Prompts
  • Horror Writing Prompts
  • Book Writing Software
  • Novel Writing Software
  • Screenwriting Software
  • ProWriting Aid
  • Writing Tools
  • Literature and Latte
  • Hemingway App
  • Final Draft
  • Writing Apps
  • Grammarly Premium
  • Wattpad Inbox
  • Microsoft OneNote
  • Google Keep App
  • Technical Writing Services
  • Business Writing Services
  • Content Writing Services
  • Grant Writing Services
  • SOP Writing Services
  • Script Writing Services
  • Proposal Writing Services
  • Hire a Blog Writer
  • Hire a Freelance Writer
  • Hire a Proposal Writer
  • Hire a Memoir Writer
  • Hire a Speech Writer
  • Hire a Business Plan Writer
  • Hire a Script Writer
  • Hire a Legal Writer
  • Hire a Grant Writer
  • Hire a Technical Writer
  • Hire a Book Writer
  • Hire a Ghost Writer

Home » Blog » How to Write a Short Story That Gets Read (In 7 Steps)

How to Write a Short Story That Gets Read (In 7 Steps)

how to plan a short story

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Short stories have a potent allure. They plunge readers into vibrant worlds, capture complex characters, and deliver impactful narratives, all within a brief space. However, learning to write a short story is as challenging as writing an entire novel.

This article unlocks the secrets of crafting short stories that seize and retain readers’ attention.

How to Write a Short Story

This guide to short fiction writing begins with an overview of the art form, highlighting its challenges and appeal. We then delve into the essence of a short story, focusing on its defining characteristics.

The article progresses to cover creating compelling characters , which is essential for driving the story’s development.

Additionally, we provide practical advice on getting your short story published . Concluding the guide, we summarize the key strategies to write short stories and encourage writers to nurture their unique voices, supplemented by a list of resources for further exploration in short story writing.

Understanding the Essence of a Short Story

By its very nature, a short story is a brief but intense glimpse into a narrative, a concentrated form of storytelling that demands precision. Unlike novels, short stories tend to require a different set of writing skills and understanding.

Short Story Characteristics

Here are the key characteristics:

  • Brevity and Focus: The most defining aspect of a short story is its length. A short story focuses on a singular theme, requiring every word to contribute meaningfully to the plot.
  • Immediate Engagement: A short story must capture the reader’s attention quickly. The opening lines set the tone, introducing the conflict or presenting a unique perspective that hooks the reader.

Use Squibler’s AI tools to rewrite or distill your story ideas. Since Squibler AI specializes in fiction writing, tools such as Rewrite or Add Conflict are effective tools for creating both the first draft and the final version.

The Role of a Strong Opening

Next, let’s cover the role of a strong opening.

  • Creating Intrigue: The opening of a short story should immediately intrigue the reader. The opening sentence sets the stage for what’s to come, whether through an intriguing situation or a compelling voice.
  • Introducing Conflict: The early establishment of the conflict or central theme moves the story forward. This conflict doesn’t have to be dramatic but must be compelling enough to drive the whole story.

The Economy of Language

Third, let’s cover the economy of language.

  • Precise Word Choice: Every word in a short story must serve a purpose. With limited space, choose words that convey the maximum meaning or emotion.
  • Descriptive Efficiency: Descriptive passages must be efficient yet evocative. The challenge is to create vivid imagery and atmosphere without overloading the reader with details.

Focused Pacing

Next, let’s talk about focused pacing.

  • Single-Threaded Plot: Most short stories follow a single-threaded plot. This focus allows for a more in-depth exploration of the central theme.
  • Balanced Pacing: Pacing in a short story needs to be carefully balanced. It should be brisk enough to maintain engagement but also allow for the development of characters and plot.

Main Characters in a Short Story

Now, let’s talk about your main character.

  • Depth over Breadth: Describing a particular character in a short story involves creating depth rather than breadth. A glimpse into the personality, motivation, or background can be more effective than a full-blown character analysis.
  • Character as a Vehicle: Characters often act as vehicles for the larger theme of the story. Their actions and transformations are pivotal in conveying the story’s essence.

Squibler AI allows you to create your characters as Elements and use them to weave custom narratives. That way, your writing is unique to your story ideas. No bland AI writing.

The Significance of a Powerful Ending

Now, let’s go over creating a powerful ending for a great short story.

  • Resonating Conclusion: A successful short story leaves a lasting impact with its conclusion. The ending should resonate with the reader, offering closure or leaving them pondering.
  • The Twist or Revelation: Many short stories use a twist or revelation towards the end. This element is a powerful tool to surprise the reader and add depth to the story’s message.

Character Arc in Short Stories

Developing characters swiftly is a cornerstone of short story writing. In the short story format, writers must employ techniques that reveal character depth effectively.

First Impressions Matter

The initial introduction sets the stage for the reader’s perception. A character’s first appearance, action, or line of dialogue should be telling. It’s about creating an impression that hints at their deeper traits, whether through a unique habit, a striking dialogue, or a notable reaction to a situation. This technique allows the reader to connect with and understand the character immediately.

Show, Don’t Tell

“Show, don’t tell” remains a golden rule in short stories. This involves revealing character traits through actions and interactions rather than explicit descriptions. For instance, a character’s kindness can be shown through actions rather than simply stating they are kind. This approach engages readers more actively, encouraging them to infer and imagine the character’s nature.

Effective Use of Dialogue

Dialogue is a powerful tool. A character’s speech can reveal their background, personality, and emotional state. Even a short exchange provides significant insights into a main character’s life, making dialogue crucial in quick character development. You can show a lot in so few words! Here are a few tips:

Key Character Moments

Identify and craft key moments that reveal the essence of your character. These moments, whether a decision, a realization, or an action, should be pivotal in showing who the character is at their core.

Minimal Yet Meaningful Backstory

While extensive backstory is often not feasible in short stories, including minimal yet meaningful details adds depth to your characters and makes a short story a complete story. A brief mention of a past event, a short flashback, or a relevant anecdote can give readers a fuller understanding of the character’s motivations and history.

Building Plot Elements in Short Stories

Creating a focused plot is crucial in short story writing, where space is limited, and every element must contribute to a cohesive whole. This section explores constructing a plot that captures and retains the reader’s attention.

Establishing a Central Conflict

Every compelling short story revolves around a central conflict or problem. This conflict should be clear and engaging, whether internal, external, or both. The story’s driving force propels the narrative forward and maintains the reader’s interest. Introduce this conflict early to set the stage and give direction to your story.

If you’re stuck with creating an impactful conflict with an inciting incident, use Squibler’s Create Conflict tool to add drama to engage readers.

Streamlining the Story

A short story has no room for unnecessary subplots or extraneous characters. Focus on streamlining the narrative to ensure that every scene, character, and line of dialogue serves the central conflict or theme. This approach helps maintain a tight story structure where each element advances the plot.

Crafting a Strong Beginning

The opening of a short story should immediately draw the reader in – many writers stick to this strategy! It could start in the middle of an action, present a unique character, or introduce an intriguing scenario.

The goal is to pique the reader’s curiosity and set the tone for the rest of the story. A strong beginning not only captures attention but also establishes the stakes and tone of the narrative.

Developing Pacing and Tension

Pacing is key in a short story. Balance action moments with quieter, more introspective segments to allow readers to absorb the events. Build tension gradually towards the climax, ensuring the story progresses logically and keeps the reader engaged. The pace should complement the story’s tone and theme, enhancing its overall impact.

Crafting a Satisfying Conclusion

The conclusion of a short story should be satisfying and resonant, whether it offers a clear resolution or leaves the reader with something to ponder. It should tie together the main threads of the plot, address the central conflict, and leave a lasting impression. A well-crafted ending elevates the entire story.

Setting the Scene in Short Stories

The setting in a short story plays a crucial role, often acting as more than just a backdrop—it sets the tone, influences the mood, and even affects the plot and characters. In this section, we’ll explore how to establish settings in short stories.

Conveying Settings

When brevity is the key, it’s important to convey the setting concisely. Writers should use vivid and precise language to paint a clear picture of the setting in the reader’s mind without lengthy descriptions. A well-chosen detail tells more than paragraphs of description. For example, describing the faded paint on a childhood home conveys a sense of nostalgia.

Using Setting to Enhance the Mood

The setting is a powerful tool in establishing the story’s mood. For example, a story set in a bustling city conveys a sense of urgency or anonymity, while a story set in a secluded forest creates a mood of isolation or mystery. Selecting details that enhance the mood you want to convey is crucial.

Integrating Setting with Plot

The setting should do more than just describe a location; it should interact with the plot and characters. It acts as an obstacle or a source of conflict. For instance, a challenging climate is a hurdle for characters to overcome, or a particular city shapes a character’s outlook and experiences. The setting should be integral to the story structure.

Symbolism and Thematic Elements

In some stories, the setting carries symbolic weight or contributes to the theme. A decaying house might symbolize the end of an era or a character’s mental state, while a busy street market could represent cultural diversity. By aligning the setting with the story’s themes, writers can add depth and layers to their short stories.

Temporal Settings

Besides geographical locations, a story’s time is set also impacts its overall effect. Historical settings offer a sense of authenticity and transport readers to a different time, while futuristic settings open up possibilities for exploring new story ideas and scenarios.

The era or period must complement the story’s themes and plot.

Engaging the Reader with Your Writing Style

The writing style in a novel or short story is not just a medium of storytelling; it’s an essential tool that shapes the reader’s experience and engagement.

This section will explore how to utilize writing style effectively to captivate readers.

Developing a Distinct Voice

A unique voice sets the tone of your story and distinguishes your writing. Whether conversational, formal, whimsical, or solemn, the voice should be consistent and reflect the nature of the story and characters.

For instance, first-person storytelling offers deep personal insights into a character’s thoughts and feelings, while a third-person omniscient voice provides a broader perspective.

Balancing Show and Tell

Finding the right balance between showing and telling is vital. “Showing” immerses readers in the story, allowing them to experience events and emotions through detailed description and action. “Telling,” on the other hand, conveys information and moves the plot forward.

In a short story, where every word counts, deciding when to show and when to tell impacts the pacing and reader engagement.

Crafting Compelling Dialogue

Dialogue in short stories must be purposeful. It should reveal character traits, advance the plot, or provide necessary information. Writing realistic and impactful dialogue involves giving each character a distinct voice and ensuring their conversations sound natural and relevant to the story’s context.

Avoiding unnecessary exposition in dialogue keeps it dynamic and engaging.

Utilizing Descriptive Language

When used effectively, descriptive language creates vivid imagery and evokes emotions. However, overuse or overly flowery descriptions slow down the pace.

The key is choosing the right words to create a clear and compelling picture in the reader’s mind without overwhelming them.

Experimenting with Literary Techniques

Don’t be afraid to experiment with literary techniques like metaphors, similes, alliteration, and varied sentence structure. These techniques add depth to your writing and help create a rhythmic flow. However, they should serve the story, not distract from it.

Using such devices should enhance, rather than complicate, the reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the story.

Adapting Style to Story

Finally, adapt your writing style to suit the story you are telling. A suspenseful thriller might call for short, punchy sentences to build tension, while a more introspective story might benefit from a more flowing, descriptive style. The style should always complement the tone and pace of the story.

Editing and Refining Your Story

The editing phase is crucial in transforming a good short story into a great one. It involves refining your plot, enhancing clarity, and ensuring that every element serves the story’s purpose. It’s also important that your story has a satisfying ending.

This section will guide you through editing and refining your short story to achieve its fullest potential in the final draft.

First Pass: Structural Edits

Let’s go over the initial steps:

  • Assessing the Plot: Begin by evaluating the plot’s structure. Ensure that the story flows logically, that each scene transitions smoothly, and that the climax and resolution are satisfying. Look for any plot holes or inconsistencies and address them.
  • Character Consistency: Check that your characters remain consistent throughout the story. Their actions and dialogues should align with their established traits and development.
  • Pacing: Adjust the pacing to maintain reader interest. Identify any sections that drag and tighten them by removing unnecessary details or exposition.

Second Pass: Style and Voice

Next, let’s talk about the style and voice.

  • Refining the Voice: Ensure your voice is consistent and appropriate for the story. Adjust it for tone and style to match the story’s mood and setting.
  • Dialogue Polish: Refine the dialogue to make it more realistic and impactful. Each character’s speech should be distinct and contribute to the story’s progression.

Third Pass: Language and Grammar

The third step is checking language and grammar.

  • Clarity and Readability: Focus on sentence structure and word choice. Ensure clarity in your writing, avoiding overly complex sentences or ambiguous phrasing.
  • Grammar and Syntax: Correct any grammatical errors and check for proper syntax. Pay attention to punctuation, as it affects the flow and readability of the story.
  • Eliminating Redundancies: Remove redundant words or phrases to keep readers engaged. Each word should add value to the story.

Final Review: Feedback and Final Touches

Finally, wrap it up with gathering feedback.

  • Seeking Feedback: Once you’ve made revisions, seek feedback from trusted readers or writing groups. Fresh eyes catch issues you may have overlooked and provide valuable perspectives.
  • Incorporating Feedback: Evaluate the feedback critically and decide which suggestions align with your vision for the story. Make the necessary changes based on this input.

Short Story Writing Tools

Don’t be afraid to seek assistance when the writing gets tricky. Writing a great short story usually requires help.

The help comes from a fellow short-story writer, writing workshops, or using writing software to guide you and help you start writing. There are many options for this, but here are two that will help you create the best short story possible.

Squibler is perfect for writing short stories.

Squibler offers an abundance of organizational tools that will make your life easier.

These include:

  • Plot generator
  • Generate scenes
  • Create elements
  • Polish dialogues
  • Create engaging descriptions
  • Generate characters
  • Generate character development
  • Generate original visuals
  • Free templates
  • A place for notes and research
  • A place for your outline – no matter how detailed
  • Chapter and scene organization

These AI tools come in handy when writing a short story. Depending on the style and genre of your story, you may need to do a lot of research despite the shorter length.

Grammarly is there to help you through the editing process. Once it scans your work, it will pick out the spelling and grammatical errors. In addition to pointing out your errors, it tells you how to fix them.

These can be small things like an unnecessary comma or a missing period. But a lot of little things add up.

Grammarly is free to use and can be integrated with:

  • Microsoft Word
  • Google Docs
  • Chrome Browser

Grammarly is an effective editing tool for all types of writers . It cleans up your work fast. This saves you time, improves your craft, and helps you remain professional and polished.

For an enhanced editing experience, Grammarly offers a premium upgrade that provides you with additional, more advanced checks.

Getting Your Short Story Out There

After the hard work of writing and refining the first draft of your short story, the next step is sharing it with the world. This final section offers guidance on how to get your short story published and read by an audience.

Exploring Publication Options

Literary Magazines and Journals: Research literary magazines and journals that publish short stories. Consider print and online publications, and target those that align with your story’s genre and style. Pay attention to their submission guidelines and deadlines.

Online Platforms: Leverage the power of the internet. Websites like Wattpad, Medium, or your blog can be excellent platforms to publish your work and reach a wide audience. These platforms also allow for direct reader engagement and feedback.

Entering Writing Contests

Writing Competitions: Participating in short story competitions can provide exposure and credibility. Look for contests that cater to your genre and offer publication opportunities as part of their prize.

Building an Online Presence

Social Media and Author Websites: Create an online presence through social media platforms and an author website. These can be powerful tools for promoting your work, connecting with readers, and building a community of followers.

Networking in the Writing Community

Join Writing Groups and Workshops: Engage with local or online writing communities. Networking with other writers can provide collaboration, feedback, and support opportunities.

Attend Literary Events: Participate in literary events, readings, or book fairs. These events can offer networking opportunities and expose you to publishers and other industry professionals.

Sources Of Inspiration: Classic Short Stories

For aspiring short story writers, classic short stories serve as a wellspring of inspiration. These timeless works, penned by craft masters, offer various styles, themes, and techniques to learn from.

Reading classics provides a deeper understanding of the short story form and sparks creativity in your own short stories and writing.

There are many classic, well-known short stories by famous authors . Some short story examples that are expertly written and deeply meaningful:

  • “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe
  • “Chivalry” by Neil Gaiman
  • “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry
  • “The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens
  • “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner 
  • “Miss Temptation” by Kurt Vonnegut 
  • “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway

These short tales have gone down in history for their ingenuity. They did a fantastic job setting the atmosphere, bringing their character to life , and awing the reader.

