When I was doing my undergrad in Creative Writing, I hated writing short stories. I did ultimately write them. I wrote a lot of them to boot because my undergrad institution didn’t offer novel writing courses, so all the fiction writing classes focused on short stories. But even though I wrote short stories, I always viewed them as a compromise on the way to writing novels. In my undergraduate self-righteousness, I firmly believed my ideas were too grand to be contained in a short story. It wasn’t until I became a professor of writing, myself getting ready to teach a creative writing course to undergrads that I truly dug into short stories both as a medium to be read and a teaching medium. So here is the approach I wish my undergrad professors had taken with me:

 

    The point of writing short stories is not to learn to write novels. The two mediums have a lot of overlapping techniques, but each one has a tendency to get away with some structural things that the other one doesn’t. So if you master the form of the one it won’t guarantee you’ll excel in the other without doing some additional skill acquisition. Instead, the point of writing short stories is to learn to write a satisfying story in under 8k words. In this way, if you do want to write a story that is ten times that length, you will have honed your story instincts and will be profoundly less likely to put in the months and sometimes years that it takes to write a novel just to realize you have no clue how to assess the success or failure of the project as a whole. 

 

    It wasn’t that my ideas were too grand when I was a college student, it’s that I didn’t know how to take those ideas and shape them into an actual story. How to separate the proverbial storytelling wheat from the chaff. And although my twenty-year old self might be shocked by my current stance, I firmly believe that beginning and intermediate (and even some advanced) writers would immensely benefit from honing their storytelling skills with short stories. 

 

Stories Are More Than the Sum of Their Parts

 

    I’ve encountered many approaches to teaching people how to write long-form fiction. From jumping straight into a full novel on the one end to focusing on paragraphs and sentences on the other. In the in-between there were advocates of a variety of writing exercises, prompts, and scene writing—the idea being that a novel is made up of scenes. I’ve been fortunate enough to either directly test these methods or work with writers who have produced work using them. In all instances the skills that writers were being taught were pretty good and useful. In all instances the skills either didn’t add up to a story at all or added up to a piece that felt as banal as room temperature water. 

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    Now don’t get me wrong, writers absolutely need to have skills of the craft, from writing a good sentence, to character motivations, arcs, pacing, tension, and so on. But I also suspect you’ve encountered a book that clearly had room to grow in its artistic execution, but you still kept reading it and felt satisfied by it. You’ve also likely encountered a novel where the author clearly possessed a lot of objective skill, yet you couldn’t finish the book, or if you did finish it, it felt meh. The difference between these two is storytelling. One writer knew how to tell a meaningful story, the other one didn’t. 

 

    Short stories are an excellent medium to practice story writing, in addition to writing skill building. The obvious reasons include:

 

• Short stories take less time to finish than longer works and finishing a thing makes you feel awesome and helps you learn from the completed project

• Short stories have lower levels of complexity (relative to novels) and so make it easier to isolate the elements that are and aren’t working

• Lower complexity also means easier iteration and revision

• Easier iteration and revision hones writing craft skills better 

• Short stories make it easier to pin down what it is you’re trying to say and force greater clarity of thought because of their smaller scope

• The brevity of short stories makes the time investment feel less overwhelming and tends to give writers greater license to experiment and be less afraid of making mistakes

• Getting someone to read your short story and give you feedback is a lot easier than getting that same person to commit to reading your full novel (this goes for both, beta and alpha readers)

 

    If I’ve convinced you to go write a short story, awesome! My suggestion is to zero in on what makes a story a story and my tools on the narrative elements hierarchy can steer you in the right direction even if you’re a complete beginner. 

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A Future Short Story Course

   

    It is of course possible to improve your storytelling alone, but it is a lot harder than if you have at least one person who knows what they’re doing to offer you feedback and guidance. It’s also a lot harder than if you are able to see a range of examples from people who are also working on their storytelling. Because of this, I’m working on developing a 6-8 week live virtual class for a cohort of 8-10 writers where we’ll focus on honing storytelling skills by writing one short story from start to finish. The vision is to combine the best elements of the undergraduate and graduate fiction workshops I’ve learned from, guided by my pedagogy training and years of personal experience teaching writing to college students.

 

    I don’t have any more details to share right now, but if you feel this is something you’d be potentially interested in, sign up for the short storytelling interest list below to be the first to get the details as they become available!