November 15, 2021
How to Write a Short Story: Examples of Structure and Intent
A short story is not just “a little novel”. In other words, short stories – despite their misleading name – are not about length. Rather, compared to novels, short stories are a different format altogether, with unique requirements and different dynamics. The trick in understanding how to write a short story lies precisely in comprehending these requirements and dynamics.
As I often say, fiction is not about telling a story but about instigating an emotional response. It’s about affect, not plot. Short stories aren’t different regarding that. However, what differs is the way there.
To put it simply, a novel with a word count of 80,000 words or more has a certain flexibility in its expansion. In other words, although narrative pace and the overall balance are something to keep an eye on, a novel is more forgiving in terms of digressions.
This is certainly not the case with a short story.
As a result, the way to learning how to write a short story that “delivers” passes through structure and the associated intent. We’ll look at these in more detail in this post, together with examples that can show you how to pack the optimal power in your short stories.
How to Write a Short Story: Structure and Intent
The structure of any literary work – be it a short story, a novella, or a novel – is obviously important. But, as I explained above, it’s far more important in a work that is, say, 2000 words long, compared to one that is 80,000.
The reason should be obvious: When you only have very limited space to impress the reader (don’t read too much into this; I mean it metaphorically), you need to be really careful with what goes in and what stays out. To me, a 3-page description of a brick wall is a no-no even for a novel, but it’s simply ludicrous for a short story.
This is where structure becomes important: To write a powerful, effective – and affective! – short story, you really need to have an excellent grasp of what its structure will be, before you begin writing it. But here comes the first exclamation point: In fiction – and more so in a short story – a structure refers less to “what happens” and more to “how it feels”; less to the plot and more to affect.
In other words: By “short story structure”, I’m not asking you to think how the plot will unfold (though of course you can still ponder on that), but on how the (short) narrative journey will create an affective response. This is what you must know before you begin writing, and not (necessarily) the “what happens” part. We’ll see more about this with an example later.
As long as you know what you want to express, what kind of experience and affective response the story will attempt to convey, you might as well begin writing without having any kind of plot in mind – stream-of-consciousness-like. The subconscious will take over, if needed. This is what intent is, in this context.
Therefore, in a way, it’s actually intent what comes first, and structure only follows! But I will continue referring to structure first, as it’s a more descriptive concept. Think of structure being informed by or incorporating intent.
Examples of Short Story Structure
Once again, let me emphasize this: Don’t be preoccupied with what the structure of the plot will be. This is secondary – quite literally; it comes after you figure out the affective context. Instead, understand what it is you try to convey with the story.
Let’s see all this with an example. I’ll use “1992”, one of the stories in Tell Me, Mariner, so we can take a look at my structure + intent process. Ideally, you should know what the story is about (in other words, you should read it following the link above), but there’s no harm leaving it for later. The process below is self-explanatory.
A Sample Process of How to Write a Short Story Structure
- The raw ingredients of experience I wanted to work with revolved around the past, nostalgia, regret, loneliness, and lost love. That is to say, I wanted to write a story where such experiences would be emphasized.
- On a secondary level, I wanted the story to be precisely as minimalist as possible in terms of plot, to allow the reader to fit their own experiences into the story. In a story revolving around the past, nostalgia, and personal regrets, this is a good affective strategy.
- As a result, I knew I would not spend any time explaining anything. I knew I would start right with the main affective focus, not bothering explaining who is who and why one does what.
- With the above intent in mind, I had a vague idea of the structure that would follow:
- an element linking past and present (the piece of graffiti), creating an aura of mystery.
- the Mariner becoming intrigued and knowing (without knowing why) it was important.
- the young woman bringing substance to the linkage between past and present.
- the Mariner and the young woman interacting over this linkage.
That’s it. I had zero other “outline” or plot ideas in mind. I just knew what experiences I wanted to write about. The rest simply followed.
