How to Write a Short Story, Step by Step

To write a short story, decide the one effect you want the reader to feel, build it around one character who wants something, start as close to the end as you can, and cut every word that does not serve that effect. A short story is read at one sitting, so everything in it has to pull the same way. The eight steps below take each part in turn, with what Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor and Anton Chekhov actually wrote about it, checked in their own books, reviews and letters.

What Is a Short Story?

A short story is a piece of prose fiction short enough to be read in one go, built to leave a single impression. Poe made that the definition in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (Graham's Magazine, May 1842). He called it "the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal", and gave the reason it works: "unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance", and that unity "cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting."

Flannery O'Connor, in "Writing Short Stories" (Mystery and Manners, 1969), put it as a warning: "I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one." Her own definition: "A story is a complete dramatic action".

How Long Is a Short Story?

A short story is fewer than 7,500 words. That is the definition the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association uses in its Nebula Award rules, and most magazines work to a similar ceiling. Below it sits flash fiction; above it, the novelette and the novella.

A magazine's own guidelines always win over a general rule, so check them before you submit. Novel lengths by genre are on their own page.

What Are the Steps to Write a Short Story?

1. Decide the single effect.
2. Choose one character who wants something.
3. Start as close to the end as possible.
4. Make things go wrong.
5. Build to one turn, and end on it.
6. Write the draft, then cut.
7. Revise for objectivity.
8. Title it, format it and send it out.

Step 1: What Effect Should Your Story Have?

Decide the feeling first and the plot second. This is Poe's method, and it is one of the most quoted passages on the short story in English. A skilful writer, he says, does not shape his thoughts to fit his incidents. Instead, "having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out", he invents the incidents, and "he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect."

Name the effect in a word or a short phrase: dread, grief that turns to relief, a joke that lands on the last line. Everything else in the story is chosen to produce it. Poe goes as far as the first sentence: "If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step."

Step 2: Who Is Your Short Story About?

One main character, with a want. A novel can hold a large cast and several plotlines. A short story usually has room for one person whose situation changes, and two or three others around them.

Vonnegut set out his eight rules of creative writing in the introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box (1999), a collection of his short stories. Rules 2 and 3 are about character: "Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for." and "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water." Rooting for someone is not the same as liking them. The reader needs to want something for them, even if it is only the truth.

Step 3: Where Should a Short Story Start?

Late. Vonnegut's fifth rule is "Start as close to the end as possible." A novel can spend a chapter on the character's normal life. A short story usually opens on the day, or the hour, that matters, with the trouble already in view.

That doesn't mean confusing the reader. Vonnegut's eighth rule is the balance: "Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense." The reader should know who, where and what is at stake within the first page. The first lines themselves get a page of their own, and the advice there applies to stories as much as to novels.

Step 4: How Do You Create Conflict in a Short Story?

Put something in the character's way, and make it cost them. Vonnegut's sixth rule: "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them", so that, in his words, "the reader may see what they are made of."

In a short story, one source of conflict is usually enough: a person, a place, a rule or the character's own fear. The seven kinds are set out in the types of conflict in literature. Pick the one that best produces your effect, and don't open a second front the story has no room to close.

Step 5: How Should a Short Story End?

On one turn: the moment the situation changes for good, or the character sees it differently. O'Connor's "complete dramatic action" means the story finishes something. In her words, "in good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters".

The ending is where the single effect lands, so it is usually short. A reveal can work if it was earned, and the rules for planting the clues for a twist apply at any length. What fails is the ending that explains itself. Stop on the image or the line that carries the feeling, and trust the reader with it.

The turn does not have to answer every question the story raises. Chekhov told his publisher Alexei Suvorin, in a letter of 27 October 1888 (Garnett's translation), that he confused two things, "solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist." Many of the best short stories end with the situation changed for good and the question left with the reader.

Step 6: How Do You Write the First Draft?

Write it through to the end before you fix anything, then cut. A short story can be drafted in a day or a week, and a finished draft tells you what the effect really is, which is often not quite what you planned.

Then cut hard. Poe's standard: "In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design." Vonnegut's fourth rule is the practical test: every sentence must do one of two things, "reveal character or advance the action." O'Connor gives the reason it matters: "A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is."

Step 7: How Do You Revise a Short Story?

Read it for the effect, then for the writer's hand. Chekhov, who wrote hundreds of short stories, told the writer Lydia Avilova in a letter of 29 April 1892 (Constance Garnett's translation) that a writer may weep over a sad story, but "one must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will be the effect."

In practice that means cutting the lines that tell the reader what to feel and keeping the details that make them feel it, which is the heart of show, don't tell. Read the story aloud once, at one sitting, as a reader would. Anywhere your attention drifts, the reader's will too.

Step 8: How Do You Submit a Short Story?