FAQ: Writing Short Stories

Here are the most frequently asked questions about how to write a short story.

How many words should a short story have?

A short story ranges from 1,000 to 7,500 words. However, this varies, with some stories being as brief as 500 words or as long as 10,000 words.

What is the importance of internal logic in a short story?

Internal logic refers to the consistency and believability of the story’s world. Maintaining it is key to ensuring that the story remains credible and engaging to the reader, even if it delves into fantastical or surreal elements.

What is a key element in a short story or flash fiction?

A key element in a short story is its focused narrative. Unlike a novel, which explores multiple themes and subplots, a short story typically revolves around a single idea or central theme.

How is rising action used in a short story?

It builds tension and complicates the plot as it progresses towards the climax. It’s crucial for escalating the stakes and deepening the reader’s investment.

What differentiates a short story from a novel?

The main difference lies in length and scope. A novel offers a broader exploration of themes, characters, and plots, often spanning tens of thousands of words, whereas a short story provides a more concentrated plot.

How do you develop an idea into a short story?

Define the main conflict or theme to develop an idea into a short story. You can even use your own life examples. Then, create compelling characters and a setting that supports your fiction. Outline a plot that makes sense. This includes rising action, a climax, and a resolution, ensuring each element contributes to the central idea.

how to plan a short story

Related Posts

Published in Short Story Writing

close

Join 5000+ Technical Writers

Get our #1 industry rated weekly technical writing reads newsletter.

close

How to write short stories

How to Write a Short Story That Captivates Your Reader

Trying to write a short story is the perfect place to begin your writing career .

Because it reveals many of the obstacles, dilemmas, and questions you’ll face when creating fiction of any length.

If you find these things knotty in a short story, imagine how profound they would be in a book-length tale.

Most writers need to get a quarter million clichés out of their systems before they hope to sell something.

And they need to learn the difference between imitating their favorite writers and emulating their best techniques.

Mastering even a few of the elements of fiction while learning the craft will prove to be quick wins for you as you gain momentum as a writer.

I don’t mean to imply that learning how to write a short story is easier than learning how to write a novel —only that as a neophyte you might find the process more manageable in smaller bites.

So let’s start at the beginning.

  • What Is a Short Story?

Don’t make the mistake of referring to short nonfiction articles as short stories. In the publishing world, short story always refers to fiction. And short stories come varying shapes and sizes:

  • Traditional: 1,500-5000 words
  • Flash Fiction: 500-1,000 words
  • Micro Fiction: 5 to 350 words

Is there really a market for a short story of 5,000 words (roughly 20 double-spaced manuscript pages)?

Some publications and contests accept entries that long, but it’s easier and more common to sell a short story in the 1,500- to 3,000-word range.

And on the other end of the spectrum, you may wonder if I’m serious about short stories of fewer than 10 words (Micro Fiction). Well, sort of.

They are really more gimmicks, but they exist. The most famous was Ernest Hemingway’s response to a bet that he couldn’t write fiction that short. He wrote: For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.

That implied a vast backstory and deep emotion.

Here are some other examples of micro fiction from my Facebook page.

Writing a short story is an art, despite that they are so much more concise than novels. Which is why I created this complete guide.

  • How to Come Up with Great Short Story Ideas

Do you struggle coming up with short story ideas?

Or is your list so long you don’t know where to start?

Writing fiction i s not about rules or techniques or someone else’s ideas. 

It’s about a story well told .

Short story ideas are all around you, and you can learn to recognize them. Then you can write with confidence and enjoy the process.

I recommend these strategies to generate story ideas:

1. Recognize the germ.

Much fiction starts with a memory—a person, a problem, tension, fear, conflict that resonates with you and grows in your mind. 

That’s the germ of an idea that can become your story.

2. Write it down.

Write your first draft to simply get the basics of the story down without worrying about grammar, cliches, redundancy or anything but the plot.

3. Create characters from people you know.

Characters come from people you’ve or have known all your life (relatives). 

Brainstorming interesting, quirky, inspiring, influential people and mix and match their looks, ages, genders, traits, voices , tics, habits, characteristics. The resulting character will be an amalgam of those.

4. Get writing.

The outlining and research has to end at some point.  

You’ve got to start getting words onto the page.

Interested in reading more about these strategies?

Click here to read my in-depth blog post on how to come up with story ideas .

  • How to Structure Your Short Story

Regardless whether you’re an Outliner or a Pantser like me (one who writes by the seat of their pants),  I recommend a basic story structure .

It looks like this, according to bestsellin g Dean Koontz :

  • Plunge your main character into terrible trouble as soon as possible. (That trouble will mean something different depending on your genre. For a thriller it might be life-threatening. For a romance it might mean choosing between two suitors.)
  • Everything your character does to try to get out of the trouble makes it only worse.
  • Eventually things appear hopeless.
  • Finally, everything your character has learned through all that trouble gives him what he needs to win the day—or fail.

That structure will keep you —and your reader—engaged.

  • How to Write a Short Story in 9 Steps
  • Read as Many Great Short Stories as You Can Find
  • Aim for the Heart
  • Narrow Your Scope
  • Make Your Title Sing
  • Use the Classic Story Structure
  • Suggest Backstory, Don’t Elaborate
  • When in Doubt, Leave it Out
  • Ensure a Satisfying Ending
  • Cut Like Your Story’s Life Depends on It

How to Write a Short Story Step 1. Read as Many Great Short Stories as You Can Find

Read hundreds of them—especially the classics .

You learn this genre by familiarizing yourself with the best. See yourself as an apprentice. Watch, evaluate, analyze the experts, then try to emulate their work.

Soon you’ll learn enough about how to write a short story that you can start developing your own style.

A lot of the skills you need can be learned through osmosis .

Where to start? Read Bret Lott , a modern-day master. (He chose one of my short stories for one of his collections .)

Reading two or three dozen short stories should give you an idea of their structure and style. That should spur you to try one of your own while continuing to read dozens more.

Remember, you won’t likely start with something sensational, but what you’ve learned through your reading—as well as what you’ll learn from your own writing—should give you confidence. You’ll be on your way.

How to Write a Short Story Step 2. Aim for the Heart

The most effective short stories evoke deep emotions in the reader.

What will move them? The same things that probably move you:

  • Heroic sacrifice

How to Write a Short Story Step 3. Narrow Your Scope

It should go without saying that there’s a drastic difference between a 450-page, 100,000-word novel and a 10-page, 2000-word short story.

One can accommodate an epic sweep of a story and cover decades with an extensive cast of characters .

The other must pack an emotional wallop and tell a compelling story with a beginning, a middle, and an end—with about 2% of the number of words.

Naturally, that dramatically restricts your number of characters, scenes, and even plot points .

The best short stories usually encompass only a short slice of the main character’s life —often only one scene or incident that must also bear the weight of your Deeper Question, your theme or what it is you’re really trying to say.

Tightening Tips

  • If your main character needs a cohort or a sounding board, don’t give her two. Combine characters where you can.
  • Avoid long blocks of description; rather, write just enough to trigger the theater of your reader’s mind.
  • Eliminate scenes that merely get your characters from one place to another. The reader doesn’t care how they got there, so you can simply write: Late that afternoon, Jim met Sharon at a coffee shop…

Your goal is to get to a resounding ending by portraying a poignant incident that tell a story in itself and represents a bigger picture.

How to Write a Short Story Step 4. Make Your Title Sing

Work hard on what to call your short story.

Yes, it might get changed by editors, but it must grab their attention first. They’ll want it to stand out to readers among a wide range of competing stories, and so do you.

How to Write a Short Story Step 5. Use the Classic Story Structure

Once your title has pulled the reader in, how do you hold his interest?

As you might imagine, this is as crucial in a short story as it is in a novel. So use the same basic approach:

Plunge your character into terrible trouble from the get-go .

Of course, terrible trouble means something different for different genres.

  • In a thriller, your character might find himself in physical danger, a life or death situation.
  • In a love story, the trouble might be emotional, a heroine torn between two lovers.
  • In a mystery, your main character might witness a crime, and then be accused of it.

Don’t waste time setting up the story. Get on with it.

Tell your reader just enough to make her care about your main character, then get to the the problem, the quest, the challenge, the danger—whatever it is that drives your story.

How to Write a Short Story Step 6. Suggest Backstory, Don’t Elaborate

You don’t have the space or time to flash back or cover a character’s entire backstory.

Rather than recite how a Frenchman got to America, merely mention the accent he had hoped to leave behind when he emigrated to the U.S. from Paris.

Don’t spend a paragraph describing a winter morning.

Layer that bit of sensory detail into the narrative by showing your character covering her face with her scarf against the frigid wind.

How to Write a Short Story Step 7. When in Doubt, Leave it Out

Short stories are, by definition, short. Every sentence must count. If even one word seems extraneous, it has to go.

How to Write a Short Story Step 8. Ensure a Satisfying Ending

This is a must. Bring down the curtain with a satisfying thud.

In a short story this can often be accomplished quickly, as long as it resounds with the reader and makes her nod. It can’t seem forced or contrived or feel as if the story has ended too soon.

In a modern day version of the Prodigal Son, a character calls from a taxi and leaves a message that if he’s allowed to come home, his father should leave the front porch light on. Otherwise, he’ll understand and just move on.

The rest of the story is him telling the cabbie how deeply his life choices have hurt his family.

The story ends with the taxi pulling into view of his childhood home, only to find not only the porch light on, but also every light in the house and more out in the yard.

That ending needed no elaboration. We don’t even need to be shown the reunion, the embrace, the tears, the talk. The lights say it all.

How to Write a Short Story Step 9. Cut Like Your Story’s Life Depends on It

Because it does.

When you’ve finished your story, the real work has just begun.

It’s time for you to become a ferocious self-editor .

Once you’re happy with the flow of the story, every other element should be examined for perfection: spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence construction, word choice , elimination of clichés, redundancies, you name it.

Also, pour over the manuscript looking for ways to engage your reader’s senses and emotions.

All writing is rewriting . And remember, tightening nearly always adds power. Omit needless words.

She shrugged her shoulders .

He blinked his eyes .

Jim walked in through the open door and sat down in a chair .

The crowd clapped their hands and stomped their feet .

Learn to tighten and give yourself the best chance to write short stories that captivate your reader.

  • Short Story Examples
  • The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
  • The Bet by Anton Chekhov
  • The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant
  • To Build a Fire by Jack London
  • Journalism In Tennessee by Mark Twain
  • Transients in Arcadia by O. Henry
  • A New England Nun by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
  • Miggles by Bret Harte
  • The McWilliamses And The Burglar Alarm by Mark Twain
  • Vanka by Anton Chekhov
  • Where to Sell Your Short Stories

1. Contests

Writing contests are great because the winners usually get published in either a magazine or online—which means instant visibility for your name.

Many pay cash prizes up to $5,000. But even those that don’t offer cash give you awards that lend credibility to your next short story pitch .

2. Genre-Specific Periodicals

Such publications cater to audiences who love stories written in their particular literary category.

If you can score with one of these, the editor will likely come back to you for more.

Any time you can work with an editor, you’re developing a skill that will well serve your writing.

3. Popular Magazines

Plenty of print and online magazines still buy and publish short stories. A few examples:

  • The Atlantic
  • Harper’s Magazine
  • Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
  • The New Yorker
  • Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
  • Woman’s World

4. Literary Magazines

While, admittedly, this market calls for a more intellectual than mass market approach to writing, getting published in one is still a win.

Here’s a list of literary magazine short story markets .

5. Short Story Books

Yes, some publishers still publish these.

They might consist entirely of short stories from one author, or they might contain the work of several, but they’re usually tied together by theme.

Regardless which style you’re interested in, remember that while each story should fit the whole, it must also work on its own, complete and satisfying in itself.

  • What’s Your Short Story Idea?

You’ll know yours has potential when you can distill its idea to a single sentence. You’ll find that this will keep you on track during the writing stage. Here’s mine for a piece I titled Midnight Clear (which became a movie starring Stephen Baldwin):

An estranged son visits his lonely mother on Christmas Eve before his planned suicide, unaware she is planning the same, and the encounter gives them each reasons to go on.

Amateur writing mistake

Are You Making This #1 Amateur Writing Mistake?

White blooming flower

Faith-Based Words and Phrases

how to plan a short story

What You and I Can Learn From Patricia Raybon

how to plan a short story

Wait! Here's a FREE guide...

Before you go, be sure to grab my character arc worksheet.

Just tell me where to send it:

how to plan a short story

Enter your name and email below to instantly access my ultimate self-editing checklist.

writing like a boss

writing like a boss

how to plan a short story

How To Plan Your Short Story (+ Free Planning Workbook!)

how to plan a short story

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” — Edgar Allan Poe

Ah, the short story. You might think a short story is an easier version of a novel. It’s tempting to think that, but let me break that down for you.

Short stories are, indeed, easier than novels in the sense of length. You don’t have to write near as much content for a short story as you do for a novel.

The problem with the shorter format is that, with so little content to work with, every single word counts toward the overall theme.

Sound daunting? It doesn’t have to be.

I’ve written several short stories, some of which I’ve published here on my website and promoted through Instagram. With that marketing alone, my short stories reached a greater success than I had anticipated.

Today, I’m going to show you how I planned those short stories before I began writing them, so you can do the same!

Don’t forget your free workbook to follow along in the process! Download the free 22-page PDF below:

how to plan a short story

HOW TO PLAN YOUR SHORT STORY

1. brain dump ideas.

Close the door. Light a candle. Open the curtains. Put on your noise-blocking headphones. Set a timer and write every single idea that pops into your brain.

“There are no bad ideas” is a huge cliché, and it isn’t necessarily true. When you conduct your brain dump, you will have some stinkers on the page. But that’s not the point.

What would you write if you knew no one else was going to read it?

You may write down 20 ideas and end up with two that are salvageable. You rescue those two from the rubble and start again : 20 more ideas, two more gems.

This is the process. It’s messy, but it’s effective.

2. GENERATE INSPIRATION

They say that you don’t need inspiration to accomplish your goals, but discipline. I think you need both.

For our purposes, we’re going to suppose that your short story is fueled by inspiration. Because, in these early stages, inspiration is going to carry you from planning to writing.

I’m always a proponent for Pinterest boards.

My best stories started off with an aesthetic that I fleshed out with character, story, and theme. Pinterest is an excellent start for that.

The Best Uses for Pinterest “Sections” for Writers

3. CREATE A PROTAGONIST

Who can tell your story best?

The protagonist is the focal point of your story. There are a few ways to easily begin creating the star of the show:

Use a character questionnaire. This is perhaps the easiest way to create a character in depth. Check out my character questionnaire:

50 Deep Questions for Getting to Know Your Characters

Use a character generator. These are less effective, but helpful if you need to create a character quickly. The downside is that you don’t get to create a one-of-a-kind, made-from-scratch protagonist; which is kind of the fun of character creation.

AI provides a new way to create characters without going to traditional “character generator” websites. While writing this post, I gave a character prompt to ChatGPT and it formulated an entire character for me, complete with backstory and motivation. So if you need a fully-formed character generated fast, AI is a good option for you.

Utilize personality tests (enneagram, Myers-Briggs, etc.). I’ve found that personality tests are great jumping-off points for creating a protagonist.

When I was planning my short story “Gingerbread,” my protagonist, Charlotte, began with one key trait: she is an enneagram 2. That gave me an easy list of basic traits that I could use to construct the rest of her character.

GINGERBREAD – a short story by Samantha R. Glas

Pinterest brainstorming. You can’t go wrong with the tried and true tradition of Pinterest character boards. Search for specific character traits to find photos to represent your character, or find a ~vibe~ that suits your character’s personality.

Once you’ve curated your protagonist, your story is already well on its way to completion. Hurrah!

4. GIVE YOUR PROTAGONIST SOME FRIENDS (OR ENEMIES…)

Now that you have a protagonist, it’s time you gave them some people to share the page with.

As you add characters to your cast, ask yourself these questions:

  • What does this character bring to the story?
  • What is this character’s relationship with the protagonist?
  • If I removed this character from the cast, would the plot still hold up?

