How to Write a Short Story

Students and clients often ask about the process of working on a story or novel—when do you know what makes for a good short story topic? How can you tell if a short story is “done?” How do you know what to include and what to cut?

My most recent story came out in The Missouri Review, and because it’s fresh in my mind, I’d like to share a bit about the process. There are a few spoilers within. 

How To Start a Story

Here’s how I started my most recent short story; it was based on a strong, authentic emotional moment in my own life. In 2008, a close family friend Eleanor Howie, died in Perthshire, Scotland, where she’d lived her whole life. I flew to Scotland from Seattle for her funeral, which took place in a small church near Loch Ness. It was frigid, snowing hard, and I was a pallbearer. Of course, I wore a kilt, and my knees were bright pink when I returned to the hired bus rented to take us to the wake. There were two buses, actually, and my bus set off first. 

The second bus got stuck on the wrong side of the mountain after the pass closed due to the weather. So, for a while, only half of the attendees gathered inside the wake’s heated tent on the lawn of Eleanor’s house.

Everyone was drunk by the end of the evening on single-malt, sharing stories about Eleanor, an eccentric, opinionated, witty woman who collected antique cars, ran a radio show, and was an early regional counselor for the Scottish Nationalist Party.

People once said, “You should write a story about this!” But without a plot or exciting conflict, there isn’t a story. The setting was great, and an interesting situation with the buses, but no story. So I set it aside and occasionally fiddled with the ideas, but nothing happened.

Eventually, stuck at home during the pandemic, I took another shot at it…

Making Decisions in Short-Story Writing

All creative writing is just a series of decisions you revisit in editing. But first, you must make choices, and each choice opens up branches for other choices. If you want to go back and change an early decision after completing a story, you’ll rewrite a completely different story. So, it’s important to make big decisions upfront before you start scribbling or typing. 

My First Writing Decision: The Narrator

Eleanor was in her sixties when she died, and my first creative choice was to make the deceased woman younger, in her early to mid-forties—close to my age at the time of writing. The short story’s main character was also going to be about my age. This story focuses on a woman in her forties; her college friend has just died, and now she’s grappling with her own mortality.

My Second Writing Decision: Theme

I wrote the first page summarizing the narrator’s life and how she hadn’t made many significant decisions in years (ironic, I’ll note since we’re discussing the importance of creative decisions here).

I’ve often noticed how our decisions in life tend to have somewhat unpredictable outcomes. Someone goes to Harvard and then ends up impoverished. Someone else goes to a state school and ends up wealthy. Someone marries a happy, healthy man.

Then, he develops an overwhelming gambling addiction and starts stealing money from his workplace. I’m interested in people making “wise” choices versus “unwise” options and what that means . . . and I wanted to write a story that struggled with that theme. 

So I wanted a character who had made many big, bold (and misbegotten) choices early in her adult life, and then, after a decade of chaos, she decided to stop making decisions.

I riffed on this for a page, describing her old houseplants she got out of the divorce, now hunched at the ceiling of her flat. She didn’t like them but also couldn’t throw them away. What do you do intentionally, and what do you let happen to you? When does not-deciding become a decision?

My Third Writing Decision: the Plot

Now that I had a character, theme, and situation, it was time to start writing the story. My short story’s narrator had an ex-husband, apparently (which emerged in the thematic summary), so I described the opening scene at the funeral as similar to the actual funeral. In the story, the protagonist’s ex-husband is attending with his sexy new girlfriend. All writers are sadists, in a way, and I was trying to make my protagonist feel bad.

Writers are also mischief-makers, so my protagonist, Kate, follows the sexy girlfriend of the ex-husband onto the first bus, leaving the wake and sitting next to her. Immediately, I knew they’d arrive at the wake on time, and the ex-husband would get trapped on the wrong side of the mountain for hours.

The sexy girlfriend needed to be surprising, not a stereotype, so I set to work on that. As soon as their banter got going, I noticed a kind of flirtatiousness between them, and my mischief-making impulses charged forward.

If Kate is leery of making any decisions and has avoided making any choices for a decade—maybe she’s sick of living that way. Perhaps she wants to start doing things again? And here is this beguiling flirtatious woman, Fiona, who happens to be her ex-husband’s new girlfriend …

The remainder was written in a day. It wrote itself, more or less. But that didn’t mean it was ready for publication. 

How to Revise a Short Story

Once I had a draft, there was quite a lot of revision. I removed most of the original page, which served no purpose other than getting me started. I further explored the friend who had died and how she connected to the story’s themes.

I also reworked the ending several times. What events could animate the theme of decision-making versus inaction? How does a person create a life?

Getting Short Story Feedback

I sent the initial draft (actually round three) to a few trusted readers, who gave me feedback that improved the story by pointing out something. Ultimately, the story became much more about loneliness and stagnation—the initial draft, I think I mentioned, was written at the depth of the pandemic lockdown, so I can’t imagine where that theme came from.

FAQs About Short Stories

How Do I Start a Short Story?

Use something very interesting from your own life or an intriguing story you’ve come across in the news recently or long ago. What makes it a good short story is that it’s an ambiguous, serious, and complicated story of a human problem that’s fairly intense.

How Do You End a Short Story?

I wrote a whole essay about short story endings for Writer’s Digest, but essentially, you want the story’s plot to end two-thirds of the way through. The last third is processing the action’s conclusion and revealing the theme and aftermath.

Is It A Good Idea to Write A Short Story Before Writing a Novel?

It’s a good idea to write several short stories before embarking on a novel. You need to learn how to control story elements such as plot and pacing, craft characters, and manage information so readers are intrigued but not confused. In addition, you learn basics such as formatting dialogue and consistently using the correct verb tense. The last aspect is surprisingly hard to manage at first.