SHARING MY ANALYSIS:
In my quest to improve my marketing in 2005, I decided I needed a couple of short stories to offer as giveaways. Although I’ve written 14 novels, I’ve never written a short story.
I went on a quest and read several classic short stories and below are my findings. I’m not an authority on this, of course, but I’m just offering my observations and what I learned to far.
STORY CONTAINMENT:
The first thing I noticed is that the story needs to be contained or confined to a shorter version than a novel. This means that you won’t have the same space to build the characters.
The other thing I noticed is that the storyline is about one event or one meeting of some kind. For example: A weekend visit, or a train ride, or a meeting on the street that leads to something happening.
Keeping this need for containment in mind I believe will prevent us, as writers, from setting out to write a short story and somehow writing a novelette or even a novel.
SENTENCES PACKED WITH INFORMATION:
The next thing I noticed was that the sentences in many of the short stories were longer than in novels, as they contained so much added information. In other words, you need to pack the background and characterization inside the action of the story. Every word counts and the writers wrote succinctly and every word served the story.
Knowing the need for this, I believe it will help with story containment.
DOWNLOAD THE WORKSHEET:
There are templates all over the internet for story crafting, but they all seem to follow the hero’s journey, which I find doesn’t work for mystery books. At least I was never able to make them work for me.
So I have created a template for a Short Story Mystery Template that asks all the who, what, where, when questions that you will need to set up the bones of the short story.
If you’re interested in downloading the form, click below to access the form.