5. BRAINSTORM PLOT

how to plan a short story

“Character is plot, plot is character.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Plot is simpler than most writers make it out to be.

“Plot” can be summarized like this:

  • What does my character want?
  • What is keeping them from getting it?
  • What do they do about it?

This is conflict . Once you have your conflict, the rest of the plot falls into place. From there, use your Short Story Planner to diagram your plot and write out your story beats.

6. BEGIN OUTLINING SCENES

Every writer outlines their stories differently. Whether you’re a plotter , a panster , or the elusive ~ plantser ~ here’s some ideas for outlining scenes from most to least detailed:

Excel spreadsheet layout. If you’re a traditional plotter and like knowing every detail of your story before you even create the Word doc, Excel spreadsheets might be for you.

Or if you’re a pen-and-paper sort of writer, it’s especially fun to hand-draw spreadsheets on notebook paper. I’ve found that I enjoy having notebooks designated to each of my short stories to write down snippets, ideas, characters, and sketches.

Loose scene layout. This is how I plan my stories: for each scene, I only write 1-2 sentences of description. This gives me a direction to travel with my pen, but it also gives me the liberty to improvise if I want.

Story beats layout. Rather than outlining each individual scene, consider writing based on a list of story beats. This way you aren’t constrained to linear scenes, but you have some direction.

No outline. You don’t necessarily need an outline for your story. Many writers work better when they write from the seat of their pants. If you appreciate the freedom to figure things out as you go along, this is a good option for you.

To summarize, here’s how you plan your short story:

  • Brain dump all ideas.
  • Generate inspiration.
  • Create a protagonist.
  • Create other characters.
  • Create a conflict/plot.
  • Outline your scenes (or don’t!).

Don’t forget, you can accomplish all of this and more with my Short Story Planner. Download the free PDF below!

One response to “How To Plan Your Short Story (+ Free Planning Workbook!)”

Short stories are difficult. Like you said, shorter is not necessarily easier. Faulkner said, “Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.” Amen, brother Bill. Amen.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

Looking to publish? Meet your dream editor, designer and marketer on Reedsy.

Find the perfect editor for your next book

1 million authors trust the professionals on Reedsy, come meet them.

Blog • Perfecting your Craft

Posted on Oct 12, 2018

The Snowflake Method: 6 Steps to a Powerful Story Outline

In the annals of ‘unhelpful writing tips offered to first-time novelists,’ Neil Gaiman’s oft-quoted opinion takes the cake: “You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It's that easy, and that hard.”

If you’ve never written a novel before (and you don’t have an MFA in creative writing), it's only understandable that you’re daunted by the prospect of writing a book . This uncertainty is precisely why outlining systems, such as The Snowflake Method, are so appealing to developing writers.

If you want to find out how to use the snowflake method, feel free to skip ahead to this section . But if you have a moment, let’s first look at the basics of this popular approach.

What is the Snowflake Method?

PyZkFcMjKJQ Video Thumb

The Snowflake Method is an approach to writing that encourages starting with the simplest premise possible. From there, you systematically expand it to include plot and character details. Developed by American author, physicist, and writing coach Randy Ingermanson , the method's end result is a comprehensive character bible and scene list with which an author can begin the first draft.

“My power flurries through the air into the ground. My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around” —  “Let It Go” from  Disney’s Frozen

Given Ingermanson’s background as a computational physicist, it should come as no surprise that his method was inspired by a mathematical principle known as a fractal. In particular, he references the Koch Snowflake to demonstrate how your story grows with each subsequent stage of the planning process .

It's probably no surprise to you to learn that every writer uses a different outline. If you're curious about the general outlining process, we dive deeper into the topic in this post on how to outline a novel. (Feel free to grab the free book outline template in there as well!) But for now, let's talk about the advantages of this particular method.

What are the benefits of the snowflake method?

Fans of Ingermanson’s method tend to enjoy how structured the process is. Not only does he lay out practical steps for outlining, but he also gives an idea of how long each step should take. For example, he suggests spending an hour on the very first step of honing a single-sentence story summary. Later on, when writing a character bible, he recommends spending a few hours on each character.

how to plan a short story

The Snowflake Method also identifies and fixes a common cause of Abandoned First Draft Syndrome: plot holes. It’s common for writers to be 20,000 words into a first draft before noticing major story issues that they need to go back and fix.

By working toward a scene list and, more importantly, synopses for every character, you can better identify plot holes before you even start chapter one. If the butler commits a murder in Chapter 20, you can make sure he isn’t imprisoned for life in Chapter 12.

With the help of the Snowflake Method, many writers have been able to follow-through and complete a draft of their novel where previously they may have failed.

How to use the Snowflake Method to write a novel (in 6 steps)

Without giving away every detail of Ingermanson’s process, here’s a quick look at how you can use the snowflake method to write a novel:

Step 1: Write a one-sentence story summary

Encapsulate what your novel is about in a single sentence. You might also call this ‘the hook’: a line that you can use in almost any situation to get anybody interested in your book .

how to plan a short story

A revenge-obsessed whaler embarks on a deadly voyage to hunt the beast that took his leg.

Whisked away to a magical boarding school, an orphaned boy discovers that he’s a famous wizard.

This practice will be closely related to the theme of your novel . When constructing this single sentence, it’s important to avoid specifics. A character’s name isn’t as useful as a reference to their personal goal, for example. For this step, writers are urged to keep their sentence under 15-words long.

Step 2: Expand it to a one-paragraph summary

how to plan a short story

If you are imagining the snowflake metaphor , this is when the triangle turns into a star. Building off the details in your one-sentence summary, add a few elements here and there until you have retold your story in five sentences.

This is where you will introduce your major plot points. If you’re a fan of the three-act structure , you’ll want to include:

  • The exposition (what is the status quo at the start of the story)
  • The first plot point (what major event kicks off the story),
  • The mid-point (where things take a turn for the worse), and
  • Plot point two (where your character hits rock-bottom and starts turning things around)
  • Climax and denouement (how the story resolves)

It’s worth putting time into getting this summary just right. You can always come back to revise it if things change, but having these plot signposts in place will help guide the next few steps.

Step 3. Start small with your characters

how to plan a short story

Now that you’ve started expanding your view of the plot, Ingermanson suggests shifting down a gear and painting your characters with broad brushstrokes.

This is where you identify all the major characters in your book, give them names and spend an hour identifying their:

  • Motivations (what drives them in life)
  • Goals (what non-abstract things do they want)
  • Conflict (what prevents them from achieving their goal)
  • Epiphany (how they overcome that conflict)

It’s worth bearing in mind both external and internal conflict . If a character’s goal is to get that big promotion, then their conflict might be with the bully from HR (external conflict) and their own self-confidence (internal conflict).

At the end of this stage, you’ll have an idea of the major players’ character arcs .

Step 4. Expand your one-paragraph summary into a single page

how to plan a short story

Ingermanson sees this stage as taking a few hours, as you blow out each sentence of your one-paragraph summary (step 2) into a full paragraph. To develop your story into blocks that are easy to understand and write, you can end every paragraph with what he calls a ‘disaster’ — which you might interpret as a major plot point or a cliffhanger.

Step 5. Character bibles and character synopses

how to plan a short story

This is the first stage where you, the story designer, will roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Armed with your short character summaries and your one-page plot, you will now create a one-page dossier for each major character (and a half-page for the minor ones).

If you want a bit more guidance, you can find various online guides to fleshing out characters, or download and fill out this free character profile template . By going deep into your major characters’ backstories, you’ll likely discover reasons why they might behave in a certain way during your story.

Once your character bible is complete, you then write a synopsis for each character. This involves outlining each character’s journey through the novel. This is perhaps one of the most useful parts of the snowflake method — especially when you’re writing for plot-heavy genres such as mystery or suspense. What a character knows at any given point in the book will factor heavily into whether the story ‘works’.

So let’s take stock: you have a long synopsis, character bibles, and fleshed-out story threads for each character. This leaves only one step in your preparation.

Step 6. Write a four-page synopsis and scene list

how to plan a short story

Remember how you expanded every sentence of your short synopsis into paragraphs to form your long synopsis? Here, you effectively do the same: taking every paragraph from the long synopsis and letting them breathe over a page each. Naturally, you might get the urge to write more descriptively, but resist that urge and keep every sentence just as tightly focused as before.

And then, last of all, you’ll want to draft out a scene list, where you detail exactly what will happen in every scene of your book.

Of course, there’s much more to the process than what’s been listed above. If you want to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, you can always buy and read Ingermanson’s book on the Snowflake Method.

Things to remember

Watch out you don’t find yourself bogged down in analysis and not actually writing anything!

Going back and revising previous stages is not just okay: it's encouraged! This shows your characters are telling you more about your story. Major changes (your protagonist is no longer a lawyer encountering family troubles, but a high witch of a faraway fantastical land) might call for a start-over, but little additions and tweaks are all part of the joy of the process.

Seek intricacy, not perfection. Keep up the forward momentum and don’t worry about making every stage perfect before moving on. Every step of this method is intended to be a springboard and move you onto the next stage — not roadblocks designed to hinder you.

Many writers swear by the snowflake method — but ultimately, the only way to see if it will work for you is to try it. And even if you find yourself deviating from it at some point, at the very least it can help you get a running start by crystallizing those crucial first story elements.

Has the snowflake method worked for you before? Let us know how you find applying this to your own writing in the comments below!

5 responses

Andreas says:

13/06/2019 – 01:57

Could you give examples on the 5 sentences of part 2?

Amazing Blair Peery says:

16/06/2019 – 17:01

I second Andreas: Please show us the 5 bulleted sentences that would have been written for, say, "Gone With the Wind" or Star Wars". That would help us understand the concepts better. Thanks!

↪️ Martin Cavannagh replied:

17/06/2019 – 12:47

Martin from Reedsy here. I'm happy to take a bash using Star Wars as an example. 1. The exposition — Luke, a young farm boy on a desert planet dreams of excitement. 2. First plot point — Luke discovers a message from a princess in trouble and recruits a Jedi master and a smuggler to go save her. 3. Mid-point — Luke successfully rescues the princess but his mentor sacrifices himself so that the team can make their escape. 4. Plot point two — The villain closes in on the rebel base and as Luke prepares to defend it, Han decides to bail on him. 5. Climax and denouement — Luke discover his force powers, and Han has a change of heart — together they destroy the death star and save the day. Medals for everyone!

Rosanne says:

30/08/2019 – 15:34

I used this method to write my first novel and an abbreviated version for the 2nd and 3rd book of that trilogy.

Alicia O Williams says:

21/09/2019 – 05:47

Thank you for expanding more on this outline.

Comments are currently closed.

Continue reading

Recommended posts from the Reedsy Blog

how to plan a short story

Narrative Structure: Definition, Examples, and Writing Tips

What's the difference between story structure and narrative structure? And how do you choose the right narrative structure for you novel?

how to plan a short story

What is the Proust Questionnaire? 22 Questions to Write Better Characters

Inspired by Marcel Proust, check out the questionnaire that will help your characters remember things past.

how to plan a short story

What is Pathos? Definition and Examples in Literature

Pathos is a literary device that uses language to evoke an emotional response, typically to connect readers with the characters in a story.

how to plan a short story

How to Start a Children’s Book: Coming Up with Your Big Idea

If you've ever dreamed of writing a children's book but aren't sure where to start, check out this post to learn more about how you can create the perfect story for kids.

how to plan a short story

How to Become a Travel Writer in 5 Steps: A Guide for Travel Bugs

If you want to get paid to share your adventures, learn how to become a travel writer with these five tips.

how to plan a short story

How to Write a Biography: A 7-Step Guide [+Template]

Portraying someone’s life on paper in a comprehensive and engaging way requires solid preparation. Here are 7 steps you can follow.

Join a community of over 1 million authors

Reedsy is more than just a blog. Become a member today to discover how we can help you publish a beautiful book.

Which plot structure is right for your book?

Take our 1-minute quiz to find out.

Reedsy Marketplace UI

1 million authors trust the professionals on Reedsy, come meet them.

Enter your email or get started with a social account:

how to plan a short story

Story planning and outlining: Complete guide

Story planning is an excellent solution to avoid getting stuck. Read why outlining stories is a smart choice, methods to plan stories, authors on planning and more, plus find extra resources on planning and story structure.

  • Post author By Jordan
  • No Comments on Story planning and outlining: Complete guide

how to plan a short story

This guide to story planning and outlining explores common planning terms and techniques in fiction writing, free and paid tools to plan your story, authors on their planning approaches, and more.

Key story planning terms

Explore common organizing terms you’ll find in articles and books on how to plan stories:

What are novel outlines and story maps?

A novel outline gives a simplified view of your story’s overarching arcs and development .

A working book title idea plus a wireframe to sculpt scenes upon helps stories take shape.

It could be a narrative version of your story written as a single page, a paginated PDF exported from a story planner (like Now Novel’s planning dashboard ), a spreadsheet or visual plot diagram (often called a story map).

Your outline should provide a helpful overview of your story’s structure. It should also make drafting a more guided, structured part of the writing process .

What is brainstorming?

Generating ideas in a short space of time through creative exercises. Idea-generating activities that form the first step of the writing process (prewriting) . For example:

  • Freewriting: Writing down anything that comes to mind on a topic, scenario or prompt for a set time
  • Answering questionnaires: A helpful way to brainstorm details about your story’s characters
  • Mind-mapping: Writing high-level concepts (e.g. ‘love’) on a page, then linking ideas visually (e.g. ‘romance’, ‘meet cute’, ‘lovers’ conflicts’) to niche down and find further ideas

What are drafts and ‘draft zero’?

A draft or rough draft of your story is a completed version of your manuscript, prior to polishing such as editing and revision.

In story planning, the term ‘draft zero’ is often used to refer to a planning process in which you write a complete, rough draft without stopping to edit.

This gets the bare bones of your story down and helps you create foundations and parameters (more on this where we discuss outlining methods below).

What is storyboarding?

Storyboarding is a planning approach typically used in visual storytelling such as TV, film and advertising (though you can use it to write narrative fiction too).

You create frames in sequence representing story beats or moments in the timeline of a scene to plan plot events in visual terms.

What are plot templates?

Print-outs, PDFs, or writing tools structured to enable you to fill in predetermined event-types to plan a story.

For example, a romance plot template may include important beats for a romantic story such as:

  • The meet cute: The moment future lovers first lock eyes
  • The refusal/not a chance: For example, Lizzie Bennet being put off by Mr Darcy’s insulting initial behavior in Jane Austen’s 1813 Regency romance, Pride and Prejudice
  • The second encounter: Another encounter during which romantic leads begin to understand each other better

Recommended reading

Find more on story outlining, brainstorming, planning first drafts and using story templates:

  • How to write a plot outline: 7 plotting techniques
  • Story ideas: Romance brainstorming in 8 easy steps
  • How to organize story scenes (plus scene structure template)

To the top ↑

I don’t start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I’ve learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. John Grisham

Make a Strong Start to your Book

Join Kickstart your Novel and get professional feedback on your first three chapters and story synopsis, plus workbooks and videos.

Now Novel writer

Why outline stories? The plotter vs pantser debate

Why plan or outline stories at all?

There is a longstanding debate between the merits of plotting/planning books in advance vs ‘pantsing’ (noun: pantser). To ‘pants’ your novel means to write ‘by the seat of your pants’ – no story maps, no satnav.

Story planning pros: Reasons to prepare

‘Failing to plan is planning to fail’, and all that jazz.

Not necessarily – many writers do swear by a not-very-plotted process. In his interviews with The Paris Review , E.L. Doctorow said:

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. E.L. Doctorow, quoted by Nancy Groves in ‘EL Doctorow in quotes: 15 of his best’ in The Guardian , Wed 21 July 2015.

You can make the whole trip that way (and props to your driving/writing skills if you do). However it’s also easy to take a wrong turn. Or get stuck in the ditch of a muddy middle . Planning your story means:

  • Knowing what scenes you need to write.
  • Avoiding weaker structure with more fixing required later.
  • Being able to spot potential story arc issues sooner.
  • Having greater confidence because you know where your story’s going.
  • Keeping a wider view of scenes and chapters (your story’s overall cohesion).
  • You keep process material that makes it easier to track and monitor structural changes and any necessary plan departures.
  • You can build wins upfront (the planning) that set up momentum for your draft.
  • You have a stronger chance to produce a rough draft that already has the padding taken out.

