Why I suck at writing short stories.
Not too long ago I wrote a short story- 2, actually- and they were fantasy short stories, each with its own set of characters and its own setting.
Guess what? I don’t know why, but they absolutely sucked.
I created characters’ insecurities and strengths and tried to affect them in the stories. I put stuff into effect and showed the insecurities and strengths without saying “John Smith is insecure of how common his name is” but instead showing with:
As John looked at the golden telephone book the hairs on his arms stood up and his vision got distorted, the telephone book seemed to be going forward and back and the room- oh, the room- was going this way and that. “Hey, this isn’t a good idea, let’s just go back home,” cried John to his brother. But John couldn’t hear his brother anymore, all he heard was his heartbeat in his head, all he could see were the thousands of John Smiths in the telephone book.”
I feel this showed the insecurity better, but the short story still was terrifyingly terrible with a troublesome, tense theme totally encompassing the thought of what I wrote (no idea why I used alliteration there).
But now (it’s been an hour) I’ve taken another look at my story and I really broke down what I did well and what I didn’t so you understand how NOT to write a short story.
1. First-person writing. First-person writing takes a lot of experience with books in general and I don’t feel like it’s worth it for a short story, especially as most people writing a short story won’t be as experienced as the people (you if you’re an author) writing novels. I also feel like first-person writing is generally reserved for those adrenaline books or books where you don’t understand everything.
Seriously, though, I don’t know if I’m the only one who experiences this, but aren’t there some books that you just DON’T understand whatsoever? I’m not going to put them down, but it just feels like a waste of time reading them!
I don’t get the setting, I don’t get the characters, and when I check my visualization of the what the story would look like in real life, I see it blurry and unclear. I leave the story without satisfaction because I don’t understand any of the problems the characters faced.
I mean, where even are we right now? Which setting are we in? I’ve been paying full attention, it’s the 300th page, and some characters have been left unestablished!
If you’re going to write a short story or even just any novel (I’m not an author but I read a lot; if you consider me not experienced enough that’s completely okay but I’m still going to state my experienced reading and limited writing opinion) I’d say don’t write it in 1st-person and go for 3rd. It’s a lot easier and gives much more insight.
2a. Useless dialogue. For my short story, I gave myself a limit of 4 pages and useless dialogue just ate so much of that up. If your dialogue doesn’t have a specific purpose, erase it. If that purpose is “for the reader to establish rapport with the character” and there’s a much better way to do that, erase it. Let me explain what I mean by “and there’s a much better way to do that”:
Dialogue to establish rapport with the character shouldn’t just be the character talking as many readers think.
“Good night, Mom,” John whispered.
“Good night, sweetie-pie,” Mom offered.
“Wait, mom!”
“Yes, honey?”
“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just a bit scared.
THIS ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING.
Instead of writing like this where you barely just get at the characters’ fears and insecurities, why not write in a way that really intensifies them instead of just hinting at them through dialogue like this.
Additionally, short stories often have page limits and this dialogue eats up so much space because each new sentence has to be a new paragraph. In a short story, you don’t have the space to waste time on meaningless things. Every word should have a purpose.
Why not just skip through this dialogue altogether or give a “Mom put John to bed”? Yes, it may be bad writing, but bad writing in some places is essential for amazing writing elsewhere, which you can do because you have the space to do it, and for good writing overall. Don’t have meaningless, useless dialogue.
2b. Wastes of time
Kind of like useless dialogue, wastes of time are a waste… of… time. I know that seems obvious, but I made that mistake and I’m fairly certain I’m not the worst writer to ever exist, so it seems logical that others might have made the mistake too. The reason I’m including this as a 2b and not a whole other point is because it has the same lesson as useless dialogue: Every. Single. Word. Should. Have. A. Purpose.
The 2-step Method to Solve and Spot Wastes of Time in Your Story:
1. Scan through your writing and establish the overarching plot ideas, including the conflict(s), problem(s), and the characters.
2. Look deep in your writing and see where the overarching plot idea is being used/ not used. A tip: Look at paragraphs and try to make a connection to a plot idea. Of course, you can make any connection being irrational and drawing pointless conclusions, but try to be rational. If it’s hard to make a connection, delete or repurpose the paragraph.
That’s pretty much it. Identify the main point of the short story and delete what doesn’t align with it.
This advice also applies to excessive zoom-ins which I made a big mistake of using too much in my story. Identify key events and only zoom in on those. As shown in the example at the beginning of the blog, unless the plot of the story is John Smith fighting his clones from the phonebook, you don’t need to show the amount of John Smiths and John Smith’s fear of his name.
3. Wrong Plot.
Y’know, man, sometimes you just gotta piss.
Occasionally, just for fun, I go up to people and ask, “What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?” People are usually startled, but sometimes I get some good answers, and I feel like that piece of advice, so educational, really applies here.
WAIT, WRONG ADVICE! Please mind that- that is most definitely not what I was thinking about- although, crazily enough, it is a true story, I did actually ask someone for the best piece of advice and that was their response. This is the real advice I was thinking about:
However good you are, sometimes you just chose the wrong thing to do. So before you do anything, just ask yourself, “Is this right?”
And I feel like that message is so universal and applicable to anything, including writing fantasy short stories. However good your writing may be, sometimes your plot just isn’t up to par. You know that feeling you get when you write a plot, that it feels like something a child would write? I can appreciate children’s writing (I can’t, that was a lie) and I’m not saying don’t get in touch with your inner child (I actually really advocate for that) but you’re trying to write a short story, not a children’s book. If you are, then by all means, please skip this point, but most of the time you aren’t.
