What I Wish I’d Known About Writing Short Fiction

Chris Ames, I Made This Just for You (forthcoming with Ultimo Press) 

For me, the best short fictions hit the ‘snow globe’ ratio. There’s the physical structure: the plot, the setting, the aspects that would stay the same whether you wrote it today or ten years from now. And then there’s the ornamental particle matter: the more porous, nebulous elements that grant a story its distinct take on the present moment. A joke you heard recently, the emotional hangover of a recent break-up, the hysterical drop-off at daycare that seeps into your sentences. If your story is all structure, it’s a brick. If it’s all atmosphere, it’s a water balloon. Aim for the snow globe—a beautifully self-contained world, both hard and soft, offering slightly new takes on the weather every time it’s shaken.

Read Chris’s story ‘Charlie & Charlie & Charlie’.

Natalia Figueroa Barroso, Hailstones Fell without Rain

Che, pasame el mate. That simple request means more than sipping a warm brew. It’s an invitation to slow down, to yarn, to listen. Over rounds of yerba mate, I’ve heard the most captivating storytellers. In these quiet circles of trust, tales are passed around like the gourd itself. Before the written word came to claim our histories, this is how we remembered. This is how we knew. Looking back, I realise that’s what short fiction is meant to do: capture something fleeting yet powerful. A moment. A memory. A mood.

When I first started writing, I thought I had to say everything. I packed my stories with backstory and internal dialogue, forgetting the rhythm of oral storytelling, the richness of voice, the quiet pauses that wake the listener up. What I wish I’d known is this: short fiction isn’t about saying more. It’s about saying enough. One turning point came when I read Doña Teresa and the Chicken by Denice Frohman. Under four hundred words, yet it holds generations of love and loss.

‘Maybe that’s how mama

learned

to love us, to kill the thing that feeds you.’

That line lingered. It didn’t overexplain. It trusted. Trusted the reader to feel the stories between words.

Now I write like I’m in the mate circle. I try not to impress but to connect. To serve something warm and real. Sometimes bitter, sometimes con yuyos, and as a Uruguayan, it’s never sweet. Short fiction, like mate, isn’t rushed. You sip. You share. You listen. And when it’s done right, it stays with you long after the last loud slurp.

Read Natalia’s story ‘Back to the Red Earth’.

I thought I had to say everything. I packed my stories with backstory and internal dialogue.

Tony Birch, Pictures of You: Collected Stories 

I’ve published five short story collections and written well over a hundred stories. Before I’d published any of them, I wish I’d read the stories of Lucia Berlin. Doing so would have saved me the effort of producing writing so inferior to the greatest ever. Instead of writing, I would have dedicated my life to reading and rereading Berlin. And I would have accomplished more than that.

The first story in Lucia’s (can I call her Lucia?) seminal collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, is ‘Angel’s Laundromat’. Had I read Lucia instead of wasting my days writing, I’d have taken my washing to Angel’s laundromat when I was certain that Lucia would be there. I’d have a copy of her book with me to impress Lucia. Better still, when my clothes had been washed and dried, I’d have folded each item carefully before returning it to my washing basket. I’d have rolled my socks carefully together and even folded my underwear. Lucia would have paid me little attention, more interested in observing the ‘tall old Indian in faded Levis and a fine Zuni belt’. But she’d eventually spot me rearranging my OCD-influenced washing basket. Lucia would have opened her notebook and written, ‘What a funny little man. Still, if I invite him home for coffee, this old boy could really clean a house.’

Read Tony’s story ‘Flight’.

Melanie Cheng, The Burrow

I began writing short stories because I (foolishly!) thought they would be easy to write. While it is true that they require less time to complete than a novel, short stories are their own art form. In fact, I’ve heard accomplished novelists admit that they can’t write short stories. In my case, it was during the process of reading and writing short stories that I fell in love with the form. A short story, more than any other literary form, is a meeting of the reader’s and the writer’s imaginations. Once you’ve experienced that as a reader, you find the neat endings of some novels a little forced and, dare I say, condescending. I think writing to a word count has also taught me to be a brutal editor, and I have brought that to my novels, which tend to be on the short side! I am also unafraid to end a longer work with some mystery and ambiguity. Both my novels finish with a couple of loose ends.

