Writing Workshop 1 - What makes a good short story?
A monthly session to ask questions and share work
Hi all, and welcome to the first monthly writing workshop with rumblewrites!
Here’s what these sessions are all about:
Answering your questions. From writing tips, submission help, and a behind-the-scenes look at the editing / publishing business, to historical research, life at a Russell Group uni, and my day-job in archives, I’m open to talking about anything.
Group feedback. I’d also like to dedicate some sessions to your writing: if you're game, send me your query, synopsis, or a c.1000-word extract for review!
What is a ‘short story’?
A short story is a piece of prose fiction composed of anywhere between 1 and 10,000 words. Famous examples include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, O. Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’, Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, and Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on the lower end of this spectrum: on stories between 500 and 5000 words. The reason for this is twofold: 1. this is the length of fiction I am most used to writing, and 2. this is the length that most literary journals look for.
In the lit mag world, generally speaking, anything under 1000 words is considered ‘flash’ fiction, while anything between 1000-5000 words falls into the category of short fiction. This isn’t a steady rule, of course, and literary journals often set their own parameters. But anything above 10,000 and we get into novella territory.
‘Ichabod Crane pursued by the Headless Horseman’ by F.O.C. Darley (1849)
What makes a good short story?
Idea
Compared to a novel, the core idea behind a short story needs to be more distilled. It should focus on a single moment, thought, or turning point. Sometimes it makes sense to centre the narrative around a question. Or a mood. These things are often transitory in a novel but should take centre stage in shorter fiction.
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