Story planning infographic - 8 reasons to plan

Pantser vs plotter compromise: Planning your way

What if you’re a veteran pantser and you love the freedom of the blank page, writing without fog lights?

If you prefer pantsing to plotting, you could do minimal planning to at least organize your writing process (if not the full plot):

  • Outline one step ahead in pairs of action and reaction. This will help to ensure cohesion from scene to scene.
  • Treat your pantsing first draft as a ‘draft zero’ – prep work for whatever you’ll keep for a second (if necessary more plotted) draft.
  • Create a reverse outline as you go. Summarize the events of each chapter in a paragraph once you’ve written it. It will help you keep the total story cohesion in mind and remind you of what makes sense to follow.
  • Plan scene-by-scene and chapter focus only. Character questionnaires and brainstorming in detail not for you? Use a corkboard (like the Now Novel Scene Builder) to just plan the basic events of each scene or chapter before you sit down to write, without extra preparation.

Have you found your own compromise between planning and pantsing stories that works? Share your approach in the comments.

Download a free story planning and progress tracker template we made in Google Docs.

story planning template and progress tracker in Google Docs made by Now Novel

(Go to the ‘file’ menu and select ‘make a copy’ of the file after logging in to your Google account to gain editing permissions and save a private version of the outline template to your own Google Drive).

Learn more about plotter and pantser approaches:

how to plan a short story

  • Story plotting and structure: Complete guide

Read more about story plotting and planning stories’ structure in our complete guide.

Common pantser writing challenges - how to fix them | Now Novel

Common pantser writing challenges (and how to solve them)

Read more about common challenges pantsers face (and ways to overcome them).

I am a hopeless pantser, so I don’t do much outlining. A thought will occur to me and I’ll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I’ll worry about untangling it later. I’m glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent. Marie Lu

Book planning methods: Becoming a story organizer

If you don’t want your poor editor and agent to wring their hands in despair, over a book that doesn’t materialize (or may flop without substantial development), planning helps you stay on top of your process .

Explore organizing factors in novels and methods for outlining your story below:

Story outlining techniques

There are several story outlining techniques you could try. You could:

1. Plan a story by writing a synopsis first

It may seem a strange idea to write a synopsis of a story you haven’t written yet. It’s a useful way to get the cogs of story whirring, though.

The Now Novel dashboard walks you through planning stories from your Central Idea into writing a one line, then one paragraph, then one page synopsis. The expanding of your idea unlocks further ideas and questions to answer.

2. Summarize scenes and sequels to outline connected chapters

If you prefer to outline scene by scene (a compromise with pantsing), scenes and sequels provide one way to organize your story.

In Techniques of the Selling Writer , Dwight Swain divides story units into ‘scenes’ and ‘sequels’. Each unit has three parts:

Scenes as units of action, says Swain, should contain a goal which leads to a conflict , then disaster .

Scene example

A man named Mr Lockwood goes to inquire about lodgings ( goal ) where he is treated inhospitably by his landlord Heathcliff and attacked by the landlord’s dogs ( conflict ). He cannot leave because they are snowed in for the night ( disaster ). This is the opening scene of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights .

According to Swain, a sequel consists of a reaction to the previous scene , then a dilemma , then a decision .

Sequel example:

Mr Lockwood goes to bed where he reads a woman named Catherine Linton’s diary ( reaction to being snowed in). He dreams Catherine’s ghost is at the window begging to be let in. He is in a dilemma when his cries awaken his already grumpy, now angrier landlord. So he decides to walk in the yard until sunrise and depart ( decision ).

3. Plan scenes and chapters on index cards, post-its, corkboards

If you’re a visual planner or prefer a more physical planning activity, writing out summary index cards for scenes ( like Vladimir Nabokov did ) or using post-its and corkboards is useful.

When we chatted to mystery series author Dr Bonnie Traymore (whose first novel was developed with the help of our Kickstart your Novel course ), Bonnie shared:

I used the services of Hedi Lampert who works for Now Novel and she gave me an idea of taking post-it notes and putting scenes on a whiteboard, and just kind of pasting it on, and that that worked pretty well for me. I know there’s a lot of online stuff that you can do. But for me, the physical act of writing and putting it on got me off the computer and standing up because writing and sitting is such a sedentary process. Author Bonnie Traymore, interviewed by Jordan Kantey for Now Novel.

4. Plan story beats in actions and reactions

If a novel planning approach using Swain’s scenes and sequels sounds too complex, try simple units of ‘action’ and ‘reaction’ . Example:

Action: Evacuation order pamphlets rain down on a city. Reaction: The city’s inhabitants including a blind protagonist must leave urgently. ( All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr).

The reaction becomes the seed for new actions and reactions.

5. Use three-act structure (or modified three-act structure)

Three-act structure is an approach to story structure deriving from Aristotle’s theories on dramatic structure in Greek antiquity. The simple premise that a story should have a beginning, middle, and end.

Three-act structure is divided into:

  • Act 1: This introduces core characters such as the protagonist and important figures in their life, as well as the inciting incident . The inciting incident is the event (or series of events) that urges your character to act/depart/commit to a goal.
  • Act 2: The middle third of the story typically includes complications, conflicts, mistakes, discoveries. If the protagonist’s goal seemed straightforward before, Act 2 reveals it won’t be a cakewalk.
  • Act 3: The final third of the story includes the climax (where conflict or complication reaches a peak) and denouement (unresolved plot threads resolve).

You could create a ‘Scene Group’ for each act in the Now Novel Scene Builder named ‘Act’ plus the act’s number.

Next, fill each act with scene cards describing actions and reactions to flesh out each act’s connected story events.

Now Novel Scene Builder - Example of planning story acts

6. Plan using the Hero’s Journey

Many archetypal stories have similar narrative structure.

For example stories that follow ‘The Hero’s Journey’ (theorized by Joseph Campbell) or one of several modern versions of Campbell’s ideas (such as Dan Harmon’s simplified ‘Story Circle’ ).

Say, for example, you take a ten-part version of the hero’s journey .

The average length of a paperback novel is 80,000 words. Divide that by ten and you have a plan of 8000 words per each section of the heroic tale (Birth, Call to Adventure, Meeting the Helper, etc.).

7. Use other methods (MICE, the snowflake method, Saves the Cat)

There are various other story planning methods. Inevitably when we discuss outlining, someone will comment, ‘what about so-and-so’s approach?’

A few other fiction planning options you could explore:

The MICE quotient

Nothing to do with rodents, this plotting concept introduced by Orson Scott Card and developed by Mary Robinette Kowal ( see a handy infographic on Kowal’s Patreon) divides stories into four types of event. These types may be linked and nested within one another:

  • Milieu – events driven by place or location.
  • Inquiry – events driven by questions your character has.
  • Character – events driven by questions your character has.
  • Event – events driven by action.

This is where plotting and planning stories can start to seem overwrought, too complicated.

Karen Woodward breaks down Scott Card’s story outlining method and Kowal’s refinement of it in helpful detail in a blog post series.

There is also Randy Ingermanson’s ‘Snowflake Method’ and Blake Snyder’s ‘Saves the Cat’ method (developed for screenwriting but adapted for novel-writing by Jessica Brody ). We also have a comprehensive guide to using the ‘Save the cat’ method.

Learn more about story structures that create payoffs for readers, structuring and organizing scenes, and more:

  • Story structure examples: How to create payoffs for readers
  • Story planner success: How to organize your novel
  • How to write a scene: Nailing purpose and structure
I’m a big fan of outlining. Here’s the theory: If I outline, then I can see the mistakes I’m liable to make. They come out more clearly in the outline than they do in the pages. Cynthia Voigt

Tools to plan stories: Software and cloud-based help

Tools to plan and outline stories provide shortcuts while rendering story connections clearer.

Cloud-based story planning tools: Advantages

The pros of cloud-based story planning tools include:

  • Safeguard story progress : There’s less chance of losing your story progress should your desktop or laptop system be lost, stolen or damaged (singer Lana Del Rey had to start a book for Simon & Schuster from scratch when her laptop was stolen!)
  • Lightweight story planning: No having to install story planning software that may slow down your system, all your progress can be saved in your browser
  • Access and add to ideas anywhere: You can plan your story on your phone then carry on using a desktop device or vice versa

Offline (software) story planning tools

The most popular offline or software-based story planning tools include Scrivener 3 by Literature & Latte (available for Mac and Windows) and Ulysses (for Mac devices including iPhone, iPad and Macbooks).

Advantages of software-based planning tools for stories include:

  • Not needing an internet connection: This isn’t a major advantage given how ubiquitous internet access is now. But helpful if you’re going off grid (or want to turn off online distraction to write)
  • Additional features and functionality: Many software-based story planning apps offer functionality such as exporting drafts to .mobi Kindle and other eBook formats

Which story planning software should you choose?

This really depends on your:

  • Budget (do you prefer subscription-based tools or once-off licensing? What are effective planning tools worth to you?)
  • Feature requirements (do you want to create a text-based outline or storyboard visually or a mixture of both?)

Many Now Novel members have said they use a combination of Scrivener and Now Novel’s story outlining dashboard for a mix of browser-based planning, feedback and writing craft information, plus offline drafting and book formatting and file conversion.

What do book planning tools cost?

It varies by platform. For the most popular software-based apps:

Scrivener: $49 for a once-off license Ulysses: $5.99 per month or $39.99 per year

The Now Novel dashboard is a little different (read more eclectic). For $15 per month (accurate ‘The Process’ pricing as of October 2022), you get:

  • Story planning tools with unlimited stories and storage: A downloadable, paginated PDF with links back to edit your outline from each section grows as you answer structured prompts
  • Live writing webinars with authors and editors: Attend writing webinars and workshops (including first page workshops and other practical panels) with published authors and editors. Includes a growing archive of recorded sessions
  • Weekly feedback from an editor in Now Novel groups on submissions to the Now Novel feedback community
  • Exclusive subscriber newsletter with bonus content and member spotlights

What free novel planners are there?

Most tools have license or membership fees as hosting space, development, support and other features all have associated costs.

However you can also use free tools such as Google Docs and Google Sheets to plan stories.

How to plan stories using Google Docs

Google Docs offers several useful features that can be used to create summaries and outlines.

Story outlines with sidebar navigation

In Docs, create an outline with links to jump between sections such as chapters, scenes, acts, or wiki-like entries (for example, you could create a structured document with details on each of your story settings).

  • Create a new Google Docs document.
  • Give your plan a title such as ‘scene outline for [story name]’.
  • Click the + next to SUMMARY to enter a summary of the purpose for this story-planning document.
  • Click ‘Normal Text’ in the toolbar at the top to choose different sizes of heading to use. Each will add to your document’s sidebar, creating easy links to jump between sections of your outline (use a smaller-sized heading to create nested sections within larger ones, e.g. scene summaries within chapters).

Example of a Docs-based story plan

Here is a story plan created using the above approach:

Example story plan created using Google Docs - Cinderella

Creating a table for planning and tracking story progress

See the section under ‘progress’ above for checking off your story’s progress according to your plan? To create similar:

  • Click ‘Insert’ in the top toolbar in Google Docs
  • Navigate down to ‘Building Blocks’.
  • Insert the block type called ‘product roadmap’ (your story plan is your product in this case).
  • You can rename the standard column headers anything (in this case, ‘Project’ was renamed to ‘Chapter’).
  • Rename the standard drop down selection items – click the drop down under the column ‘status’, then ‘Add/edit options’ and rename status options as you choose, then click ‘apply to all’ so that every row will have the same options.

How to plan stories in Google Docs with even more structure

To really level up your story planning in Docs (requires paid Now Novel membership ), use Now Novel’s Google Docs add-on. This enables you to view your Now Novel outline in sidebar on the right as you draft per the screenshot below:

Story planning in Google Docs - Now Novel add-on

How to use your Now Novel story plan in Google Docs

  • Click ‘Extensions’ in the top toolbar of your document.
  • Navigate to Add-ons > Get add-ons.
  • Search for ‘Now Novel’ and click ‘Install’ to add the add-on to your Google Docs. Confirm permissions to allow logging into your Now Novel account from within Docs.
  • Under ‘Extension’, find ‘Now Novel’ and click ‘Start’.
  • Sign into your Now Novel account using your Now Novel username and password.

If the above steps were successful, your currently active story outline should load. Find links back to edit each section from the sidebar, too, and all your characters, plot points, setting and scene ideas.

Learn more about novel planning tools, Now Novel’s outlining dash and Google Docs add-on, and more:

  • 7 writing productivity tools to work smarter
  • Novel planner tools: 7 tips to propel your progress
  • Writing tools: Now Novel’s Scene and World Builder

Now Novel Blog Newsletter

Pay $0 for writing insights and how to’s

Be first to know whenever we publish and get bonus videos and the latest Now Novel news.

Authors on planning books

There are (as the above examples show) many ways to plan books and shorter stories. The main thing is to find the method that works for you .

Read authors on the type of planning they do to write novels and other stories (and why they do it):

Sophie Hannah on why planning books is fun (and safer)

Crime author Hannah compares planning stories to doing home renovations :

The main reason I’m a planner is that it’s huge fun! It makes life SO much easier for a writer, and it gives you something concrete to look forward to. I would hate to start writing a novel with no clue as to what might happen from chapter to chapter, or how it might end. It would be like stripping the old wallpaper in your house and pulling up all the old carpets with literally no idea how you want the rooms to look at the end of the process Sophie Hannah, ‘Why and How I Plan my Stories’

Kim Wilkins on planning solving any structural issues early

Dr Kim Wilkins is a senior lecturer in writing, editing and publishing at the University of Queensland.

In a podcast, she told the Australian Writers’ Centre:

Well, I’m a plotter, that’s how a book is written quickly and that’s how they come out the right shape, they don’t require much structural feedback, and you can just get on with the line edit and publish the damn thing. I will brainstorm the beginning with a bunch of scenes, or brainstorm part of the middle, and then I plot maybe two chapters ahead, in quite a lot of detail. And that means that when I sit down to write, when I turn off the internet and have my two hours, I look at my notebook and I go, “OK, well, I’ve got to write a scene where Sam and Violet meet in secret and they go and dance in the empty ballroom while the snow falls Kim Wilkins, in conversation with Allison Tait for Australian Writers’ Centre.

L. Sprague de Camp on why you should plan series

L. Sprague de Camp, a major figure in science fiction in America in the 1930s and 40s (who wrote over 100 books), stresses the importance of planning series in particular:

In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies. L. Sprague de Camp, quoted by Rochelle Melander in ‘Write-A-Thon: Write Your Book in 26 Days (And Live to Tell About It)’, 2011.

Read more advice from authors:

  • 8 writing tips from authors who won the Nobel
  • 88 inspiring quotes about writing a novel
The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes. Agatha Christie

How to Write Scenes Free Guide

GET YOUR FREE GUIDE TO SCENE STRUCTURE

Read a guide to writing scenes with purpose that move your story forward.

What is a story planning question that’s been bugging you? Ask us via the comments below. Start creating a story plan now and view your outline in sidebar as you draft in our distraction-free Writing Pad or Google Docs.

