Tips For Writing Short Stories

A lot of people find that they want to write a short story, even though they are not a "writer" or an "aspiring novelist." Many people find that writing short stories is fun for them - it makes them feel relaxed. Short story writing can be a productive use of your time, and it can be a very fun hobby. At the same time, however, it is not much fun at all if you write short stories that no one reads!

In modern American literature, few writers were as highly regarded as Kurt Vonnegut. For over fifty years - from the late 1940s to the mid-2000s - he wrote novels, essays, and short stories that were widely-read and highly acclaimed. At one point during Vonnegut's writing journey, he compiled his list of "rules" for short story writing. The next few paragraphs capture these ideas of his.

Vonnegut's first two rules deal with the reader: firstly, that you should make sure the reader will not feel their time is wasted, and secondly that you give the reader a character they can root for. Continuing with characters, Vonnegut says that every character should want something, even if it is only something small, and every sentence should either reveal something about a character or advance action. Vonnegut goes on to tell you that you should make awful things happen to your characters, no matter how sweet they are. This allows the reader to see what the character is made of. Vonnegut also advised writers to start their story as close to the end as they possibly can, and to write to please one person. You can understand this last one by realizing that if you write for one person, and that one person loves it, then every other person who has the same tastes as your "one person" will certainly love it also.

Vonnegut's final piece of advice was to give the reader as much information as possible as quickly as possible. He says, "to heck with suspense." The reader should always have an absolute understanding of what is going on, is what Vonnegut said.

In his notes on this list, Vonnegut also allowed that you can break every one of these rules and still write wonderful short stories. But if you are going to take the advice of someone when writing short stories, you could certainly do a whole lot worse than Kurt Vonnegut.