While our Instagram grid is filling up with poetry prompts in honor of National Poetry Month, we’re turning our attention on the blog to a different medium: the short story.
When I was a shiny new writer, the only thing I wanted to tackle were novels. Over and over again, I began drafts only to discard them less than a week later. It wasn’t until after I wrote a few short stories that I was able to complete a longer work, and I (at least partially) owe that to becoming better acquainted with my writing process.
But wait, isn’t the writing process the same for everyone?
Well, yes and no. The essential steps are always the same: planning (even pantsers daydream about their scenes), drafting, revising, and editing before finally publishing. The real trick is finding out how each of those steps look for you. For example, if you read through the blog post on my out-of-the-ordinary writing process (the metaphor for which was, of course, an epiphany that came to me after completing a short story), you might feel intrigued or you may recoil at how much more energy I spend in the planning phase than any other, but that’s what works for me!
In contrast, Racquel’s process is focused more on revision. You may find your own process spends more or less time or energy in the various stages. Every writer’s process is as unique as the stories they write.
Why write short stories?
Simply put: because they’re short!
But short stories aren’t too short. Flash fiction, while it has many advantages, would be too short for our purposes. Its brevity makes it too easy to keep all of the details and plot points in you head. To truly get a feel for your process, you need to be able to get lost in the weeds a little bit. If you can develop a plan for how to manage important elements and get back on track when you go astray, you’ll be able to extrapolate that knowledge to help you when you’re writing a novel.
Closer to the opposite end of the spectrum, you don’t want to write anything longer than a novelette (which would be 7,500 words at its shortest) because that’s going to be too long of a project to get through in a timely manner. You’ll forget how it felt to write it in that particular way. You want to remember all the lessons you learn for each story you write!
How do I use short stories to learn my writing process?
You’ll want to experiment with how you approach every short story, keeping what works for you and discarding what doesn’t.
Don’t let what writers you know would think about how you’re writing enter your mind. This is about you and you alone. Research others’ writing techniques and try them if they call to you. If you want to try write out of order, do it! If you want to edit as you go, give it a try!
If you can, remain consistent in terms of when, where, how long, and how often you write, so there will be fewer variables affecting your writing. Of course, if chaos is the only constant in your life, that’s fine, too—just as long as you know how to spot the distinctions between a writing technique that doesn’t work and a week that didn’t work for writing.
It might be helpful to keep a journal while you go through this exercise. That way, you’ll have something to reference when you’re wondering how you fixed a problem you know you’ve encountered before.
To get you started, we transformed our first ten National Poetry Month 2024 prompts into short story prompts!
- On April Fools Day, a prankster orchestrates a practical joke that leads to life-changing consequences.
- A once-in-a-generation weather event unearths a family’s long-buried secrets.
- Someone who thought they were alone in the world discovers an uncanny ability to communicate with another just like them.
- A struggling artist has finally sold a work of art for a high price. Write a story that leads to the artist burning it to ashes.
- A young girl discovers a forgotten journal filled with cinquains written by her grandmother—and that there’s more to them than meets the eye.
- Write a story about one character trying to remain a secret admirer despite the admired one on the brink of figuring them out.
- Rewrite and modernize a Greek myth. Alternatively, write from the perspective of a lesser-known Greek god (as in, not one of the twelve Olympians) walking the earth.
- Write a story that takes place over the lifespan of a single flower. Choose a flower that has symbolic significance to the story. (E.g., red roses typically represent passionate love.)
- After returning to their drab childhood home, a world traveler stumbles upon a gateway to another world in their own backyard.
- Everyone around your main character is acting happier than they would be otherwise. What’s happening?