So, while you’re planning your story out, if you feel like something’s not up to par, please take the time to revise until you’re satisfied.
4. Lack of Planning
Personally, I tried to plan as much as I could, but I still have to admit I could have and should have planned more.
A lot of writers will jump “write” into writing without taking the time to consider the characters and the plot they want to create.
Yes, you can make some changes during the story, but you shouldn’t change the entire plot for it.
If you plan well and stick to that plan while writing your story, you:
- Write what you need to write at that time (for example, if the character isn’t supposed to know something in your original plot and then knows it while you’re making your story your writing is going to be based on the character not knowing it and then from one scene onward the writing is going to be based on the character knowing it- THIS IS GOING TO CREATE A MAJOR IMBALANCE IN YOUR STORY-).
- Are better able to space-organize your story. In the original story, if you know that the ending isn’t going to take long, you’re able to spend more time on the beginning and end, however, if you’re writing the end and decide that you want to do something completely different, you’re going over your page limit. Yes, you can delete some stuff, but the story is not going to be that good.
- Have a better-planned story. I know this seems obvious, but your story will naturally likely not be planned well at all if you improvise. On the other hand, if you stick to what you previously planned, your story has events that all serve a purpose and intention.
- Have a MUCH higher chance of making a good story.
Yes, there are only 4 reasons listed here, but there are so many more. Plan your story.
“How do I plan my story?” you may ask. PAUSE!
First off, I found this really good website (I don’t have any ties to it, don’t worry) that you can use. I don’t get any benefit from it, I’m just sticking to my own principle of “don’t waste people’s time”:
Story Planner Helper | Story Planner
If you want to read the rest of the post, here you go:
RESUME!
Simple. First, establish the plot based on a plot structure you can easily find online. Here’s a couple:
So how would one do this? Look at these expositions, destruction things (read the article for more info on thejohnfox.com ) and explain how what’s going to happen to your character and setting in them; you have the plot element, you just need to explain the specifics.
This is a really good example I found from https://simplewriting.org/plot-structure/basic-plot-structure/ that explains each of these plot elements.
That’s step 1, just establish what’s going to happen; the rough plot.
Expect this step to take a bit and a lot of writers end up with multiple plot structures/ story ideas because of their brainstorming, this stage is mainly about creativity.
IN THIS STAGE YOU ALSO ESTABLISH ROUGH CHARACTERS.
As a clarification: In this stage, you also establish your characters.
The big difference between this (plot) stage and the character stage is that the character stage requires you to really dive deep into your characters but this stage is just to establish some basic information, ex.
Name: John Smith
Age: 21
Gender: Male
Depending on your story, the plotting stage can be mixed with the character stage if a character’s insecurity is critical to the story, but if it’s possible find a way to procrastinate the characters’ insecurities and just focus on what is happening rather than the why.
For example, John Smith does have to fight his clones and face his insecurity, but in the plot, I could just use his insecurity broadly as an inciting incident:
Inciting incident: John Smith sees a phonebook and gets scared.
No details on the “scared” are needed yet, that’s for the next step:
The Character Planning Stage
The character planning stage is the stage where you figure out important things about your character, emotionally and physically. It’s a stage that also requires a lot of creativity as in the character planning stage you MUST be deep and introspective of another person. No “name:”s here.
Create insecurities, strengths, deep weaknesses, giant opportunities for change, reasons for insecurities.
A common tip authors give is to think about your characters’ weaknesses and faults rather than their positive aspects. I know this advice sounds quite negative, but for a lot of my writing life (I’m no author, just writing random things) even I was falling into the trap of just saying positive things about my characters.
ARE YOU PERFECT?
If the answer to that is “No”, guess what? Your characters aren’t perfectly good either! The saying “Nobody is perfect” applies here too, your characters should have negative qualities, to make them more believable make sure they AREN’T perfect.
How to Character Plan
No real “maps” here, you’ve just got to step into your currently empty character’s shoes and start designing. What are their insecurities, their desires? Create their world.
…There’s really nothing else to add, the way I first planned my characters is I wrote down what characters I had and picked some qualities that made sense to each of them. Yes, my story turned out rubbish so there’s no real reason you can trust me to do this, so you might want to do stuff in a more organized manner, such as:
- Mind mapping character qualities
- Establishing a background story and basing insecurities off of that
But I can’t really give much advice on organization tools, I’m not a very organized person. For character planning, the process is very simple: answer these questions.
- WHAT IS THE CHARACTER’S NAME?
- WHAT DO THEY HATE?
- WHAT DO THEY LOVE?
- WHAT ARE THEIR STRENGTHS?
- WHAT ARE THEIR WEAKNESSES?
- WHAT ARE THEY INSECURE OF?
- WHAT ARE THEY SCARED OF?
- WHAT EXPERIENCES SHAPED WHAT THEY HATE, LOVE, ARE STRONG AT, ARE WEAK AT, WHAT THEY’RE INSECURE OF, WHAT THEY’RE FEARFUL OF?
- WHAT CAN YOU DO TO CREATE THEIR WORLD?
Conclusion
Of course, there are more things to do for a story, but all you really need to know is how to create a plot and characters. Here’s that tool that I mentioned again:
Story Planner Helper | Story Planner
Looks extremely good.
In this article, I’ve covered some main mistakes readers (and I) can make and delved into what makes a good story. If you’re an author and you benefited from something in this post, please let me know as my main goal was to benefit. Thank you so much for reading this, and bye!
Photo credits:
Photo by Hayley Murray on Unsplash
Photo by Shaouraav Shreshtha on Unsplash
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash
Photo by Sergio de Paula on Unsplash
