Should you expand your story?Ī short story is a narrative at its best when told at less than novel length, the kind of story where extreme brevity heightens the reader’s experience. Don’t think you can get away with calling it a short story. If you’ve written something that won’t quite fill a novel, then expand on your story or develop your characters. Simply writing something that’s a few thousand words won’t do: short stories are precision crafted works of fiction that use their brevity as a narrative device. Like poetry, short stories use many of the same tools as longer fiction but are an art form in their own right. ‘Short story’ is a bit of a misnomer, making it sound like word count is the defining factor. The difference between short stories and stories that aren’t very long In this article, I’ll be exploring some of the demands short fiction makes of an author and using examples from accomplished writers to show that when you embrace those challenges, you can write something amazing.

While some may view them as an easy medium, anyone with experience writing short stories knows that a shorter length doesn’t mean reduced complexity. Setting out to write a short story is a difficult task.

Examples of short stories to write