I find that inspiration can come from anywhere and everywhere. Sometimes I get a feeling deep in my gut when I behold a particular image or object or scene, and I just know it will make a great story. That’s why it’s essential to have a notebook or notes app close at hand. More often than not, however, the ideas are percolating in my subconscious. These are the ideas that tend to emerge during the act of writing. And so, for me, writing is like exercise—I can’t wait for motivation or inspiration to strike, I have to force myself to make a move and hope that the action of putting words on the page will generate the inspiration. Also: Read short stories! We have some wonderful short story writers in this country—Cate Kennedy, Jennifer Down, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Julie Koh, Michelle Wright, Tony Birch, Laura Elvery…the list goes on. Join a writers’ group and share your work—a fresh pair of eyes and genuine feedback from fellow writers is invaluable.

I love the quote from Toni Morrison that it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power. There are negative spaces in a story, just as there are in a painting. In my experience, a helpful exercise is to delete the first and last paragraphs of a work-in-progress. We tend to write our way into a story and then over-explain on our way out. This is a mistake. In fact, it is best to trust the reader—they are smarter than you think (especially readers of short fiction).

Read Melanie’s story ‘Australian Ghost Story’.

Alex Cothren, Playing Nice was Getting Me Nowhere

Short stories are like Victorian-era children: lots of them are going to die. And yikes does every death hurt. You think of the glowing potential that story once had as it lies pulseless in your arms (Scrivener). That concept you were sure was fireproof, that witty character with their clever dialogue, that perfect description of morning dew on a honey melon.

How to lessen the blow? Well, do what the Victorians did and make a boatload of babies (stories). I aim for five story drafts each week. The first four drafts have to be different stories; only the fifth is allowed to double-back on a ‘working’ story. This process is…highly annoying! When a first draft thrums or a story is almost polished, I am desperate to keep going. But nope: Alex, you need to spend Wednesday working on that idea about the bullied kid with a frisbee for a head.

The positives are that I never get attached to one story. When it goes asunder, my mood doesn’t sink with it. Do not underestimate the importance of vibes to the writing life! This approach also produces a detached freedom that is great for experimentation (see: frisbee-head). Often it’s the stupidest throwaway stories that end up surviving.

The other bonus is that broken stories, when given space, can fix themselves. They burst from the grave with a renewed vigour for life, shouting that all they needed was a twist on their concept, less dialogue, way less dew descriptions, etc. As far as I am aware, this was not something that occurred with children in the Victorian era. But I am not a historian.

Read Alex’s story ‘Ocean Paradise’.

I never get attached to one story. When it goes asunder, my mood doesn’t sink with it.

Pip Finkemeyer, One Story

I recently wrote a series of five very short stories. I wanted them all to be around 500–600 words, so they could conceivably be called a paragraph. After writing two novels back to back, it was quite the mental shift. A few times I found myself accidentally writing a scene that felt like an excerpt of a novel rather than a standalone piece. I came up with an editing technique I was calling The Sardine Theory. When you have long-form tendencies and then try to write something very short, you end up with something like a tin of sardines. A bunch of ideas packed in so tightly that it becomes unpleasant. After a first draft, what you need to do is go and crack the tin open. Find the best fish and make sure you have room to lie them flat so you can all see them properly. Discard the rest back into the sea, for another day or another writer (the fish magically come back to life in this analogy). Then make sure we feel a moment in the story when the fish changes direction, perhaps unexpectedly, somewhere towards the end. Unrelated: read poetry! (the shortest fiction writers of them all).

In my next novel, One Story, a fictional tech company creates a tool to publish one very short story a day in an attempt to unite humanity. A tragicomic scandal ensues. The Five Stories series is me experimenting with what those stories would look like. So I guess I inadvertently wrote a whole novel about the power of short fiction!

Read Pip’s Five Stories.

