Short Stories

Planning A Short Story:

• What does your protagonist want?
• When the story begins, what morally significant actions has your protagonist taken towards that goal?
• What unexpected consequences — directly related to the protagonist’s goal-oriented actions — ramp up the emotional energy of the story?
• What details from the setting, dialog, and tone help you tell the story?
• What morally significant choice does your protagonist make at the climax of the story?

 Write a Catchy First Paragraph

• the first sentence of your narrative should catch your reader’s attention with the unusual, the unexpected, an action, or a conflict.

 Developing Characters

• In order to develop a living, breathing, multi-faceted character, it is important to know way more about the character than you will ever use in the story.
• You need to know the 4 main areas-
• Appearance. Gives your reader a visual understanding of the character. Action. Show the reader what kind of person your character is, by describing actions rather than simply listing adjectives. Speech. Develop the character as a person — don’t merely have your character announce important plot details. Thought. Bring the reader into your character’s mind, to show them your character’s unexpressed memories, fears, and hopes.

 Choose a Point of View

• Point of view is the narration of the story from the perspective of first, second, or third person. As a writer, you need to determine who is going to tell the story and how much information is available for the narrator to reveal in the short story.

 Use Setting and Context

• Setting includes the time, location, context, and atmosphere where the plot takes place.

 Set Up the Plot

• Plot is what happens, the storyline, the action.

 Create Conflict and Tension

• Conflict produces tension that makes the story begin. Tension is created by opposition between the character or characters and internal or external forces or conditions.

 Build to a Crisis or Climax

• This is the turning point of the story–the most exciting or dramatic moment.

  Find a Resolution

• The solution to the conflict. In short fiction, it is difficult to provide a complete resolution and you often need to just show that characters are beginning to change in some way or starting to see things differently.