I write a couple of short stories just about every week, and I keep learning new things every time I write a new story. Sometimes I smack myself in the head for making a “rookie” mistake on a new story. Something I should have known somehow slipped through the cracks in draft number one.
That’s okay, because there can always be a draft number two or number three. But avoiding those pitfalls, or at least catching them early in the writing process, is a key way to become more productive and write better stories.
I’ll tell you what prompted this blog post. This past week I wrote three stories, and two of them had major, obvious flaws. I had taken a couple of weeks off from writing new stories to finish up edits on a bunch of old ones (and to work on a new, secret project that I’m not quite ready to announce). Just those couple of weeks off were enough for the rust to set in!
So I decided to develop a checklist. The purpose of this checklist is to remind me of what needs to happen in a good short story. By reading it before I start blasting words into a document, perhaps I’ll make fewer first draft mistakes and get to a great final draft that much faster.
Notes on the Checklist
These are in no particular order, and are terse so I can read them in just a few minutes before I start to draft a new story. I will also use this checklist after completing that draft but before submitting the story for workshop review. That will make the review process more efficient, as fewer comments will be about my bonehead mistakes.
I’m sure I’ll be refining this over time. Feel free to leave in the comments any checklist items you think I’ve missed.
Many of these items apply to any kind of story, but some apply specifically to speculative genres (SF, Fantasy, Supernatural Horror). The abbreviation MC stands for “main character.”
As with any set of general rules of thumb, there will always be exceptions. To keep this list short, I’m not going to exhaustively list those exceptions (if that were even possible). I just want to make sure any exceptions I allow in my writing is for a legitimate reason and not because I’m rationalizing being lazy!
The Short Story Checklist
OPENING: The first hundred words or so should establish the main character’s identity, the setting, and the primary theme. In most cases the beginning should mirror the ending. The opening paragraph has to be “grabby.”
POV AND TENSE. Give some thought as to which character should have the POV. It can vary per-scene. In most cases use simple past tense and either first or third person. Flash can often get away with present tense and/or second person POV, and sometimes it makes the story better, but sometimes it’s just a gimmick. Choose wisely.
EARLY SCENES: The speculative element (SF, Fantasy, Horror, etc.) should at least be hinted at within the first few hundred words. In addition, some kind of tension must be in place within a few hundred words max.
ABEYANCE: Not everything has to be explained in detail, especially near the start of the story. SF readers are willing to wait for details, you can give them broad brush strokes at first and just hint at things by using clever naming and analogies.
SCIENCE AND MAGIC: Unless it’s hard SF, it’s only necessary for your speculative elements to be plausible and self-consistent. For example, you don’t need to prove that your cool specfic technology conforms to the laws of thermodynamics.
SPECULATIVE SIGNIFICANCE: Speculative elements should be dramatically different than the “real” world, not just tiny differences. They should be central to the story and theme, not just a cool thing thrown in that has no impact on the story. The main character’s personality should be designed to highlight the speculative elements and theme.
LAYERS: The story must contain at least three “layers.” For example, the main character may have a personal/cultural/emotional struggle layer while dealing with a larger global/universal conflict layer that also ties into a spiritual/philosophical issue layer. All of the layers should tie in with the theme (the purpose of telling the story). EXCEPTION: In flash fiction, you may be forced to limit the story to just one or two layers.
CAUSAL FLOW: The scenes must be causally linked. Things that happen in one scene cause things to happen in future scenes (in the great majority of cases anyway). This seems obvious but is surprisingly easy to get wrong. When writing a new scene ask yourself: what caused the actions in this scene to happen?
AGENCY: The main character cannot be merely an observer. The main character must perform actions which at least attempt to alter the causal flow, even if not in the way the character intended, even if not successfully. Note that I said main character here, not POV character. They don’t have to be the same. A POV character who is not the main character can sometimes be a pure observer, for example Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
ROLLER COASTER: Tense action scenes should be balanced by introspective pacing scenes; all art is rooted in contrast.
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL BALANCE: The main character must have a balance of internal and external thoughts, speech, and actions. Don’t fall too heavily on one side or the other. It’s fine, even desirable, for the MC to be confused, groping toward a solution, speculating incorrectly, misinterpreting, etc., in the MC’s internal world. Some internal thoughts should also be introspective or otherwise “meta”. Thoughts about why the character feels a certain way or thinks certain things.