Give it a title that points at the effect without giving it away, then send it out in the form the market asks for. Literary and genre magazines nearly all take stories in standard manuscript format: a Word file, double-spaced, with your name, contact details and an approximate word count on the first page. Read each magazine's guidelines for its word limit and whether it accepts simultaneous submissions.

How Is a Short Story Different From a Novel?

In scale and in aim. A novel can follow several characters over years and leave the reader with many impressions. A short story usually follows one character through one change and leaves one. Poe thought this was the short story's advantage. Of the novel he wrote: "As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality."

The tools are the same: character, conflict, structure, point of view. The whole process for a book-length story is in how to write a novel.

Which Short Story Quotes Are Misattributed?

• "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" is not Hemingway's. It is often called his six-word story. Quote Investigator traced similar wording back to classified adverts and newspaper columns from 1906 onwards, and the Hemingway anecdote to print only in 1989 and 1991, decades after his death. Its verdict: it "has located no substantive evidence that Ernest Hemingway composed a six or seven word story."
• "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass" is not Chekhov's. It is a later summary of his letter of 10 May 1886 to his brother Alexander, and what the letter really says is on the show, don't tell page.
• "Brevity is the sister of talent" was about a play. The line is real. Chekhov wrote it to Alexander on 11 April 1889, and Louis S. Friedland's translation gives it word for word: "Brevity is the sister of talent." But the letter is advice on the play Alexander was writing, not on short stories.
• Vonnegut's rules are not laws. He followed them straight away with a caveat about the greatest American short story writer of his generation, Flannery O'Connor: "She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that."

A Worked Example

Here is the plan for a 3,000-word story, "Low Tide".

• Effect: dread, then relief.
• Character and want: Tess, sixteen, has to get her grandmother off the tidal island before the causeway floods.
• Start close to the end: the story opens with Tess already halfway across the causeway, tide table in her pocket.
• Conflict: her grandmother will not leave the cottage she has lived in for fifty years.
• The turn: at the door, Tess looks at the tide table again. It is yesterday's. The water is already over the road behind her.
• The ending: they climb to the lamp room together, and her grandmother, who knows the island, lights the old signal lamp for the lifeboat. The last line is the light going out across the water.

Every scene serves the dread. Nothing explains what the grandmother feels about leaving; the reader sees her lock the door and put the key in her pocket.

How Do You Write a Short Story Collection in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app for Windows, macOS and Linux, and a collection fits it the way a novel does: each story is a chapter in the Draft, with its scenes inside.

1. Make a new project with File › New Project, and open the Outliner on the Draft. It is a board of cards, one for every document.
2. Add a card for each story with Add › Chapter, and write the story's single effect in its synopsis, so the aim of every story is on the board.
3. In the Binder, click a story, then use the + beside Draft (Add to Draft) › Scene. The new scene goes inside that story.
4. Back on the Outliner, open the story's card by its folder badge to see its scenes as cards, and write what happens in each in its synopsis.
5. Click Grid View to switch the Outliner to List View. Each story is a row, and its Words column adds up the words of every scene in it, so you can see at a glance which stories are over a magazine's limit.
6. Track where each story is with a status. The pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses, where you can add one such as "Submitted", then pick it from the Status menu.
7. To send one story out, open File › Export, go to the Contents tab, turn off Export the whole Draft and tick that story. Pick DOCX and the Word target, and on the Options tab turn on Standard Manuscript Format.

The Outliner is also where you reorder the stories when you assemble the collection, by dragging their cards.

Common Mistakes

• Starting too early. Pages of background before the trouble begins. Cut to the day it matters.
• Too many characters. Every named person needs room. Merge or cut anyone the effect doesn't need.
• Two effects. A story that is half ghost story, half family comedy usually lands neither. Pick one.
• A novel in disguise. If the plan needs years of time and several plotlines, it may be a novel, or a novella.
• Explaining the ending. A paragraph after the turn that tells the reader what it meant weakens it.
• Ignoring the guidelines. A strong 9,000-word story is still rejected by a magazine with a 7,500-word limit.

Sources

Retrieved 30 October 2026.

• Edgar Allan Poe, review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, Graham's Magazine, May 1842, pp. 298-300, text from the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.
• Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box (Putnam, 1999), introduction, rules 1 to 8 and the O'Connor caveat, read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• Flannery O'Connor, "Writing Short Stories", in Mystery and Manners (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), from p. 87 (archive.org).
• Anton Chekhov to Lydia Avilova, 29 April 1892, in Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, tr. Constance Garnett (Project Gutenberg).
• Anton Chekhov to Alexei Suvorin, 27 October 1888, in the same Garnett translation.
• Anton Chekhov to Alexander Chekhov, 11 April 1889, in Louis S. Friedland (ed.), Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and Other Literary Topics (1924) (archive.org).
• Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, Nebula Rules, for the word lengths of each category.
• Flash Fiction Online, submission guidelines, linked from its Submittable page, for "complete 500- to 1000-word stories".
• Quote Investigator, For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn, 28 January 2013.