Short Stories Are Between Poetry and Novels
Remember my poem shuffler? I there said:
Again, I would argue that each new iteration brings a new instance of affect; a new kind of reaction – perhaps even more accentuated than the original, precisely because the literal meaning is no longer as obvious.
In other words, lacking its original linearity, each new iteration “forces” us to discover – or rather create – meaning, inspired by this new instance of affect.
A poem – certainly not as stable, clear-cut a narrative as prose – becomes even more destabilized in this process. Effectively, this JavaScript poem shuffler is a defamiliarization program!
The ideal short story is a click above in terms of plot, compared to a poem. It has a more structured, recognizable plot, but still one that has none of the meandering aspects found in a novel. Think of it like this:
shuffled poem > poem > short story > novel
The more you move to the right, the more a certain plot appears, and the harder you need to work, as an author, to highlight affect. At the same time, the less hard the audience has to work to compose a story in their mind.
This means that, as a format, short stories are, quite inevitably, ideally placed in the sweet spot. They can be abstract enough while still having plot, which means they can be affectively impactful without overwhelming the reader.
“So, How Should I Write a Short Story?”
The short answer to this is, you should write a short story as you would ideally write a novel: From your heart, focusing on experiences, not becoming preoccupied with plot – let alone any external factors.
And here’s the longer answer.
We don’t live in an ideal world, and nobody’s perfect. No matter how concentrated, talented, or good we are as authors, the longer the text, the likelier we end up with a plot that doesn’t make perfect sense or is too linear, with characters that aren’t optimized, or with symbolism that doesn’t work.
A short story helps us avoid such issues – though we still have to treat it properly – as a result of its length. With a short story, it becomes easier to let go of elaborate plots, secondary characters, and avoidable narrative strains. “For sale baby shoes never worn” is an extreme example of how this works: Give up on plot, give up on having to explain to the reader, and you end up with powerful, affectively impactful stories.
Note: You might also be interested in knowing how a short story is born. I’ve written a “behind the scenes” post about writing a short story, check it out! And if you’d like a program that helps you with structuring your story, take a look at Conceptualizer, my free and ad-free story planning program.
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For some time, I thought writing short stories would help writing novels. Then I started thinking it wouldn’t. Now I think it can help, but for different reasons than at first — for the same reasons getting well acquainted with poetry can help be a better novelist too. You see, Baby Shoes is just the most compact example, but Hemingway’s short stories are full of subtext, they are his real masterpiece, disregard the novel, safe maybe for The Old Man and the Sea (which benefited much from his short stories by way of allegory as subtext). Conciseness, compactness will almost always improve affective impact because it leaves room for the reader to fill “the intentional blanks” with their own memory and imagination. An exhaustive description becomes an impenetrable rock, we can only “read” it: run our eyes across its surface — there’s no “reading” it: immersing ourselves, via imagination, in its meaning. Long sentences may be a way to resist (placing) semantics in the first place. As avant-garde as it seems at first, it bores the reader to abandoning the text quickly — it bores me, even. On the other hand, writing conventionally is a bore too. To strike a balance between the un|expected. Poetry and short stories teach the best lessons, by my book. Invisible Cities comes to mind: an excellent balance between narration and description, favouring this second textual type, whilst retaining the reader’s interest throughout due to how imaginative it is. The chapters even read like page-sized short stories, even though they are primarily descriptions lacking in narration, characters, etc. Travelogues matter — the most ancient Western narrative model is twofold: the journey, the travel, Odyssey, and the conflict, the war, Iliad.
I think once again we’ll have to go back to your post on the industrialization of the arts and entertainment. “Writing” and “reading” are two very vague and fluid concepts (think of “love” or “success”) that truly mean entirely different things to different people, or to the same person on different occasions.
In other words, masterpieces such as Invisible Cities will remain opaque to the average reader. This is quite by necessity; if they weren’t opaque they would be average themselves. But, then, this creates a rather vicious cycle of conditioning readers to read the way you described: feeling the surface, as if with fingers, blind-like, and remaining unable to penetrate the rock.