by Joseph Lallo

If you’d asked me a few years ago to define myself as an author, I probably would have called myself a novelist. (Actually, I probably would have argued with you about whether or not I was an author because of impostor syndrome issues that we won’t get into here.) Regardless of how I would have answered in the past, though, I can’t ignore that a large part of my writing time and at this point the bulk (by title count) of my literary output has been in the form of short stories. I never would have predicted this would be the case.

For one thing, keeping things short is not a strength of mine. For another, short stories are a bit of a puzzle when it comes to things like marketing. But time makes fools of us all, and I’ve developed a genuine affection for short-form writing. It offers unique opportunities, and lends itself to some inventive methods of composition that can really shake up a writing process and keep things feeling fresh. What have I learned? Let’s get into it!

Short Is Sweet Method

It is always good to start with “why” before you go into “how.” Why would you dabble in short stories? Well, speed, for starters. It may shock you to discover this, but short stories are short. When I’m firing on all cylinders on a writing project, my daily word quota is on the order of 3000 words. That means a properly planned short story (or one where I really hit my stride while pantsing it) can be a one-day affair.

In a business where it’s not out of the ordinary to take weeks or months to finish a piece, getting a first draft in the “done” column in a few hours is a real shot in the arm, even if revisions might extend that a bit.

Short stories are low stakes, too. A wise man once said that grapes are the fruit of opportunity. If you get a bad one, who cares? There’s always a bunch more waiting for you. Short stories are the same way. You certainly can labor over every sentence, but you can just as easily cut loose and even get a little experimental, because a short story is a small-time investment. For you that means if it doesn’t satisfy you, who cares, it was a breeze to create. And if a reader doesn’t like it, they don’t feel betrayed by having squandered hours of precious free time reading it.

I could go into detail about how shorts are well-suited to readers who are accustomed to social media-length posts, or how shorter things are better suited to giveaways or shares on your blog, but what I’d rather talk about today is the methods I use to generate short stories.

Variations on a Theme Method

I recently released the fourth in my series of short story collections, Paradoxes and Dragons. As the name would suggest, the collections tend to have stories that contain fire-breathers and time travelers. Earlier I established that short stories are a small-time investment. Whereas I’d be inclined to think long and hard about the specific angle of an idea that I’d want to focus a full novel on, I don’t have to limit myself nearly as much with a short story.

It is hardly rare for me to muse to myself–for example–that I’d like to write a take on a fairy tale. Maybe something that plays with the tropes of the genre a bit. Rather than committing to a single interpretation, I challenge myself to construct an array of stories that are variations. I’ll list out, in this example, aspects of the fairy tales that I find interesting or otherwise genre defining.

Princesses, knights, dragons, wizards, magic, narrators, explicit lessons to be learned, etcetera. Then I’ll start grouping them up into potential ideas.

• What if the dragon is the knight, one who thinks he’s playing out the fairy tale playbook by “rescuing” a princess from her palace?
• What if the narrator starts to lose control of things, and genre-savvy characters object to the plot’s trajectory?

In no time at all, I’ll have a list of premises.

As often as not, I’ll stumble upon ideas that hadn’t even occurred to me at the beginning of the process. And I can pick my favorite to develop, or just throw caution to the wind and write all of them. It’s astonishingly effective at getting the juices flowing. But it invites the observation: Isn’t that just a way to brainstorm short stories, not necessarily a method for writing short stories?

Why, yes! Aren’t you a keen observer of detail? Once you have ideas that are well-suited to shorts, you can move on to the “short specific” construction methods I’ve come to favor, such as…

Just The Intro Method

When you only have a few thousand words to tell a story, you can’t always fit a full plot. Short stories and serials are among the few story formats that will let you get away with that, so I often indulge myself in a little bit of “let the reader fill in the blanks.” Let’s go back to one of those examples from above.

Suppose your characters stage a revolt on your narrator. It would feel awfully rushed or crowded to blaze through the introduction of the characters, the establishment of the norm, the breaking of the norm, the battle of wills, and the new normal of the narrator adjusting to the genre-savvy characters, then sending them on an adventure in this curious new situation. So, who says you have to?