After purchasing The Process, I was able to completely outline my first novel in a matter of weeks, all 25 chapters! – Eric

TrustSpot

Related Posts:

  • Story setting and worldbuilding: Complete guide
  • Writing fantasy: Creating a spellbinding story…
  • Tags Story planning , writing process

how to plan a short story

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Pin It on Pinterest

  • PRO Courses Guides New Tech Help Pro Expert Videos About wikiHow Pro Upgrade Sign In
  • EDIT Edit this Article
  • EXPLORE Tech Help Pro About Us Random Article Quizzes Request a New Article Community Dashboard This Or That Game Popular Categories Arts and Entertainment Artwork Books Movies Computers and Electronics Computers Phone Skills Technology Hacks Health Men's Health Mental Health Women's Health Relationships Dating Love Relationship Issues Hobbies and Crafts Crafts Drawing Games Education & Communication Communication Skills Personal Development Studying Personal Care and Style Fashion Hair Care Personal Hygiene Youth Personal Care School Stuff Dating All Categories Arts and Entertainment Finance and Business Home and Garden Relationship Quizzes Cars & Other Vehicles Food and Entertaining Personal Care and Style Sports and Fitness Computers and Electronics Health Pets and Animals Travel Education & Communication Hobbies and Crafts Philosophy and Religion Work World Family Life Holidays and Traditions Relationships Youth
  • Browse Articles
  • Learn Something New
  • Quizzes Hot
  • This Or That Game New
  • Train Your Brain
  • Explore More
  • Support wikiHow
  • About wikiHow
  • Log in / Sign up
  • Education and Communications
  • Writing Genres
  • Short Story Writing

How to Begin a Short Story

Last Updated: December 25, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Lucy V. Hay . Lucy V. Hay is a Professional Writer based in London, England. With over 20 years of industry experience, Lucy is an author, script editor, and award-winning blogger who helps other writers through writing workshops, courses, and her blog Bang2Write. Lucy is the producer of two British thrillers, and Bang2Write has appeared in the Top 100 round-ups for Writer’s Digest & The Write Life and is a UK Blog Awards Finalist and Feedspot’s #1 Screenwriting blog in the UK. She received a B.A. in Scriptwriting for Film & Television from Bournemouth University. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 306,605 times.

Great writers grab you in the first few lines and hook you until the end. You may wonder how they craft these lines, or you may be wondering how writers start writing at all. These techniques will help you achieve strong first lines as well as a strong first draft of the story. You will learn how to start writing, how to choose your beginning lines, and how to edit your beginning lines.

Starting to Write

Step 1 Create a plot outline

  • A plot outline should first address the story goal. This is something your protagonist would like to achieve and/or a problem she wants to resolve. This is also called the big "want" in the story, where your protagonist wants something from herself, another character, an institution, etc.
  • A plot outline should also note the consequences for your protagonist if she does not achieve her goal. These are also called "the stakes of the story", where the protagonist will suffer in some way if she fails to reach her goal. Having high stakes in a story usually encourages a reader to stay engaged and care about the fate of your protagonist.
  • If you're struggling, first look for your concept. Then, think about how that plot is going to work—and usually that involves structure and character, which usually go together.

Step 2 Use a writing prompt.

  • Most writing prompts have a time limit (i.e., write about the prompt for five minutes). You can extend the time limit for the writing prompt if you feel it is helping you generate useful material for your story. You can also deviate from the writing prompt if your writing takes you in a different direction. The prompt should act as a way to get you started, but it should not feel restrictive or limiting in any way.
  • A writing prompt can be anything from a phrase, such as "I remember..." to an image, such as "Imagine you are trapped in your childhood bedroom". You can also use a phrase from a favorite poem or a book, as well as a phrase from a favorite song.
  • You can find a list of writing prompts at https://www.writersdigest.com/prompts Writer's Digest and https://www.dailyteachingtools.com/journal-writing-prompts.html Daily Teaching Tools. You can also try an online random https://writingexercises.co.uk/firstlinegenerator.php first line generator.

Step 3 Identify your protagonist.

  • The protagonist also does not necessarily have to be the narrator of the story, but they should be the one making decisions that move the story forward. Your protagonist should drive the events that occur in the story and their fate should give the story meaning.

Step 4 Try to write the basic story in one sitting.

  • Focus on simply telling the story and getting it down on the page. This could take you one hour or several hours. Pretend you are talking to a good friend and sharing the story with them over coffee.
  • Avoid doing any outside research or reaching for information outside of the story you are telling. Try not to slow down to really think about certain sections or areas of the story. You will address any issues in the story once you reread it later.

Choosing Your Type of Beginning

Step 1 Start in a scene.

  • You should choose a scene that is essential to the main character or the narrator and shows them in action, doing something that will have consequences later or sets up the plot. For example, rather than start with, “Walter thinks the day will be the same as usual,” you may start with, “Walter wakes up from a bad dream and realizes that today will not be like any other day.”
  • Though you may decide to use the past tense for your story, using the present tense will give the story a sense of urgency, which can help to propel the reader forward. For example, starting with “Today, I will rob a bank” may be more effective than “Yesterday, I robbed a bank”, as the present tense allows the action to unfold for the reader in real time. The reader gets access to the main event and experiences it with the characters.

Step 2 Establish the setting.

  • For example, in the short story “Oceanic” by Greg Egan, the first lines focus on establishing the setting of being in a boat in the ocean: "The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs." Egan uses specific, sensory detail to give the reader a sense of sitting in the cabin of a boat and starts his story in a particular moment in time. [7] X Research source
  • Keep in mind you can also do scene setting later in the story if you do not want to start right away with setting. If theme or plot is more important to your story than setting, you may start with these elements first. You should still try to start your story in scene so your reader is engaged right away.

Step 3 Introduce your narrator or main character.

  • Though J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is a novel, not a short story, it has an opening line that establishes the narrative voice right away: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” [9] X Research source
  • The narrator sounds sour and rough but he also draws you in with his frustrated view of the world and his disdain for traditional narratives. The narrator has a distinct perspective that gives the reader a good sense of what the rest of the story will sound like.

Step 4 Open with a line of strong dialogue.

  • Many short stories will start with one line of dialogue and then zoom out to tell the reader who is speaking or where the speaker is situated within a scene. The dialogue is also usually spoken by a main character or one of the central characters in the story.
  • For example, in Amy Hempel’s short story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Was Buried”, the story begins with a striking line of dialogue: "Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," she said. "Make it useless stuff or skip it.” [11] X Research source The reader is drawn into the story right away by the funny, strange dialogue and the presence of a “she”.

Step 5 Present a minor conflict or mystery.

  • For example,the opening line for Jackson’s short story “Elizabeth” raises several questions: “Just before the alarm went off she was lying in a hot sunny garden, with green lawns around her and stretching as far as she could see.” The reader wonders why the main character is dreaming about a hot sunny garden, what she is waking up for, and what the dream will mean later to the character. This is a minor conflict, but it can be an effective way to ease the reader into the larger themes or ideas in the story.
  • If you're planning a mystery story, do some research into thinking about how thrillers work, and how mysteries work. One of the key elements is usually tension, and it's important to make it compelling from the beginning.

Editing Your Beginning

Step 1 Read the beginning again once you reach the end of your story.

  • You may be able to tweak your opening lines to fit with the tone, mood, and voice of the rest of the story or you may need to write a new opening to better suit the story. You can always file away your old beginning for another story or a future project, especially if you think it is strong but just does not fit that particular story.

Step 2 Tighten up the language.

  • You may notice that you are using weak verbs or adjectives in your first line that feel vague and nondescript. Replace them with strong verbs and adjectives so your first line makes a lasting impact and sets the bar high for the language and description in the rest of the story.

Step 3 Show the beginning to an objective reader.

Recognizing the Purpose of a Beginning

Step 1 Keep in mind the role of the beginning of a short story.

  • Using Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for a short story, a popular reference for writers, you should always try to “start as close to the end as possible” in your opening lines. [17] X Research source Place your reader right in the action as soon as you can so they are hooked into reading on.
  • Often, editors will read the first several lines of a story to see if it’s worth reading to the end. Many short stories are selected for publication based on the strength of their opening line. This is why it is important that you consider how you can make an impact on the reader and make an impression with the first one to two lines. [18] X Research source

Step 2 Read example opening lines.

  • “The first great act of love I ever witnessed was Split Lip bathing his handicapped daughter.” “Isabelle” by George Saunders.
  • “When this story goes out into the world, I may become the most famous hermaphrodite in history.” “The Obscure Object” by Jeffrey Eugenides.
  • “Just before the alarm went off she was lying in a hot sunny garden, with green lawns around her and stretching as far as she could see.” “Elizabeth” by Shirley Jackson.

Step 3 Analyze the examples.

  • How does the writer set the tone or mood? For example, the first line in Eugenides’ short story “The Obscure Object” introduces the narrator as a hermaphrodite and lets the reader know that the narrator’s life story is going to be told. It sets up a reflective mood, where the narrator relays their life as a famous hermaphrodite.
  • How does the writer introduce key characters or setting? For example, Saunders’ first line in his short story “Isabelle” introduces a character named “Split Lip” as well as his handicapped daughter. It also provides a key theme of the story: love between father and daughter. Jackson’s first line in “Elizabeth” uses description and sensory details, like “hot sunny” and “green”, to paint a specific image in the reader’s mind.
  • What are your expectations as a reader, based on the opening lines? A good first line will signal to the reader what they are in store for, and provide just enough information for the reader to be drawn into the story. The opening line in Saunders’ story, for example, lets the reader know that the story may be a bit quirky or strange, with a character named “Split Lip” and a handicapped girl. It is a bold opening that lets the reader know how the story is going to be narrated, with a unique narrative voice.

Community Q&A

Community Answer

You Might Also Like

Start a Love Story

  • ↑ https://www.how-to-write-a-book-now.com/plot-outline.html
  • ↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/prompts
  • ↑ https://thewritepractice.com/how-to-write-a-short-story/
  • ↑ https://writetodone.com/short-stories-the-art-of-the-start/
  • ↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-goal/write-first-chapter-get-started/10-ways-to-start-your-story-better
  • ↑ https://io9.gizmodo.com/5814687/the-7-types-of-short-story-opening-and-how-to-decide-which-is-right-for-your-story
  • ↑ https://www.dailywritingtips.com/20-great-opening-lines-to-inspire-the-start-of-your-story/
  • ↑ https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/ask-writer/can-a-novel-or-short-story-have-too-much-dialogue
  • ↑ https://fictionaut.com/stories/amy-hempel/in-the-cemetery-where-al-jolson-is-buried
  • ↑ https://www.openculture.com/2015/04/kurt-vonneguts-8-tips-on-how-to-write-a-good-short-story.html
  • ↑ https://writersrelief.com/blog/2008/04/short-stories-start-off-with-a-bang/
  • ↑ https://distraction99.com/2007/01/14/the-best-first-line-of-a-short-story-ever/

About This Article

Lucy V. Hay

There are a variety of great ways to begin your short story, and the best beginning depends on what you’re trying to achieve. For example, start with a scene that’s important or engaging to hook your reading right away. Alternatively, establish the setting of your story first if it’s key to your plot and helps set the right mood. For a story that’s character-driven, try starting with a strong narrative voice or a description of your main character. You might also consider beginning with a solid line of dialogue or a minor conflict or mystery to immediately draw your reader in. To learn from our English reviewer how to use a prompt to start writing your short story, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

  • Send fan mail to authors

Reader Success Stories

Joyce Delos Santos

Joyce Delos Santos

Sep 24, 2016

Did this article help you?

how to plan a short story

Ardrontae Herd

Sep 3, 2017

Marienne Du Bois

Marienne Du Bois

Oct 4, 2016

Jaes Macanas

Jaes Macanas

Jan 21, 2017

Am I a Narcissist or an Empath Quiz

Featured Articles

How to Make Friends in Your 20s after College

Trending Articles

Everything You Need to Know to Rock the Corporate Goth Aesthetic

Watch Articles

Cook Fresh Cauliflower

  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Info
  • Not Selling Info

wikiHow Tech Help Pro:

Develop the tech skills you need for work and life

Literacy Ideas

Short Story Writing for Students and Teachers

short story writing guide

What Is a Short Story?

The clue is in the title!

Short stories are like novels only…well…shorter! They contain all the crucial elements of fully developed stories except on a smaller scale.

In short story writing, you’ll find the key story elements such as characterization, plot development, themes explored, etc., but all within a word count that can usually be comfortably read in one sitting.

Short stories are just one of many storytelling methods; like the others, they help us derive meaning from our world.

Visual Writing Prompts

How Do Short Stories Differ From Novels?

The reduced scale of a short story explains most of the differences the form has with longer forms such as novels.

Short stories usually have a tighter focus on a single main character and rarely shift between perspectives the way we often find in longer works of fiction.

Space is of the essence in this form, so long passages of exposition are usually avoided and the story starting at the last possible moment.

In purely numerical terms, short stories can be anywhere between about 1,000 to around 20,000 words or so, though many would consider even 10,000 too long.

A short novel clocks in at around 60,000 words, with word counts between 20-60,000 words being taken up by that red-headed stepchild of prose, the novella.

THE STORY TELLERS BUNDLE OF TEACHING RESOURCES

short story writing | story tellers bundle 1 | Short Story Writing for Students and Teachers | literacyideas.com

A MASSIVE COLLECTION of resources for narratives and story writing in the classroom covering all elements of crafting amazing stories. MONTHS WORTH OF WRITING LESSONS AND RESOURCES, including:

How to Write a Short Story

Good storytelling is an art. But, luckily it’s a craft too and, like any craft, the skills and techniques can be learned by anyone.

In this article, we’ll first take a look at some ways to kickstart the short story writing process, before taking a look at some of the structural considerations essential for students to understand before they write their short stories.

We’ll also explore some simple practical activities that will help students to draw on their creative resources and personal experiences to help bring their stories to life.

Finally, we’ll look at some general tips to help students put a final polish on their masterpieces before they share them with the world.

How t o begin a story

short story writing | short story writing guide | Short Story Writing for Students and Teachers | literacyideas.com

Create a Dramatic Question

The first thing a student needs to do when writing a short story is to create a dramatic question. Without a dramatic question, readers will have no motivation to read on as there will be no story .

This dramatic question can take many forms, but as it will be the driver of the plot, it will be the single most important element of the story.

Take the movie Rocky as an example. In it, an aging journeyman boxer, Rocky Balboa, answers two dramatic questions:

1. Will Rocky find love?

2. Can he become the Heavyweight Champion of the World?

Often the dramatic question is of this will she/won’t she type. But, whatever form it takes, there must be some obstacles put in the way of answering it.

These obstacles can come in the form of an external obstacle, such as an antagonist or a negative environment, or the form of an internal obstacle, such as heartbreak or grief.

This is the conflict that creates the crucial element of suspense necessary to engage the reader’s interest.

Whatever form a student’s dramatic question takes, it will provide the plot impetus and how the student will explore their story’s theme.

Practice Activity: Identify the Dramatic Question

It is good practice for students to attempt to identify the dramatic question any time they read a book or watch a movie. Ask the students to think of some classic or popular books and movies that they are already familiar with. Can they extract the major dramatic question from each?

Find Inspiration in the World Around

One of the most common complaints from students, when asked to write a short story, is that they don’t know what to write about. This is the age-old curse of writer’s block.

Figuring out what to write about is the first hurdle students will need to overcome. Luckily, the inspiration for stories lies everywhere. We just need to help students to know where to look.

As writers, students must learn to see the world around them with the freshness of the eyes of a young child. This requires them to pay close attention to the world around them; to slow things down enough to catch the endless possibilities for stories that exist all around.

Luckily, we have the perfect activity to help our students to do this.

Practice Activity: Breathe Life into the Story

We can find stories and the details for our stories everywhere.

Students need to tune their ear to the fragments of stories in snatches of overheard daily conversations. They need to pay enough attention to catch their own daydreaming what-ifs on the bus to school or to keep an eye out for all those little human interest stories in the local newspaper.

Once the living details of life are noticed, students need to capture them quickly by recording them in a journal. This journal will become a great resource for the student to dip into for inspiration while writing their stories.

Those half-heard conversations, those anecdotes of street life witnessed through a bus window, the half-remembered dreams scribbled down while gulping down a rushed breakfast. All these can provide jumping-off points and rich detail for a student’s short story.

Outline and Prepare

Preparation is important when writing a short story. Without a doubt. There is, however, a very real danger of preparation becoming procrastination for our student writers.

Students must learn to make their preparation time count. The writing process is much more productive if students invest some time in brainstorming and organizing their ideas at the start.

To organize their short story, students will need to understand the basic elements of structure described in the next section, but the following activity will first help them to access some of the creative gold in their imaginations. The discipline of structure can be applied afterward.

Practice Activity: Dig for Nuggets

For this activity, give each student a large piece of paper, such as a leaf from an artist’s sketchbook, to brainstorm their ideas. Employing a large canvas like this encourages more expansive thinking.

Instruct students to use colored pens to write sentences, phrases, and fragments, even doodles. Anything that helps them to dump the contents of their mind onto the paper. This is all about sifting through the rubble for those nuggets of gold. Students shouldn’t censor themselves, but instead, allow their mind’s free reign.

