These short story writing tips do not come from a checklist. They come from the conference floor from writers mid-process, mid-collection, mid-submission pile, talking about what the creative writing process looks like when you are living inside it.

The Case for Short Fiction: A Creative Writing Process Worth Defending

The short story is the most fabulous form in the world. Edgar Allan Poe, one of the originators of American short fiction, described it as “an exaltation of the soul that cannot be long sustained,” and that gives you a great deal of license. The beating heart of short fiction is experience. It leads to a great sense of experimentation, whether you are writing formally experimental work or something more traditional.

Short fiction lends itself to your real life: the family life, the busy life. You always have something underway. A collection can be built from stories written at various times across several years, each one complete in itself. For writers who teach, who parent, who carry the demands of a full life, short fiction works.

To try it yourself: Take stock of what you have. If you are sitting on a finished story, an abandoned draft, or even just a paragraph you wrote six months ago and never returned to, that is your something underway. Give yourself one hour this week to return to it.

Start with a Splinter

Stories often begin from a thematic place. Maybe you have something you want to say about silence—you’re not quite sure what it is. You might know a setting well, a restaurant in the coastal mountains, for example, a world rendered familiar through experience, and have a main character you know a great deal about without knowing exactly what you are going to do. Then you have scene after scene after scene.

Sometimes what you think the story is about turns out to be wrong. You might place your character in Denver, then Northern California, then Seattle. The scenes stay flat. And then a violent thing happens, a break-in during a garage cleanout, and you immediately know that you had the theme but had it backwards. You were actually interested in somebody being disappointed in the main character, not the other way around. And then the story writes itself.

To try it yourself: Write down one thing you have been wanting to say lately — not a plot, not a character, just a feeling or an idea or a single word that keeps surfacing. That is your thematic place. Start there and see what setting and character grow around it.

The Recipe That Finally Works

Drafting short fiction is a great deal like cooking. You try a recipe and it does not work, so you try other ingredients, and those do not work either. But all those tries lead up to when you have the recipe that holds, the keeper stage. You might have a draft, and another character, and a great deal you want to say, and still find yourself working toward it. We’re almost to the keeper stage.

The setup comes first: a place, a character you know, a theme you are circling. Then science. You are not sure exactly what you are going to do.

To try it yourself: Pull out a draft that is not working. Instead of asking what is wrong with it, ask what it is trying to become. Read it looking for the scene that feels most alive, and consider whether that scene is actually the center of the story.

Short Story Submission Tips: On Rejection and Persistence

Finishing a draft is one milestone in the creative writing process. Sending it out is another, and for many writers, the harder one.

Keep sending things out. You will be amazed at where your work will be received. Have faith in your work enough to send it out, and to be willing to have other people read it. You will never know where that generosity is going to hit right for you.

Until you are at 50 rejections, do not talk about it. You need 50 to start. Looking at a Submittable account with 350 rejections is the work. You can paper your family room with rejections. Finding a rejection notification in your inbox on the conference floor is like flossing: it kind of hurts, but you find the dirty bit and then you feel better.

To try it yourself: Open your Submittable account, or create one if you do not have it yet. Find one journal that publishes work like yours and send something out this week. Just one. The 50 starts somewhere.

What a Fiction Writing Coach and a Good Editor Have in Common

You might come to an editorial relationship from a defensive place, feeling you need to defend your voice against whatever cruelty will be imposed. But a good editor draws you out rather than imposes something on top of your work. It is very hard to put together stories written at different times of your life. A good editor can devise the order, and people will often tell you how beautiful and cohesive the arc is. He did that. Not you.

The most useful editorial notes are often the ones that confirm what you have already accomplished. An editor might tell you that one line is extremely violent and you do not need it, that as a new reader, you have already done it, already accomplished what you set out to accomplish. And the deal-breaker note, the one that makes you blush while you look at it because it is so obvious, that is the mark of a good editor. She was absolutely right, no question.

To try it yourself: Find one person—a trusted reader, a writing group member, a coach—and share a draft you have been protecting. Ask them for one note. Just one. Notice whether it makes you blush because it is so obviously right.

Whether you are circling a theme you cannot yet name, staring down a Submittable inbox, or wondering whether your collection is ready for an editor’s eye, Hewes House works with fiction writers at every stage of the short story writing process. Book a free consultation to find out what your work needs next.