Laura Jean Mckay, Gunflower

A jaded short fiction writer told me when I was starting out to give it up that I would never get anywhere with shorts. I didn’t listen and partly that’s because of Janet Frame. I had pulled, at random, Frame’s 1983 collection You Are Now Entering the Human Heart from the shelf at a library, and I’d never read anything so warm and profound. It was Frame’s writing and life experience but also her choice of form.

Short stories are such a joy to read, write and edit. In writing shorts, emerging writers hone prose skills and experienced writers explore their most exciting ideas. Short stories get a bad reputation because people treat them like novels and expect a novelistic experience in the reading while also thinking they’ll be easy to write. But short fiction has its own unique form. Novels, short stories and creative nonfiction sit under the prose umbrella but all need to be approached, practised and read differently. It does take a while if you’ve been reading and writing only long-form prose to adjust to such a sharp style, laden with symbolic meaning. Stories share elements with poetry—they’re often political, intense, emotional. To be pondered and discussed. The novel is a solo pursuit; the short story is a party.

Murray Middleton, U Want It Darker: Tales of Artists in Despair

When I was a self-important undergraduate writing student, I wish I’d known that short fiction could take on any form—an email, an exchange of text messages, hip-hop EP lyrics, a user-updated database detailing the demise of a notorious Northside pizzeria—as long as my stories were written with conviction and housed characters with flickers of humanity.

If I’d known this, my short fiction would’ve been less imitative of the writers I loved. But perhaps it had to be imitative? A gateway drug…

I wish I’d known that there is no shame in being a ‘readable’ writer; in abandoning a thesaurus. Or in not being a networker. The most honest writers are shithouse at working a greenroom.

Above all else, I wish I’d known that creative talent is subordinate to persistence and single-mindedness, or stubbornness. It’s reassuring, in a way. If I’ve ever had an edge as a writer, it’s only because I’m a desk-shackled psycho, which doesn’t sound especially romantic.

Scrap this exercise! I wish I’d known exactly what I knew—and didn’t know—so that I could find my way here, three books and innumerable cuts deep. It feels absurd and miraculous, like Werner Herzog and company heaving a steamship through the Amazonian jungle.

I wish I’d known that short fiction could take on any form—an email, an exchange of text messages, hip-hop EP lyrics.

Jordan Prosser, Big Time

I wish I’d known that short stories can be epics in their own right. Conventional wisdom often suggests that short fiction is best suited to simple subjects and brief timespans—the perennial ‘slice of life’. Increasingly though, the short fiction I most enjoy reading and the short stories I aspire to write are those that manage to cram entire lifetimes into five thousand words. Playing a story’s form and content off against each other like that is immediately exciting to me. (On the flip side, I love a dense novel set entirely over the course of a single day.)

This means I tend to plot out my short stories even more rigidly than my novels because not a single word can go to waste; every sentence has to feel like looking through a keyhole into a fully realised world. When I read a short story that pulls this off, covering enormous distances or spanning multiple generations, it feels like a magic trick precisely because of what it achieves despite the inherent limitations of its format. It’s like a ship in a bottle. You see it and you ask, ‘How on earth did they manage to fit all that in there?’

Read Jordan’s story ‘Eleuterio Cabrera’s Beautiful Game’.

Miriam Webster, The Slip

Short fiction is enigmatic, which to me means that it’s frustrating and charming in equal measure. As a reader, I want to feel like the story is giving me side-eye. I want it to flirt with me, to advance and retreat. I want it skirting round the issue; I want parapraxis and to have a sense that it’s not really saying what it means.

As a writer, I think this equates to making sure that there’s an essential unknowability at the story’s core: maybe it’s a lack or an evasion, but it’s equally possible that it’s a wink or a nod, a slyness. I think what I’m saying is that the best short fiction gestures toward meaning but never really spells it out, inviting the reader to participate in making it. Short fictions should be unwieldy, sliding things. I’m not always good at this—sometimes I find myself over-explaining to the point of being stupidly obvious, especially when I’m doing dialogue or working out my characters’ motives. But the more I read and write, the more I believe that this is really the most important thing. I have to remind myself: you don’t have to spoon-feed your reader. Let them wonder. Let them work it out.

Listen to Miriam’s story ‘Farrow’.

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