To help your students get started, you can provide them with some prompts or questions as jumping-off points. For example:

  • What is your basic premise?
  • What is the story about?
  • Who are your main characters?
  • Where is your story set?  

Encourage students to generate their own questions too by allowing their minds ample room to roam. Generating new questions in this way will help them gather momentum for the telling of their tale.

SHORT STORY WRITING STRUCTURE

Even getting off to a great start, students often find themselves in difficulties by the middle of their story, especially if they haven’t achieved a firm grasp of structure yet.

The main elements students will need to master are plot, theme, and character development.

In this section, we’ll take a look at each of these in turn.

short story writing | structuring a short story 1 | Short Story Writing for Students and Teachers | literacyideas.com

Plot refers to the events of the story. This is the what of the tale. It’s useful for students to understand the arc of the plot in five sections: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.

Exposition: This is the introductory part of your story. It should introduce the reader to the central characters and orientate them to the setting.

Rising Action: Here the student begins by introducing the central dramatic question which will be the engine of the story. A series of obstacles must be placed in the way of the main character that will increase suspense and tension as the story moves forward toward the climax.

Climax: The climax is the dramatic high point of the story. This is where interest peaks and the emotions rise to their most intense.

Falling Action: Now the conflict is resolving and we are being led out to the story’s end.

Resolution: The central dramatic question has been answered, usually in either a happy or tragic manner, and many loose ends are tied up.

Practice Activity: Instruct students to use the five-part plot structure above to map an outline for their tale before writing .

If the plot consists of the series of events that constitute the story, then the theme refers to what those events mean.

The theme of a story is the underlying message of the story.

What is the ‘big idea’ behind all the action of the plot? This is open to a certain amount of interpretation on the part of the reader, but usually, a little reflection by the student writer will reveal what the events of the plot mean to them.

If, as described in the introduction, stories are how we derive meaning from the world, the theme will reveal the writer’s perspective on things.

Practice Activity: Organize students into groups and ask them to list their Top 5 movies or books of all time. Instruct them to briefly outline the main plot points using the plot structure above. When they’ve completed that, instruct the students to discuss what they think the main themes of each of the works of fiction were.

A COMPLETE UNIT ON TEACHING STORY ELEMENTS

short story writing | Story Elements Teaching Unit | Short Story Writing for Students and Teachers | literacyideas.com

☀️This HUGE resource provides you with all the TOOLS, RESOURCES , and CONTENT to teach students about characters and story elements.

⭐ 75+ PAGES of INTERACTIVE READING, WRITING and COMPREHENSION content and NO PREPARATION REQUIRED.

Character Development IN SHORT STORY WRITING

short story writing | character development short story writing | Short Story Writing for Students and Teachers | literacyideas.com

No doubt about it, characterization is essential to the success of any short story. Just how important characterization is will depend on whether the story is plot-driven or action-driven.

In the best writing, regardless of genre or length, the characters will be at least plausible. There is a lot that students can do to ensure their stories are populated with more than just cardboard cutouts.

One effective way to do this is to reveal a character through their actions. This is the old show, don’t tell trick at work.

A good short story writer will allow the character to reveal their temperament and personality through their actions.

For example, instead of merely describing a character as putting a mug on the table, perhaps they bring it down with a thud that betrays their anger.

Another great way to reveal character is in the use of dialogue. How characters speak to each other in a story can reveal a lot about their status, mood, and intent, etc.

Our students must learn to draw complex characters. Archetypes may serve us well in some contexts, but archetypes are not real people. They are caricatures. If our students want to people their fictional world with real people, they need to create complex, even contradictory characters, just like you and I are.

If their characters are too consistent, they are too predictable. Predictability kills suspense, which in turn kills the reader’s interest.

Practice Activity: Reveal Mood through Action

For this simple activity, provide the students with a list of emotions. Now, challenge the students to concoct a short scene where a character performs an action or actions that reveal the chosen mood.

To start, you might allow the students a paragraph in which to reveal the emotion. You might reduce this to just a sentence or two as they get better at it. Remind students that they need to show the emotion, not tell it!

HOW TO POLISH AND REFINE A SHORT STORY

Now students have already had a look at how to begin and how to structure a story, we’ll take a look at a few quick tips on how they can polish their stories generally – especially during the editing process.

Write Convincing Dialogue:

For students, investing time in learning how to write great dialogue is time well spent.

Not only is well-written dialogue great for revealing character, but it will break up intimidating walls of text too.

Dialogue is a great way to move the story forward and to provide subtle exposition.

 As mentioned earlier, journals are the perfect place to dump interesting snatches of conversation that become a valuable resource for writing convincing dialogue – except, of course, if you are passing through North Korea or the like!

Vary Sentence Length:

 When finished with their first drafts, encourage students to read their work out loud when editing and rewriting.

Often, students will be surprised to realize just how regular the rhythm of their sentences has become.

Like musicians, writers have chops. It’s easy to fall back on the same few favored structures time and again. Students can do a lot to spice up their writing simply by varying sentence lengths.

Shorter sentences are pacier and punchier while longer sentences can slow things down, calming the reader, then, boom!

Varying sentence length throughout a story prevents the writing from becoming stale and monotonous.

Punctuation:

As with varying sentence length above, the rhythm of a story can be altered through the choice of punctuation.

Students can think of punctuation as musical notation marks. It’s designed to help the reader understand the composer’s intention for how it is to be read and interpreted.

Students should understand punctuation as an imperfect but effective tool. Its use affects not only the work’s rhythm but also the meaning.

It is well worth the student’s time to perfect their use of punctuation.

To Conclude                                                  

There are a lot of moving parts to short stories.

From the nuts and bolts of grammar and punctuation to crafting a plot and exploring big thematic ideas, mastering the art of short story writing takes time and lots of practice.

With so much ground to cover, it’s impossible to address every aspect in a single unit of work on short story writing.

Be sure to offer students opportunities to see the short story in action in the work of accomplished writers, as well as opportunities to practice the various aspects of short story writing mentioned above.

Draw attention to writing best practices when they appear even in work unrelated to the short story.

Lots of time and plenty of practice might just reveal a latter-day O. Henry or Edgar Allen Poe sat in one of the desks right in front of you.

SHORT STORY WRITING CHECKLIST BUNDLE

writing checklists

SHORT STORY WRITING VIDEO TUTORIAL

short story writing | YOUTUBE 1280 x 720 7 | Short Story Writing for Students and Teachers | literacyideas.com

ARTICLES RELATED TO SHORT STORY WRITING

short story writing | how to write a scary horror story | How to Write a Scary Story | literacyideas.com

How to Write a Scary Story

short story writing | Writing great characters and setting 1 | 7 ways to write great Characters and Settings | Story Elements | literacyideas.com

7 ways to write great Characters and Settings | Story Elements

short story writing | UNDerstanding story elements is an esential reading skill for students of all ages | Teaching The 5 Story Elements: A Complete Guide for Teachers & Students | literacyideas.com

Teaching The 5 Story Elements: A Complete Guide for Teachers & Students

short story writing | 1 MAIN2BIDEA | Identifying the main idea of the story: A Guide for Students and Teachers | literacyideas.com

Identifying the main idea of the story: A Guide for Students and Teachers

The content for this page has been written by Shane Mac Donnchaidh.  A former principal of an international school and English university lecturer with 15 years of teaching and administration experience. Shane’s latest Book, The Complete Guide to Nonfiction Writing , can be found here.  Editing and support for this article have been provided by the literacyideas team.

The Write Practice

Short Story Plot: How to Use Ideas and Structure to Plot a Short Story

by Sarah Gribble | 1 comment

Do you want to write a short story , but are unsure about how to develop a short story plot?

short story plot

Short stories rarely require extensive plotting. They’re short, after all. But a bit of an outline , just to get the basic idea down, can help you craft a strong plot.

Plotting your short stories will give you an end story goal and will help you avoid getting stuck in the middle, or accidentally creating plot holes. You’ll have fewer unfinished stories if you learn to do a little planning before you start writing.

And in this article, you can learn how to take your short story's primary conflict , and build a plot around it.

Definition of Plot and Structure

I see the terms “plot” and “structure” thrown around interchangeably quite a bit, so I'd like to correct that before we move on.

Plot is a series of events that make up your story.

Structure is the overall layout of your story.

Plot is (most likely) unique to your story, but there are a handful of basic structures that are universal and used over and over again. (We'll get into the basic three act structure in a later post.) Structure is the bones and plot is what fills it out.

You can learn more about plot and structure in this article , or the different story type s here .

The Strength of a Short Story Idea

When I first started out writing short stories, I had no idea where I was going with any of them. Absolutely none. I see this time and time again with newer writers. I think it’s because we’re conditioned to think any kind of art is only driven by that infamous and often elusive muse rather than hard work. I felt the same way.

And then I started getting more stories under my belt. Some I finished. Some I didn’t.

You know what the difference was? The stories I finished, I plotted before I wrote.

Now I know a lot of writers loathe plotting or outlining stories—of any length, but especially short stories. They have various reasons for this dislike, but the most common one I hear is planning or outlining takes all the “magic” out of writing. “Creative writing is about being creative!”

I won’t get into the idea that writing is actually a job here—it is. That’s not what this article is about.

Instead, I’m going to propose a different reason for planning a short story with one important question: Is your idea even a story?

Planning out your story, even if it's short, can give you an answer to this question. It will determine whether or not your central character can work towards achieving a goal (and simultaneously the plot moves towards a climax), or if your idea ends there—at the idea.

Writer's tip: If you're feeling stuck on coming up with an idea that could withstand a story's length, try looking at the types of plots discussed in this article.

Is It a Story or Just a Story Idea?

Don’t panic. I don’t plan extensively. But what I've found was absolutely no planning whatsoever more often than not leads to wasted time. Nobody has time to waste.

If I don't plot at all, I'll get maybe a third of the way through the story and get stuck. I’ll have no idea where it was going, and without that goal in mind, I'll flounder. I might tinker around with the idea a little longer, but most of the time I’ll end up abandoning the story.

A few weeks ago, I had the infamous muse visit me. I grabbed my notebook and started writing. It was great writing . The prose was good, the main character was crazy interesting, ditto for the secondary character, and I'd set up a mystery that made you want to turn the page. The problem was I had no idea what the mystery was. I had set up and no payoff. This story idea fizzled out at the start of the second act.

Now, to be clear, I do indulge my muse every once in a while. It does feel good to be taken over by an idea, even if you don't know where it's going. It's all very “artisty.”

But the fact is I’ve sold one story that I finished without plotting it beforehand. One. Out of dozens I’ve started. That one took me about a week to write and it was torture for me, for my characters, and, I'm sure, for the backspace on my keyboard. Everything about the story reads as forced. It's uninspired. And you know what?

That's the one my muse started me on! Inspiration is supposed to be the point of the muse, right? But a muse can only get you started; it can't keep you going.

Your muse won't finish a story for you.

When your muse starts poking at you and you don't know if your idea is a story, ask yourself a couple of questions:

  • Am I going to remember this idea tomorrow? Yes, it's nice to be taken over by inspiration. Feel free to indulge that every so often. But also be prepared to have an unfinished story on your hands. You don't necessarily have to wait until tomorrow to write the thing (especially when we're talking about shorts), but you do need to know if your enthusiasm is going to wan a few minutes down the road when your muse decides to go take a nap, leaving you with nothing but frustration. (That story I mentioned a moment ago? I haven't completely forgotten about it, but it does not sit at the top of my mind.)
  • Do I have a “What if?” question and an answer to that question? If you're thinking about beautiful sentences where nothing is happening, that's probably not a story. If you can't think of an end goal for your character, that's probably not a story. See the next section for more on “What if?” and the answer. (The story I didn't finish did not have a goal in mind.)
  • Do you have a character? This one seems like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised how often I used to start “stories” and just ramble on with purple prose. No people, no action, no story.

If the answer to all these questions is “yes,” then you most likely have a finishable story. If it's “no” tell your muse to go back to its hole until it can come up with something better.

If you must, explore the idea a little more and see if you can't plot a little something. (Do not write yet!)

Enter the “What if?” question.

What If? How Asking This Question Can Plot a Short Story

In the last post, I told you my favorite way to think of a short story idea is the “What If?” question. This question can help you think about various ways to put your central character into a conflict, like: What if X happened? It’s your own mind giving itself creative writing prompts.

Let’s expand on that method a bit. Notice it’s a question. And questions often have answers, do they not? Knowing the answer to your “What If?” question is the most basic outline of a story.

Let’s start with a basic question.

Q: What if someone knocked on my door? A: I’d probably ignore it.

That’s it. That’s the story. It’s kind of crappy, right?

Notice that answer is my immediate reaction to the knock. It’s not something that happens down the road. That’s part of what makes this scenario NOT a story.

The other issue here is there is no conflict . I don't answer the door, the person goes away, and I'm left to my own devices. There are no consequences for my decisions, so nothing happens—and nobody reading about this incident cares.

Without conflict, there are no stakes in a story . No conflict equals no story.

What Makes a Good Conflict?

Remember conflict can come in many forms and doesn't have to be a shoot 'em up kind of situation. Internal conflict can also make a short story. But there MUST be conflict.

So, on multiple levels, this question and answer session is a loser.

Now, let’s say I don’t answer the door. (I’m a millennial. I’d rather not talk to people if I can help it, so this really is the most likely thing to happen.) The person assumes I’m not home. But wait! They’re a burglar. They now try to break into my house. The “What If?' question has now changed to “What if someone tried to break into my house while I was home?”

See how the central character has to do something now? Even if they don't, there will be consequences.

Because the story idea establishes stakes, I know I've got something. How do I know? There are myriad possibilities here. I could call the cops. I could run out and confront them myself. I could freeze and run upstairs and hide. I could sic my dog on them. I could wait for them to get inside and invite them to join me in having a cup of tea.

Whatever I choose to do, there will be a cause and effect trajectory of events. Which means more stakes, and more opportunities that force my protagonist to face their conflict. They have to make decisions, which will lead to a whole slew of other “What If?” questions:

  • What if they get in before the cops get here?
  • What if they break a window?
  • What if my dog was outside and they hurt him?
  • What if a neighbor sees them and comes running over?
  • What if they “break in” but it’s really just my sister needing in my house for something?
  • What if I’m hiding under the bed and they find me?
  • What if they hate tea?
  • What if … and the list goes on.

These are all more interesting scenarios than just ignoring the door and the person going away. But we’re still looking for the answer to the initial “What If?” question. The answer solves the question and puts it to bed. It doesn’t lead to other questions.

Don't Forget to Answer Your What If Questions

A short story only has one to three scenes normally, so your answer needs to come in a short span of time. It can't come years down the road. Any span of time longer than a few hours, maybe a day or two, is probably too long.

Q: What if someone tried to break into my house while I was home? A: I would call the cops, but also grab my bat and be ready to use it.

But wait. That still doesn’t answer the question, not in a final way. There’s still an open ending there, still questions. (Did I use the bat? What happened if I did?) Let’s try again.

A: I would decide not to use my bat and would talk to them until the police got there.

That’s better. With this scenario, I can think of a couple of things that would happen after the police got there, but at that point the situation is over. I’ve done it. I’ve defeated the burglar. Anything afterwards is a conclusion to the story .

The best part is, I’ve actually done it in a way that means change for me as a central character. I didn’t want to talk to anyone to begin with, which is what led to the whole situation. But I have to overcome that aversion by talking to someone in order to solve the problem.

Short Story Structure

We’ve got two important elements of the story narrowed down now: the “What If?” question and its ultimate answer.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might have come across the many posts we have about plot structure. In a story you need six things:

  • Exposition (Background and setup.)
  • Inciting Incident (A major event happens to your character.)
  • Rising Action (or progressive complications, a sequence of events where things get worse.)
  • Crisis (Ah, what is your character going to do?)
  • Climax (Showdown based on what your character decided to do.)
  • Denouement (Finish it up.)

Need a refresher on these plot elements? Dive further into story structure here.

A short story is often only one to three scenes. That means this structure, these six elements, stretch over the entire story to form the framework. (The scenario I’ve presented would most likely be a one-scene story.) Notice I'm talking about framework here. These six elements are your story structure.

So what do we have here after all this thinking about questions and answers?

