Perhaps you have an idea for a short story and are wondering how best to start writing it. Or maybe you’ve written your story and are now looking for ways to revise it for a more complex and engaging narrative. You can create fascinating prose and deepen your short fiction with the following strategies:
1) Start in action or movement, gold in half beef, which in Latin means “in the midst of things.” Due to the space restriction of a short story, you want to engage your reader immediately. Movement takes us into history faster than stillness. Say, for example, you are thinking of writing a story about a teenager who decides to rob a liquor store for the first time. Instead of introducing the character before he walks into the liquor store, why not have him already in the store, looking for his weapon and dealing with his internal conflict of committing his first crime? When reviewing, the live action, when the central character and conflict are first introduced, may not appear until, say, page 5, and the previous pages are full of background and basic situations. Try starting on page 5 and incorporating the background as the story unfolds, making it part of the bottom-up action.
2) Include your contract, or promise to the story, within the first two paragraphs.. This gives readers the context of what is unfolding and lets us know what is at stake for the central character. It is here where we are shown what the character wants, and we can intuit that from the events that begin to unfold, regardless of whether or not he achieves his wishes, this character will be altered at the end of the story.
3) Use concrete and specific details as much as possible. Specific details resonate more with readers than lofty statements. Statements with broad or abstract brush strokes tend to be melodramatic. Connect them to reality with particular and tangible details. This creates a more experimental reading of your story.
4) Show and tell. We are all familiar with that saying, “show, don’t tell,” but it is impossible to eliminate all “tell” from a story, especially in short fiction, where we have limited narrative space. Summarizing events is essential to cover long periods of time or to convey recurring actions that provide context to the current action in the story. The trick is to make the narrative appear shown by using specific details that dramatize the narrative. For example, let’s look at a section on The snows of Kilimanjaro to see how Hemingway hides his story with very specific and concrete details:
He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betraying himself and what he believed in, by drinking too much that blunted the edges of his perceptions, by laziness, by laziness, and by snobbery, by pride and prejudice, by the hook and by the thief. (60)
The narrative is full of stories, but what the story masks is the insertion of “drinking too much”, a simple phrase that fills in the blanks and supports all abstract statements with real and concrete terms.
5) Use the internal monologue to create more depth for your character.. While you don’t want to go out and explicitly express your character’s feelings, such as “he felt sad” or “she was happy,” you can express your character’s impressions, judgments, and reflections to convey his emotional complexity. Looking at the Hemingway quote again, notice how the character reflects and concludes that he wasted his talent through his drinking. Without really expressing emotion, Hemingway was able to convey the depth of the character’s regret and shame.
6) Create tension by hindering the character’s wishes.. This is the heart of the growing action in your tale. Your character wants something (what is at stake?) And a conflict arises in his efforts to obtain the desired result. Tension is created when we see the character struggling with these obstacles.
7) Allow your characters to be vulnerable and flawed. Stop protecting them. They are much more interesting when they make mistakes, say the wrong things, or get in trouble. It is their vulnerability and flaws that make the characters in their stories human and sympathize with their readers. This is also part of creating a character arc. Sometimes the obstacles to a character’s wishes come from the character himself, and it is in overcoming (or not) these obstacles that he changes.
8) Insert your flashbacks (the past as scenes) strategically in the story. Flashbacks interrupt the present moment and can slow down the pace of your story, especially during a key emotional moment. If the flashback is lengthy, try turning it into a standalone scene and use simple, unobtrusive time markers (such as “three months ago” or “last spring”) to locate your reader. If the flashback is short, consider inserting it well enough earlier, possibly in an earlier scene, so that your character can experience the emotional moment in the current action without interruption. Readers will have the flashback in mind when your character takes action in the present.
9) Have flashbacks and the past in brief inform the present action in your story.. In other words, the past should provide context for your character’s actions or beliefs in the present moment.
10) stay in the emotional moment. Writers sometimes find it difficult to endure during a crucial emotional moment. It can be uncomfortable. And sometimes, we feel inadequate to express it well, so we have a great deal of development and detail in the storytelling before and after, rather than during the emotional moment. But when we review such a significant moment, readers will see it. feel like they were rushed or even missed you completely. Worse still, the ending will feel undeserved. Staying in the emotional moment can mean digging deeper into the character’s thinking. Try to extract the thought behind the thought. Or, if your character doesn’t look inward much, you can still make the moment feel emotionally significant by enhancing the details of the character’s senses (smell, sight, hearing) or his physique (how the body feels or what he’s doing. ). ).
Incorporating these craft tips into your writing will go a long way toward creating a more visceral reading experience, a more believable arc of change, and a more meaningful relationship between character and action. You’ll be on your way to writing an engaging and compelling short story.