How to Write a Short Story

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura turner, and today we're going to talk about, how to write a short story. A short story in my opinion, is almost harder to write than a novel, because it is shorter, and even though it's shorter, it has to be even that much more streamlined. In a novel, you have room to grow, you have room to be adding characters that you want to explore, you can go off on tangents, you can create chapters. But within a short story, you really have no room for chapters, you just have your one story, so therefore, you have to be very streamlined with how you write. Some advice that I have for you then, then for, is to pick just a few characters to use in your short story. Don't write about every character that you've ever made up in your brain, just take three or four possibly, characters, and put them into your short story, and really concentrate on them, even fewer would be better. Some short stories of course, can be written about just one character inside of their head. Narrow the scope of the plot, streamline the plot to contain only one incident, or if you have a couple of characters that are brushing off, and their stories come together, something like that, you can connect these incidents. The thing about a short story, is that when you get to the end of it, you want to have a real solid conclusion, or a moral, or something that you set out to write the story for in the beginning, in the first place. So know where you're going, and know specifically how to get there. Okay. My other piece of advice, my ending piece of advice really, is to stay consistent with your style. In a novel, you have room to change from first person to third person, just whenever you feel like it, you can have one chapter inside one characters head, and all the other chapters are sort of wherever you want to be. In a short story, it can be a little more confusing if you do that. I suggest staying within an area of a style, you by no means have to do that, but it might help you to sort of, again, get that streamlined vision of a short story. So, good luck writing."