In 2021, so far I’ve written eleven short stories. Worth mentioning because for one, I rarely read short stories voluntarily, and two, I’ve never wanted to write one in the same way as I’ve wanted to write a novel.
Yesterday, I was searching short story markets. As literary journals and magazines have their own submission guidelines, close reading is imperative. One of these magazines included in its guidelines:
- Make sure your short story is a story.
Maybe that should go without saying, but I sent a draft of a story to a reader the week before and asked her if, in fact, it was a story. With all due respect to the form, there is something incomplete about short fiction. There are questions that can’t be answered. There is a backstory that you’ll never know.
The challenge is to provide a beginning, middle, and end, knowing that all three of those elements will be condensed, and still maintain coherence. If you can do that, try to make it interesting, as well.
Most novelists I know struggle with the middle of a book when a plot can sag under the weight of all that has to be explained and happen. I’m not minimizing the agony of dealing with a sagging middle, but it’s nothing compared to finding the end to a short story.
Here’s someone else who couldn’t find the end of his story:
I think of my “ideas” file full of frozen Jack Nicholsons. I’ve finished eleven short stories and published three so far, but there are a dozen situations in that file with characters, plotless, or unable to solve their dilemma. For some of these ideas, there will be no resuscitation.
This doesn’t happen to me with a novel. Characters in a novel will determine the ending due to their complexity and development. The ending may be a surprise to me, but I never doubt that it will end.
Characters in a short story want to grow and develop, but not toward a particular ending. In the short story I completed today, my main character wanted to explain the traumas of her third-grade experience. Intriguing, but useless. Just like real people, they want to steal the stage and monopolize the conversation.
Perhaps it is depressing being a short story character–you know your words are numbered.
And that’s the challenge–to progress a complete narrative, reveal a character or two, and resist the temptation of tangents. It must end or else wander into the mysterious “novella” territory.