The “What If?” question is your Inciting Incident. The ultimate answer is your Climax.

Boom. Two elements down. And these two elements happen to be the bulk of what your readers will remember from your story.

We’ve planned a story, believe it or not. And it didn’t even hurt that much.

But wait! There’s more. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)

In the process of coming up with these two elements, we’ve inadvertently come up with a couple of others.

Choosing not to use the bat and talking to the burglar instead? That’s the Crisis. All those streams of “What if?” questions? Those are progressive complications.

Whoops. We’ve outlined basically the whole thing, haven’t we? I sort of tricked you there. Sorry, not sorry.

Plotting Doesn’t Hurt—Too Much

Plotting a short story doesn’t have to be a meticulous thing that requires hours of work and a running spreadsheet. It also doesn’t have to take the magic out of writing.

Your plan for your short story can be a simple, loose outline. (By the way, outlines can change if you think of something better! They’re not set in stone.) Really, you just need two elements to get to writing a short story:

  • A “What If?” question (identifies the Inciting Incident)
  • The answer (shows the Climax)

And then you’re ready to write!

In future articles, we’ll dive more into writing structure and the essentials and plot elements of a short story. For now, use this “shortcut” to plan out a few short stories of your own! Have fun with it!

Do you like planning or are you more of a pantser? Let me know in the comments .

For today’s practice, use this method of taking a short story idea and turning it into a short story plot. Choose one of the “What If?” questions below and come up with the ultimate answers for at least two of them.

Remember, if it’s not an ultimate answer or nothing really happens between the What If and the answer, you don’t have a story.

  • What if an alien landed in your backyard?
  • What if you got a phone call informing you that you’ve inherited a horse farm?
  • What if you were forced to live with a talking robot?
  • What if you won a trip to space?
  • What if you found a dead body at your workplace?
  • What if your child’s imaginary friend was real?

Work on coming up with answers to at least two of these for fifteen minutes . When your time is up, share your questions and answers in the comments section (bonus points if you have some progressive complications in there!).

After you post, please be sure to give feedback to your fellow writers. Happy writing!

' src=

Sarah Gribble

Sarah Gribble is the author of dozens of short stories that explore uncomfortable situations, basic fears, and the general awe and fascination of the unknown. She just released Surviving Death , her first novel, and is currently working on her next book.

Follow her on Instagram or join her email list for free scares.

How To Sell Books by Building Your Email List

Join over 450,000 readers who are saying YES to practice. You’ll also get a free copy of our eBook 14 Prompts :

Popular Resources

Book Writing Tips & Guides Creativity & Inspiration Tips Writing Prompts Grammar & Vocab Resources Best Book Writing Software ProWritingAid Review Writing Teacher Resources Publisher Rocket Review Scrivener Review Gifts for Writers

Books By Our Writers

HIDDEN: Bodies, Loot, Caves, & Self-Respect

You've got it! Just us where to send your guide.

Enter your email to get our free 10-step guide to becoming a writer.

You've got it! Just us where to send your book.

Enter your first name and email to get our free book, 14 Prompts.

Want to Get Published?

Enter your email to get our free interactive checklist to writing and publishing a book.

  • Kindle Unlimited Free Books
  • Writing Piggy Monk Square
  • Piggy Monk Square – Book Reviews
  • Practical Creative Writing Exercises Book
  • Authors Notes – Writing Fiction Street
  • The Sunshine Girl
  • Kindle Unlimited eBooks for Children
  • Writing About Ballyyahoo
  • Free Stories For Kids
  • The Witch Of Ballyyahoo
  • A Story For Cats And About Cats.
  • Bonkers In Ballyyahoo
  • The Little Book Of Swinging On A Gate
  • Free as a Ladybird
  • The Tree Hugger
  • Football Mad – A Funny Children’s Story
  • Football Crazy
  • Creative Thinking
  • Creative Writing – Flow
  • Walking and Inspiration
  • Dream a Little Dream
  • How To Increase Your Creativity in Five Easy Steps
  • On Confessing To Depression
  • Giving up the Day Job to Write
  • Don’t tell me nobody wants to read my stories.
  • Political Satire – Funny or Not?
  • Talking To Strangers
  • Go Set A Watchman – Her Choice?
  • Writing For The Market
  • Why Women Writers Use Initials
  • Ten worst things about social networks.
  • How Not To Deal With Criticism
  • Transparency and The Irish Film Board
  • What Do I Know About Bullying?
  • Valentine’s Day And My Green Heart
  • Too Many Experts
  • Be True To Yourself
  • The Glass Castle – Jeanette Walls
  • Small Great Things – Jodi Picoult
  • Just Friends – Elizabeth Grey
  • The Woman Who Walked Into Doors – Roddy Doyle
  • Cookie Policy

Planning A Story

Planning a story is one of the best things you can do if you want to finish your story.

I know some writers don’t plan at all.

They just follow their muse , or their creative genius wherever it takes them.

If it works for you, that’s great but many writers find that without a plan to follow, their story falls apart before they get to the finish line.

Personally I don’t have a muse, so I have to work out my stories in advance.

To me, the idea of not planning a story is equivalent to a slow descent into hell!

A writer who has lost themselves in the creative writing process can produce a confusing and confused story.

I have read a lot of pieces where I know there is a good story in there somewhere but the story is lost among a confusion of disjointed scenes that go nowhere, characters who are disconnected and tangents that beat a confusing path towards a whole different story.

At the very least, planning a story will stop you getting stuck, and at the very best, it will enable you to structure your story coherently and let your narrative flow.

Whether you begin with a story idea, or a character idea, it is up to you. If are just starting and are stuck for ideas try some creative writing exercises.

A STORY IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS TO SOMEONE

In its simplest form a story is something that happens to someone – this is important and forgetting this is one of the most common mistakes writers make.

Your character can be very interesting but unless you reveal that through story, nobody will ever know. There is more help with planning a character here.

If you don’t remember that simple rule you will produce reams of descriptive scenes, or big chunks of dialogue with nothing much actually happening to anyone at all!

A SIMPLE STORY

Planning a story can be easy or complicated.

I write a chapter plan of a novel with each chapter represented by a couple of lines about the action of each chapter. I add to this gradually.

Usually I start writing the project and add to the plan as I go. This makes it easy to manage and helps trigger ideas for new developments.

Not everyone can map out every character, event and obstacle in their proposed book from the get go.

That’s okay – just make a loose chapter plan and add events and place obstacles in your characters path as you go on.

Use your plan as a guide, not a bible and remember to keep adding to your plan as you write – this makes it easier to manage a long project.

I use Scrivener software for writers, all the time. It makes my life much easier.

I can create chapter plans, cork boards, outlines and much more. My favourite feature is the ability to see all the chapters and their headings at a glance.

KEEP TRACK OF THE CHARACTERS IN YOUR STORY

You can and should keep character notes. It is very easy to mention a minor character’s luscious red hair in one scene and yet later on in the story there they are – leaning against a bus stop patting their bald head!

ENJOY BLUSHING

There are lots of people who spend their days trawling through books and films, looking for mistakes like that so that they can post them on discussion boards all over the internet.

Keep notes on locations used and remember if you are mentioning real locations you must be accurate in your description and your depiction.

Keep notes, or learn to enjoy blushing.

Don’t worry though, as long as you have some form of plan you won’t go too far wrong.

But, without a plan you could go so very, very wrong.

It is very disheartening to find you have somehow written a large quantity of pages that add nothing to your work – except confusion.

Believe me I’ve been there.

A WHOLE LOT OF MIDDLE AND A WHOLE LOT OF MUDDLE

Without a plan you might find yourself with a whole lot of middle, a whole lot of muddle and no ending.

What’s so heartbreaking about this is that sometimes writers get to this point after a couple of hundred pages and then find themselves unable to end their story. For more about this see ‘ tired of your own story.’

Planning a story means you can work out whether a viable ending is possible before you are a couple of hundred pages in and that’s worth doing.

Good luck with your story planning and all your writing.

P.s. all the information and creative writing tips are provided here free for you. all i ask in return is that you comment in the box below, like and share this article so that others may enjoy it too., share this:.

creative writing , creative writing process , creative writing tips , planning a story

No comments yet.

Leave a reply click here to cancel reply..

Name (required)

Email (will not be published) (required)

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

  • Newsletters

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

  • Will Douglas Heaven archive page

OpenAI has built a striking new generative video model called Sora that can take a short text description and turn it into a detailed, high-definition film clip up to a minute long.

Based on four sample videos that OpenAI shared with MIT Technology Review ahead of today’s announcement, the San Francisco–based firm has pushed the envelope of what’s possible with text-to-video generation (a hot new research direction that we flagged as a trend to watch in 2024 ).

“We think building models that can understand video, and understand all these very complex interactions of our world, is an important step for all future AI systems,” says Tim Brooks, a scientist at OpenAI.

But there’s a disclaimer. OpenAI gave us a preview of Sora (which means sky in Japanese) under conditions of strict secrecy. In an unusual move, the firm would only share information about Sora if we agreed to wait until after news of the model was made public to seek the opinions of outside experts. [Editor’s note: We’ve updated this story with outside comment below.] OpenAI has not yet released a technical report or demonstrated the model actually working. And it says it won’t be releasing Sora anytime soon. [ Update: OpenAI has now shared more technical details on its website.]

The first generative models that could produce video from snippets of text appeared in late 2022. But early examples from Meta , Google, and a startup called Runway were glitchy and grainy. Since then, the tech has been getting better fast. Runway’s gen-2 model, released last year, can produce short clips that come close to matching big-studio animation in their quality. But most of these examples are still only a few seconds long.  

The sample videos from OpenAI’s Sora are high-definition and full of detail. OpenAI also says it can generate videos up to a minute long. One video of a Tokyo street scene shows that Sora has learned how objects fit together in 3D: the camera swoops into the scene to follow a couple as they walk past a row of shops.

OpenAI also claims that Sora handles occlusion well. One problem with existing models is that they can fail to keep track of objects when they drop out of view. For example, if a truck passes in front of a street sign, the sign might not reappear afterward.  

In a video of a papercraft underwater scene, Sora has added what look like cuts between different pieces of footage, and the model has maintained a consistent style between them.

It’s not perfect. In the Tokyo video, cars to the left look smaller than the people walking beside them. They also pop in and out between the tree branches. “There’s definitely some work to be done in terms of long-term coherence,” says Brooks. “For example, if someone goes out of view for a long time, they won’t come back. The model kind of forgets that they were supposed to be there.”

Impressive as they are, the sample videos shown here were no doubt cherry-picked to show Sora at its best. Without more information, it is hard to know how representative they are of the model’s typical output.   

It may be some time before we find out. OpenAI’s announcement of Sora today is a tech tease, and the company says it has no current plans to release it to the public. Instead, OpenAI will today begin sharing the model with third-party safety testers for the first time.

In particular, the firm is worried about the potential misuses of fake but photorealistic video . “We’re being careful about deployment here and making sure we have all our bases covered before we put this in the hands of the general public,” says Aditya Ramesh, a scientist at OpenAI, who created the firm’s text-to-image model DALL-E .

But OpenAI is eyeing a product launch sometime in the future. As well as safety testers, the company is also sharing the model with a select group of video makers and artists to get feedback on how to make Sora as useful as possible to creative professionals. “The other goal is to show everyone what is on the horizon, to give a preview of what these models will be capable of,” says Ramesh.

To build Sora, the team adapted the tech behind DALL-E 3, the latest version of OpenAI’s flagship text-to-image model. Like most text-to-image models, DALL-E 3 uses what’s known as a diffusion model. These are trained to turn a fuzz of random pixels into a picture.

Sora takes this approach and applies it to videos rather than still images. But the researchers also added another technique to the mix. Unlike DALL-E or most other generative video models, Sora combines its diffusion model with a type of neural network called a transformer.

Transformers are great at processing long sequences of data, like words. That has made them the special sauce inside large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google DeepMind’s Gemini . But videos are not made of words. Instead, the researchers had to find a way to cut videos into chunks that could be treated as if they were. The approach they came up with was to dice videos up across both space and time. “It’s like if you were to have a stack of all the video frames and you cut little cubes from it,” says Brooks.

The transformer inside Sora can then process these chunks of video data in much the same way that the transformer inside a large language model processes words in a block of text. The researchers say that this let them train Sora on many more types of video than other text-to-video models, varied in terms of resolution, duration, aspect ratio, and orientation. “It really helps the model,” says Brooks. “That is something that we’re not aware of any existing work on.”

“From a technical perspective it seems like a very significant leap forward,” says Sam Gregory, executive director at Witness, a human rights organization that specializes in the use and misuse of video technology. “But there are two sides to the coin,” he says. “The expressive capabilities offer the potential for many more people to be storytellers using video. And there are also real potential avenues for misuse.” 

OpenAI is well aware of the risks that come with a generative video model. We are already seeing the large-scale misuse of deepfake images . Photorealistic video takes this to another level.

Gregory notes that you could use technology like this to misinform people about conflict zones or protests. The range of styles is also interesting, he says. If you could generate shaky footage that looked like something shot with a phone, it would come across as more authentic.

The tech is not there yet, but generative video has gone from zero to Sora in just 18 months. “We’re going to be entering a universe where there will be fully synthetic content, human-generated content and a mix of the two,” says Gregory.

The OpenAI team plans to draw on the safety testing it did last year for DALL-E 3. Sora already includes a filter that runs on all prompts sent to the model that will block requests for violent, sexual, or hateful images, as well as images of known people. Another filter will look at frames of generated videos and block material that violates OpenAI’s safety policies.

OpenAI says it is also adapting a fake-image detector developed for DALL-E 3 to use with Sora. And the company will embed industry-standard C2PA tags , metadata that states how an image was generated, into all of Sora’s output. But these steps are far from foolproof. Fake-image detectors are hit-or-miss. Metadata is easy to remove, and most social media sites strip it from uploaded images by default.  

“We’ll definitely need to get more feedback and learn more about the types of risks that need to be addressed with video before it would make sense for us to release this,” says Ramesh.

Brooks agrees. “Part of the reason that we’re talking about this research now is so that we can start getting the input that we need to do the work necessary to figure out how it could be safely deployed,” he says.

Update 2/15: Comments from Sam Gregory were added .

Artificial intelligence

Ai for everything: 10 breakthrough technologies 2024.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT reached mass adoption in record time, and reset the course of an entire industry.

What’s next for AI in 2024

Our writers look at the four hot trends to watch out for this year

  • Melissa Heikkilä archive page

These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI

Generative AI took the world by storm in 2023. Its future—and ours—will be shaped by what we do next.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Stay connected

Get the latest updates from mit technology review.

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at [email protected] with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.

What is Ash Wednesday? Here’s what to know about the holy day marking the beginning of Lent

how to plan a short story

Lent is a 40-day season of prayer, fasting and giving that Catholics and some other Christian denominations observe as a time of repentance and closeness to God in preparation for the day of Christ's resurrection, celebrated on Easter .

Ash Wednesday is the kickoff of that season that is one of five on the Catholic liturgical calendar, along with Advent, Christmas, Easter, and Ordinary Time .

That means you may see someone walking around with an ash cross on their forehead this Wednesday. Don't try to clean their forehead: Here's what it means and why the day figures so prominently in the Lenten season.

What is Ash Wednesday?

Ash Wednesday is the first day of the liturgical season of Lent that falls six and half weeks before Easter each year.

Members of the Catholic Church ages 18 to 59 are required to observe Lent and fast on Ash Wednesday, starting at 14-years-old.

Ash Wednesday dates back to the 11th century, according to the Vatican , but the tradition of marking one's forward with ashes is rooted in the ancient Hebrew custom of "clothing oneself in sackcloth and dusting oneself with ashes as a sign of penance," according to Hallow , an app for Catholic prayer and meditation.

When is Ash Wednesday 2024?

This year, Ash Wednesday falls on Feb. 14.

Why is Ash Wednesday important?

Ash Wednesday places Catholics and other denominations of faith in the place of Jesus’ entry into the desert before His death. It is a symbolic turning of one's heart towards God, recognizing the brokenness that exists and the need for salvation.

"Ash Wednesday is the perfect opportunity for us all to recommit to many of the things we know we need to do," Hallow CEO Alex Jones said.