When I’m working in short stories, I feel it is entirely acceptable to really sink my teeth into an introduction or premise, then hurl the characters off into the reader’s imagination with more of a trajectory than an actual plot. You’re not fully exploring the story. You’re inciting it and giving your audience a chance to imagine that world for themselves.

Doing things this way allows you to write concepts that might not withstand scrutiny for more than a few chapters. Alternatively, it might leave your audience wanting more without necessarily doing a cliffhanger. It also leaves the concept open for expansion and sequels. And all the while, it gets in and out before an idea overstays its welcome. Of course, if you’re more of an “en medias res” sort of writer…

Just the Climax Method

Have you ever listened to a song and imagined a whole stirring, exciting scene in your head? Have you ever then had the heartache of realizing there was no place within any of your existing settings where such a scene would fit? Now, you can always engage in the time-honored tradition of creating an entire new setting just to use that scene. Lord knows I have. But if you don’t want to spend months of your life to justify a music video, you can use a short story to get right to the good stuff.

There’s a bit of a trick to doing this well. When you’re just writing the intro, your story starts where a normal story would. If you are writing a longer tale that begins en medias res, you will have time to flesh out the mess the reader has been dropped into sight unseen. A short story that skips to the climax needs to be a little more helpful in establishing character, setting, and motivation during the action. This can be a pitfall, as the easiest way to do this is to just tell the reader explicitly. But that’s almost certainly going to be a “telling rather than showing” situation, which is frequently a no-no.

Methods for Starting in the Middle

The way I handle situations like this involves, first, writing all that awesome action and intrigue as though who, where, and why didn’t matter in the slightest. The why will usually work itself out along the way–rare is the person who’s doing something worthwhile that doesn’t at least hint about their reasons for doing it through their words or actions. And maybe that’s enough. “Who” can sometimes be as simple as “the protagonist” in the reader’s mind. And “where” doesn’t need to be more detailed than the descriptions peppered through the action.

When you’re done writing and give it a read through, though, you may find yourself wishing you knew a little more about this or that. Those questions (and only those questions) are the ones you should go back and hint at. Writing in this way gives you a very stripped down, efficient bit of action, and efficient writing is something that most stories can benefit from, so this in particular is good practice for your longer writing.

But if the action isn’t the thing that excites you about a project. What if it’s the idea? Well then…

Just the Concept Method

Kissing cousins with the idea of “Just the Intro” is “Just the Concept.” This is what I call my stories that hinge upon a character or idea so heavily that there isn’t even necessarily a plot. For example, one of my stories is nothing more than a few thousand words of data log from a space probe that’s launched in search of intelligent life. It would be an awfully dull story if I were to try to stretch this concept and structure out to a full-length novel, but for a few thousand words I am able to simply gather up all of the juiciest little quips and observations an artificial intelligence might have during such a mission.

Another common form the concept story takes for me is an interview with an interesting character. Like the Climax idea, this is good practice. A concentrated dose of character building can help teach you to deepen and widen the inner life and history of your characters in your novel-length works. Just write a conversation between two people wherein the characters chat about what makes one or both of them special. Worst case, you’ve textured a one-time-use character. Best case, you’ve assembled the skeleton of a new protagonist.

Re-Read, revise, and release!

If you use one of the methods and forms above, I’m confident you can produce something interesting and bite-sized in no time at all. All that remains now is to clean it up and send it out. I mentioned above that revision can extend the short story’s development time by a bit, but this is where things can wildly diverge. If you’re happy with the story being little more than a toy for your brain, a quick read-through, a pass with a spell-checker, and a reformat into an ebook or manuscript is all it might need.

For other works, you might find yourself carving minute facets into the jewel of the story and producing something worthy of submission to a magazine or anthology. You can spend as much time as you like in the post-production of a piece, but nothing matches the speed of the production itself when you’re working with short stories.

Try for yourself! The only thing you have to lose is an afternoon, and you might just get a killer short out of it!

Have you used any of these methods? Tell us about it in the comments.

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About Joseph

Joseph R. Lallo hails from Bayonne, NJ--the fabled birthplace of George R. R. Martin. He has written dozens of novels and novellas, including the international bestseller The Book of Deacon and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series. In addition to writing, he has helped run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson. Find Joseph and his books on his website at bookofdeacon.com.

Top Image via Pixabay.