How to Prepare to Write a Short Story

In this article, I'll share a few foundational areas that will help you in creating a short story. Preparing well will not only make a better quality story, but it makes it easier to write as well.

1) Explore Your Characters:

If you think of your favorite stories, books, and movies, almost 99% are great because they were character-driven. With fictional characters, it's helpful to create a profile including background information, motivations, and physical descriptions for continuity. You can keep this in a file folder, notebook, or a database file on your computer for handy reference.

2) Research Your Setting:

This is going to vary based on the nature of the story. A historical short story for instance can benefit from little details from the time period the story is set. Due to the attention span of the average reader, you want to balance creating a detailed environment with keeping the reader's interest (not bogging them down with so many setting details that it hinders the actual story). There is a happy medium that creates a very rich story in a short amount of pages.

3) Create a Framework for Your Plot:

Even if you don't have all the details at first, creating a framework for your story generally makes things a lot easier. With novels you have more room to explore multiple sub-plots, but short stories are generally very focused. You're usually tracking with one character or a small set of characters through the entire piece, so you need to know the character's conflict, how that conflict builds, and its resolution.

4) Revise More Than Once:

Walk away from the story for a few days, then revisit it. You will find ways to improve it several times. Eventually you will reach a point that adding or changing would actually take away from it. That's when you're really done.

Additional Tips:

• Start your planning on paper, and over time it does gets easier to do it automatically. I still use notebooks a lot just so I'll have a reference for ideas I want to use later.
• Save all of your short stories and refer back to them. I was able to take a set of short stories and three years later adapt them into a novel.

Resources:

• The Writer's Library
• Web Writer Central

Author Link:

• Patricia Gilliam's Amazon.com Author Page