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How To Write A Short Story
By Alan Leach
Whether you're a budding writer or a student with a school assignment, knowing how to write a short story can come in useful. While there are as many ways to write a short story as there are stories, here we look at one way for the sake of simplicity. Once you have learned how to write a short story following this advice, you can adapt and change it to suit your own ideas and writing style.
The first step in learning how to write a short story is to come up with an idea. It's no use starting to write the story if you don't know how it will end! This is how writers get writer's block, and can be avoided by thinking about and planning your story carefully. Some people believe it can be a good idea to start at the end and work backwards. In other words, what happens at the end of your story? Then go back and think about the events that are necessary to lead up to this ending.
Most short stories end with some kind of climax, where the main conflict or problem in the story is resolved. When learning how to write a short story, it is a good idea to come up with a main character. The story will then be essentially the story of this main character's struggle to do or achieve something. Usually, but not always, this character will be described more fully than other characters and readers will feel some kind of sympathy towards him or her. You want the readers to turn the page, and a sympathetic character can achieve this as people want to know what happens to the hero.
When learning how to write a short story, the central theme or problem of the story is important. There are several ideas you could use such as a conflict with another person (good versus evil) or even person versus nature (such as being stranded on a desert island). Build up the tension of the problem throughout the story by having the main character fail several times to achieve what it is he or she has set out to achieve in your short story.
The climax of the short story is where the tension is resolved and the main character succeeds in whatever they were trying to achieve. When learning how to write a short story, it is important to make sure that this step is drawn out to create more excitement for the reader. The reader should be filled with tension at this point, and be desperate to find out whether the main character is successful, so try not to make the ending too obvious. A few twists along the way are sure to give your short story some added excitement.
Once the climax of the story has been reached, a good tip for those of you wanting to know how to write a short story is to end the short story quite soon after. Once the excitement is over, readers will not want to sit through another ten pages of reflection on the events but would prefer a short resolution and ending.
As mentioned already, there are many ways to write a short story and the model given above is just one example. For those of you wanting to learn how to write a short story, there is no substitute for sitting down and just writing. Finally, for those of you needing a little more guidance on how to write a short story, visit your local library and pick up some short stories to read and get ideas from.
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