For some, it could mean prayer and meditation, Jones added. For others, it could look like fasting food or social media.

"It might be serving at a local shelter or being more generous in our giving. Whatever it is, Lent is the perfect time to take just 40 days and commit to it," Jones said.

What do the ashes symbolize?

The ashes symbolize our mortality.

On Ash Wednesday, you may see neighbors walking around with ash crosses on their foreheads.

During mass on this day, priests will add crosses made of ashes to foreheads reminding Catholics, but you do not need to be Catholic to receive ashes on Ash Wednesday. Other Christian denominations and even those disconnected from traditions of faith, sometimes observe.

When is Easter 2024? How its date is determined each year and why some celebrate.

Can you eat meat on Ash Wednesday?

Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are the only two days of fasting and abstinence required by the Catholic Church, though Catholics are encouraged to abstain from meat on Fridays during the 40-day season of Lent.

Christ fasted in the desert for 40 days leading up to His death and resurrection, so believers choose to fast as well according to their own conviction in the days leading up to Easter. Fasting, just like ashes, is a sign of repentance and aims to stir up a spiritual hunger.

What is Lent?

Just as the four-week season of Advent prepares believers for Jesus’s birth at Christmas, the 40-day season of Lent prepares believers for Jesus' death and resurrection at Easter.

This time of sacrifice and repentance prepares the heart to receive the reconciliation that Christ offers. An individual gets to choose what they'd like to give up during the time of Lent, as Jones shared.

When does Lent start and end?

This year, Lent starts on Ash Wednesday (Feb. 14) and ends on either March 29, Good Friday, or on March 30, " Holy Saturday ," the day before Easter, depending on the denomination.

Australia's naval shipbuilding program on the verge of finding safe harbour in South Australia

An artistic drawing of a large military ship floating on water with a little cloudy sky

For decades, much of Australia's naval shipbuilding efforts and promises have centred on the Osborne yard in Adelaide's north-west.

From diesel to nuclear powered submarines, frigates, air warfare destroyers and offshore patrol vessels, various programs have been announced, commenced, hit by both time and cost blow outs, or axed all together.

Shipbuilding in South Australia has been a political hot potato through successive governments, with the current Albanese government set to release revised plans for shipbuilding within days.

The state's defence sector, particularly shipbuilding, has been repeatedly spruiked as an economic boon and a pathway to long term prosperity, particularly in the wake of the demise of the automotive industry.

But will what was promised actually be delivered? Or is another change in course being plotted, especially for the frigate program based at Osborne?

2016: A pivotal year

To understand the current state of play in shipbuilding, rewind to 2016.

A third Defence White Paper in seven years was released by the Commonwealth, which doubled down on the call to build a fleet of 12 conventionally powered submarines and nine future frigates.

It spoke of the need for a continuous shipbuilding program which would not only provide a pipeline of vessels for the Navy but work, and jobs, for decades.

"The continuous onshore build strategy for naval surface vessels my government is delivering will fundamentally transform our naval shipbuilding industry, ensuring its sustainability in the long term," then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said in February 2016.

Hunter Class Future Frigates

Decisions were made against the backdrop of a febrile political and economic climate in South Australia, ahead of the double dissolution federal election that July.

It turned out to be the peak of Senator Nick Xenophon's power and influence in Canberra, with the maverick SA independent branching out to attack lower house seats as well as the Senate.

Maintaining and expanding the state's submarine and shipbuilding sector was a heavy focus area for the campaign.

At the time, there was concern in Liberal ranks that then Industry, Science and Innovation Minister Christopher Pyne could have been challenged in his traditionally safe electorate of Sturt.

Pre-dating that was internal angst in the Liberal party room over ousted prime minister Tony Abbott's push to have the submarines built in Japan after the Coalition promised to construct them in Adelaide in 2013.

Another layer was the state of South Australia's economy broadly, and the manufacturing sector specifically, little more than a year out from the closure of the Holden plant at Elizabeth.

South Australia's unemployment rate hit 7.7 per cent in February 2016, nearly two per cent above the national average.

This was before the Whyalla steelworks slid into administration, raising the prospect of one of the state's largest regional centres being plunged into an economic and social abyss.

Then there was what was happening with the workforce at Osborne itself, as the Air Warfare Destroyer build started to wind down, leading to job losses.

No shipbuilding contracts had been inked, creating a so-called "valley of death" for the workforce before any new projects kicked off.

Plus, there was a Labor state government agitating and campaigning, headed by Jay Weatherill and assisted by ex-Liberal state opposition leader turned government cabinet minister, Martin Hamilton-Smith.

These were among the factors that contributed to the decisions in April 2016 when Naval Group was awarded the $50 billion submarine contract, plus the commitment to build nine frigates in Adelaide and a plan to start offshore patrol vessels project in ASC's yard to fill the "valley of death".

Two years later British firm BAE Systems was selected as the successful tenderer to build the frigates at Osborne.

Changing times and reviews

Fast forward to 2024 and much has changed, particularly since the AUKUS agreement was struck.

The nuclear submarine deal between Australia, the United Kingdom and United States in 2021 scuttled the French program for conventionally powered boats which were to be built in Adelaide.

AUKUS also helped spark a re-think about the frigate program.

One man speaks in front of media microphones, with two men standing behind him on either side

Following the release of the Defence Strategic Review last April, the federal government launched another review of Navy's surface ship fleet to make sure its "size, structure and composition" complemented nuclear-powered submarines.

"The surface fleet, as it's currently constructed, was determined at a time when Australia was still pursuing a diesel electric powered submarine," Defence Minister Richard Marles said at the time.

The Hunter class project has hardly been in calm waters since it commenced.

Its expected budget jumped from $35 billion to $45 billion, the ship's displacement increased and there have even been calls to scrap the program all together .

The national audit office was called in and found the program was "experiencing an 18-month delay and additional costs due in large part to design immaturity" . 

And a report released late last year found the program did not meet the Commonwealth's rules regarding achieving value for money . 

All of which has cast doubt about whether the 2016 pledge of nine frigates will be delivered, or if that many vessels is still needed.

Concept art showing four warships fanning out in open waters.

Economically, South Australia is also in a different place to 2016.

It's ridden through the end of car manufacturing and the COVID-19 pandemic and currently has an unemployment rate of four per cent, the second lowest of any state or territory.

But it's future plans which have raised some concerns within state government ranks.

What happens next?

ABC News has reported at least six frigates, possibly more, will be re-committed to under the revised plans.

But other options are also understood to have been considered by the Commonwealth.

If the program was cut back to three frigates without an explanation of what would come next, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas says that would be "insufficient" to have continuous ship building at Osborne – raising the spectre of another 'Valley of Death' for the local workforce.

"So in our view, and we've been very clear, that there is no option for the Commonwealth to do anything less than six frigates if they're serious about a continuous ship build," he said on Thursday.

"Because six frigates takes us to 2038, 2039 and then allows to announce what follows."

Side profile of bald man wearing glasses speaking.

While visiting a factory adjoining the Osborne yard on Friday, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said it sounded to him like Mr Malinauskas "had an inside run" on what was coming.

"If Premier Malinauskas is making excuses for Anthony Albanese to reduce the build from nine down to six, then he would have to explain why that is in the best interests of South Australia when clearly it's not," he said.

South Australians won't have to wait long for clarity.

  • X (formerly Twitter)

Related Stories

Bae systems scores $35 billion warship building contract.

A computer-generated image of the Type 26 Global Combat Ship being developed by BAE Systems in the United Kingdom.

Previously secret report raises doubts about $45 billion Defence program

Tim Barrett speaking at an event in military dress

Auditor's scathing assessment of $45b future frigates program

Four people including then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull look at a model of a navy boat

'Unsuited for Australia's needs': Former navy chief calls for nation to back out of $45 billion frigate deal

BAE Systems beats Spanish and Italian designs for $35 billion warship building program

  • Aerospace and Defence Equipment Manufacturing
  • Defence Forces
  • Defence Industry
  • United Kingdom

IMAGES

  1. Story Planning Template

    how to plan a short story

  2. A story map template for planning a story.

    how to plan a short story

  3. How to Plan a Short Story: Free Story Planner Template for Kids

    how to plan a short story

  4. Free Story Writing Plan, Story Plan, Literacy, Writing Worksheets

    how to plan a short story

  5. How to Plan a Short Story

    how to plan a short story

  6. Image result for short story template

    how to plan a short story

VIDEO

  1. Home Life Short Story! #shorts #delicious

  2. Home Life Short Story! #shorts

  3. plan short video//#trending #shortfreedr#short

  4. Did you know in the Movie Escape Plan #shorts #escapeplan

  5. writing a story #shorts #stories #videos

  6. The Plan

COMMENTS

  1. How to Write a Short Story in 9 Simple Steps

    1. Know what a short story is versus a novel 2. Pick a simple, central premise 3. Build a small but distinct cast of characters 4. Begin writing close to the end 5. Shut out your internal editor 8. Share the story with beta readers 9. Submit the short story to publications Last updated on Oct 29, 2023

  2. How to Write a Short Story: The Short Story Checklist

    Of course, short stories also utilize the elements of fiction, such as a setting, plot, and point of view. It helps to study these elements and to understand their intricacies. But, when it comes to laying down the skeleton of a short story, the above elements are what you need to get started. Note: a short story rarely, if ever, has subplots.

  3. How to Plot a Short Story: 5 Steps for Short Story Plotting

    Writing How to Plot a Short Story: 5 Steps for Short Story Plotting Written by MasterClass Last updated: Aug 19, 2021 • 3 min read So you want to write a short story? You're in great company: New short story collections, packed with vibrant portraits of real-life or fresh takes on science-fiction, are plentiful.

  4. How to Write a Short Story from Start to Finish

    1. Training Short stories help you hone your writing skills. Short stories are often only one scene and about one character. That's a level of focus you can't have in a novel. Writing short stories forces you to focus on writing clearly and concisely while still making a scene entertaining.

  5. How to Outline a Short Story in 4 Steps

    Writing How to Outline a Short Story in 4 Steps Written by MasterClass Last updated: Aug 30, 2021 • 4 min read Outlines are a tremendously valuable resource when writing fiction. The clear plan an outline provides will make your creative writing more fluid, efficient, and even spontaneous.

  6. How to Write a Short Story: 10 Steps

    How to write a short story in ten steps: How to plan a short story, write and publish Devise an intriguing scenario. Plan what publications you'll submit your final story to. Find the story's focus before you start. Outline character and setting details. Choose a point of view for the story. Write the story as a one-page synopsis.

  7. How to Write a Short Story: Drafting, Edit, and Polishing

    1. Make a plot outline. Organize your short story into a plot outline with five parts: exposition, an inciting incident, rising action, a climax, falling action, and a resolution. Use the outline as a reference guide as you write the story to ensure it has a clear beginning, middle, and end.

  8. How to Write a Short Story: Your Ultimate Step-by Step Guide

    1 - You learn the skill of showing. Short story writers have a challenge that requires some patience to overcome, but it's worth it. When you only have a few pages to hook readers, paint a clear picture of the main character, and tell a story, you end up mastering the skill of showing instead of telling.

  9. How to Plan a Short Story: Free Story Planner Template

    How to Plan a Short Story: Free Story Planner Template Short stories have a lot of work to do. They have to convey vivid details about setting and characters while advancing a cohesive plot in a limited amount of space.

  10. How to Write a Short Story That Gets Read (In 7 Steps)

    Balancing Show and Tell. Finding the right balance between showing and telling is vital. "Showing" immerses readers in the story, allowing them to experience events and emotions through detailed description and action. "Telling," on the other hand, conveys information and moves the plot forward.

  11. How to Write a Short Story: 9 Proven Steps

    Trying to write a short story is the perfect place to begin your writing career Because it reveals many of the obstacles, dilemmas, and questions you'll face when creating fiction of any length. If you find these things knotty in a short story, imagine how profound they would be in a book-length tale.

  12. How to Plan to Write a Good Story: 7 Steps (with Pictures)

    1 Brainstorm. Think of a story that will have an impact on the audience. For example, a story that may change the way that people think about a certain subject. The story could contain twists and turns and unexpected endings. Build up on that creative story. Start by thinking about what happened to you yesterday or what will happen in the future.

  13. How To Plan Your Short Story (+ Free Planning Workbook!)

    writing like a boss. 2. Use a character generator. These are less effective, but helpful if you need to create a character quickly. The downside is that you don't get to create a one-of-a-kind, made-from-scratch protagonist; which is kind of the fun of character creation.

  14. The Snowflake Method: 6 Steps to a Powerful Story Outline

    Step 1: Write a one-sentence story summary. Encapsulate what your novel is about in a single sentence. You might also call this 'the hook': a line that you can use in almost any situation to get anybody interested in your book. A revenge-obsessed whaler embarks on a deadly voyage to hunt the beast that took his leg. Or.

  15. Story Planning and Outlining: Complete Guide

    Book planning methods Tools to plan stories Authors on planning This guide to story planning and outlining explores common planning terms and techniques in fiction writing, free and paid tools to plan your story, authors on their planning approaches, and more. Key story planning terms

  16. How to Begin a Short Story: 15 Steps (with Pictures)

    4. Open with a line of strong dialogue. Starting your story with a strong line of dialogue can be effective, but the dialogue should be easy to follow and to the point. As a general rule, dialogue in a story should always be doing more than one thing and never be there just for the sake of conversation.

  17. Short Story Writing for Students and Teachers

    Create a Dramatic Question. The first thing a student needs to do when writing a short story is to create a dramatic question. Without a dramatic question, readers will have no motivation to read on as there will be no story.. This dramatic question can take many forms, but as it will be the driver of the plot, it will be the single most important element of the story.

  18. Short Story Plot: How to Use Ideas and Structure to Plot a Short Story

    Plotting your short stories will give you an end story goal and will help you avoid getting stuck in the middle, or accidentally creating plot holes. You'll have fewer unfinished stories if you learn to do a little planning before you start writing.

  19. Planning A Story

    A SIMPLE STORY. Planning a story can be easy or complicated. I write a chapter plan of a novel with each chapter represented by a couple of lines about the action of each chapter. I add to this gradually. Usually I start writing the project and add to the plan as I go. This makes it easy to manage and helps trigger ideas for new developments.

  20. How to plan a story

    Your story needs to engage the audience with an exciting plot and keep them engaged from the opening, through the build up, problem and resolution, right up to the ending on the final page, and ...

  21. Writing, Compiling, and Arranging Short Stories in a Collection

    Apr 11, 2017. Putting together a book of short stories is like creating an issue of a literary magazine: The writer has to consider each story and the composition of the book as a whole. The difference between writing a single story and compiling them into a collection is significant. ( Tips for Writing and Selling Short Stories)

  22. Lesson Plan on Writing Short Stories (High School)

    Objectives Upon completion of this lesson, students will be able to discuss and analyze a short story, as well as recognize key elements of a short story. Lesson Overview Explain what a short story is, be sure to cover how this type of writing differs from other forms of creative writing.

  23. Short Story Fiction Unit Planning: How to Plan and Organize (Especially

    Short Story Fiction Unit Planning: How to Plan and Organize (Especially if You're New to Middle School ELA) If you're a new 6th, 7th, or 8th Grade ELA Teacher looking to plan and organize a fiction unit, you're in exactly the right place!

  24. OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

    OpenAI has built a striking new generative video model called Sora that can take a short text description and turn it into a detailed, high-definition film clip up to a minute long.. Based on four ...

  25. Steph Curry Confidently Predicts How Challenge vs. Sabrina Ionescu Will

    Steph Curry isn't taking WNBA star Sabrina Ionescu lightly ahead of the Stephen vs. Sabrina Three-Point Challenge competition on Saturday night, but the NBA's greatest shooter of all-time also has ...

  26. Ash Wednesday 2024: What is it? What is Lent? Explaining the holiday

    "Ash Wednesday is the perfect opportunity for us all to recommit to many of the things we know we need to do," Hallow CEO Alex Jones said. For some, it could mean prayer and meditation, Jones added.

  27. Promises, plans and delays: A short history of major naval shipbuilding

    South Australia's defence sector, particularly shipbuilding, has been repeatedly spruiked as an economic boon and a pathway to long term prosperity, particularly in the wake of the demise of the ...