How to Write a Short Story: Structure, Constraints, Method

The short story is often presented as a miniature novel that works the same way on fewer pages, and that mistake sinks most first stories. A failed novel often has a hundred pages too many, whereas a failed story is almost always a compressed novel, with too many characters, too many years and too many intentions packed into twenty suffocating pages.

The short story is a discipline of its own, with its own laws: a single effect, a late entrance, a quick exit, and constraints that drive the text forward instead of holding it back. Here's how it works, and how to approach it without applying a novelist's reflexes.

Unity of effect, Poe's founding law

The first serious theory of the short story fits into a short text, the review Edgar Allan Poe devoted to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales in Graham's Magazine in May 1842. Poe sets out two principles there that haven't aged.

According to the first, a story should be readable in a single sitting. You put a novel down and pick it up again, so everything that comes between two readings weakens its hold, whereas a story holds the reader from beginning to end without the outside world breaking the spell. No other narrative form commands the reader's full attention to this degree.

The second follows from it: everything should work toward a single effect, conceived in advance. The skillful writer, Poe says, first conceives the effect they want to produce, then invents incidents and arranges them to achieve it, so that everything tends toward it from the first sentence and no word is written that doesn't contribute to it, directly or indirectly.

This gives you a test as severe as it is useful. For every scene, character and paragraph in your story, ask whether it serves the effect, because a digression that enriches a novel dilutes a story. As long as you can't say in one sentence what effect your story should produce, whether unease, a reversal, a revelation or grief, you're not ready to write it yet.

Get in late, get out early

A novel can afford an exposition, while a story starts in motion. Raymond Carver, who left the novel for short fiction, summed up his approach in a few words in an essay published by the New York Times in 1981 ("A Storyteller's Shoptalk," collected in Fires): "Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on."

That economy shows up in the structure:

• The opening already contains the complication. The reader arrives in a situation that's already tense and picks up the context along the way, because information about the past arrives in fragments rather than blocks.
• One thread, one reversal. The classic story rests on a single turn, sometimes spectacular, like the twist ending in Maupassant, sometimes tiny, like a perception that shifts or a confession that never comes. In Carver, often almost nothing happens, and what has moved by the end is the reader's position toward the characters.
• The ending leaves the story open. A successful story stops before it has said everything, and its final silence is part of the composition, often to the point of being the single effect Poe was talking about.

The same tightening applies to style, since in a ten-page text every verbal tic weighs far more than in a novel. Revision matters even more, and the principles of our four-pass revision method apply in full, to a text short enough to be reworked five times without exhaustion.

What short fiction makes possible

The short story is sometimes reduced to a school exercise or a step on the way to the novel, and two major bodies of work are enough to overturn that hierarchy.

Alice Munro never needed the novel. In 2013, the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize in Literature, presenting her simply as the "master of the contemporary short story," and praised her ability to fit the entire complexity of a novel into a few pages: whole lives, decades, forks in the road, held in thirty pages through ellipsis. Munro skips years the way others skip a line, and what a novel would narrate happens, in her work, between two sections.

Jorge Luis Borges turned brevity into a philosophical position. In the prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), he calls composing vast books "a laborious and impoverishing extravagance," books that develop over five hundred pages an idea that could be explained orally in a few minutes, and he prefers to pretend that these books already exist and offer a summary or a commentary on them. All of his fiction fits into collections of stories, without a single novel. His infinite libraries, his map at the scale of the empire and his Quixote rewritten word for word are vertigos a novel would have watered down, and the short story delivers them in exact doses.

Munro and Borges both show that the short story suits what would lose by being expanded, far more than it suits writers lacking the material for a novel.

Constraints as a method

Everything about the short story is a matter of constraint, which has the advantage of being something you can plan.

Length first. Depending on the tradition and the magazine, a story runs from a few pages to a few dozen. The number matters less than the commitment: set yourself a target before you write, then hold to it, and every scene will become a trade-off, since you'll have to decide what deserves to exist within that budget. A writing goals tool helps here, since you set a word target with a deadline and a circular gauge constantly reminds you of the format you're writing in. For a story, that goal mostly serves as a guardrail against the temptation to expand it into a novel.

Time and place next. Most strong stories unfold over a tight span: an evening, a journey, a conversation. When the span stretches, as in Munro, it's ellipsis that keeps the tension, by cutting whole years rather than a few minutes.

The number of characters last. Two or three fully developed characters are worth more than eight silhouettes, because every additional character demands space the form doesn't have.

If you write several stories, for a collection, a contest or a magazine, run them as parallel projects. Keeping each story in its own sheet, grouped by chapter or by collection, with a status for each text (draft, in progress, done), lets you see at a glance where each one stands and switch from one to another when one resists, which is one of the real pleasures of short fiction.

Where to start

For a first story, here's an approach that pulls together everything above:

1. State the effect in one sentence, along the lines of "by the end, the reader should understand X without anyone having said it." As long as that sentence doesn't exist, don't write.
2. Start as late as possible. Write down the whole chronology of your story, then step into it at the last useful moment, often two-thirds of the way through.
3. Set your budget: a word count, a time span, two or three characters. Write these constraints at the top of the document, like the rules of a game.
4. Write the first draft in one go if you can. The short story is one of the few forms you can write in the conditions in which it will be read, in a single sitting, and Poe's unity of effect begins with that unity of writing.
5. Cut while reading aloud. Everything that doesn't serve the effect goes, and if the text stays clear after that pass, it's ready for readers.

The short story forgives little, but it teaches fast, because you can finish one, fail, understand why and start again within the same month. A novelist never wastes time writing stories, and some of the century's greatest writers never needed to write anything else.