ACTION: There must be action, even if psychological. Avoid pure “talking heads” stories.
TENSION: There must always be tension. When one tension resolves, another must already be ramping up to take its place. There should be multiple tensions at any given time, often one (or more) per layer.
SCOPE: In most cases, short stories should be of limited scope. Limited number of locations, limited number characters, short time frame. You can go wider when writing at novelette and novella length. Flash stories often will have just one or two characters and may occur in real time or have two or three real-time scenes separated by longer time periods.
LONG, FLOWERY DESCRIPTIONS. Just say no. No one cares what your characters look like, spend no more than a few words on that, if any. That chair your MC is sitting in? Nobody cares what kind of wood it’s made from. Unless it impacts the plot, keep descriptions very terse in short stories.
PREDICTABILITY: Avoid it, it’s boring. Unexpected stuff has to happen, frequently.
MAIN CHARACTER’S PLANS: Plans never go completely as the main character wants them to without a hitch. Never. Never ever. They order soup, they get the wrong kind. Or better yet there’s a fly in the wrong kind of soup. Or better yet a tiny, deadly alien is swimming in the soup. They can eventually succeed, but the MC needs to work for it harder than they ever thought they would need to work. The MC usually needs to be seen as clever by the reader. Unexpected things happen, the MC thinks on his or her feet and meets those challenges (sometimes without success, but not because they weren’t smart, because the deck was stacked against them.)
CHARACTERS: No two characters have names that start with the same letter (Orson Scott Card’s rule). Every character has a distinct voice and personality. Every character wants something. It’s usually a good idea to make the MC sympathetic. There can be MCs who are not sympathetic, it’s just harder to pull off. MCs with a checkered past can work out well, people like stories of redemption or attempted redemption.
GOLDEN RULE: Show don’t tell. There are numerous exceptions. Speeding through predictable parts, summarizing things that would be tedious to show. In flash there will tend to be a little more tell due to word count constraints, but don’t use flash as an excuse to have no show at all.
DIALOG: Keep it short. Punchy. Avoid long monologues. Fragments? No problem. See? Also, sometimes one character doesn’t have to respond at all to the other. They can just cross their arms or sigh or grimace. Actions speak louder than words.
DIALOG TAGS: Use as few as possible: just enough to avoid ambiguity. Action tags are frequently better to use than “said.” Speaking of which, about 97.5% of your name tags should be plain old “said” or “asked.” Sometimes “whispered” is okay and a handful of others, but on rare occasions. Please never write: “Okay,” she grunted. You can’t grunt words.
EXCLAMATION POINTS: No! No!! Hell no!!! Elmore Leonard said you get to have one every hundred thousand words. That’s not feasible in short fiction. But keep them under control, please. I start to get nervous if I use more than two in a 5k word story. And regarding multiple exclamations on the same line (no!!!!) that is considered a definite mark of an amateur. Exception: you’re telling the story in the form of a letter or text and the character who’s writing is an amateur writer or a teenager, etc.
PEARLS: Damon Knight said that a short story should be like a string of pearls. Every paragraph or two there should be a pearl: a beautiful description, a clever phrase, an unexpected twist, a hilarious joke, a tense situation. Keep stringing the pearls. Every paragraph or two ask yourself whether you’ve strung a pearl recently.
CLICHES: Avoid them like the plague. See what I did there? Find a way to reword the cliche in a unique way that fits the setting and theme. Example: in a swords and sorcery fantasy, instead of saying “he was sharp as a tack” you could say, “he was sharp as a unicorn’s horn”.
ENDINGS AND ARC: Avoide cliche, over-used endings (“He woke up and it was all a dream.”) Many submission guidelines on market sites have lists of cliche plots and endings–read them and heed. Most readers find it satisfying if the ending reflects or echoes the beginning. I often try to plant the ending right in the beginning, hiding it in plain sight. Endings should be unexpected but not out of left field–pay attention to setup. Flash fiction is not an excuse to have a sucky non-ending. (And after the unicorn vanished, he continued eating breakfast. It tasted great. The End.) Endings should never be wholly ambiguous (there can be a few unknowns but not major ones). The MC either won, lost, or ended up in some compromise between those two extremes. The MC changed in some definite, identifiable way from story start to story end (the character’s arc).
