Writing a short story

by Carmelita Dentlinger
5th March 2014

Hi my fellow writers. I require your guidence. I seem to be having trouble writing a short story. Any guidence for me. It all seem to end up like the first chapter of a book and too much going on. Thanks a lot.

Replies

I agree with nicholas: The begining middle and end theory- we learn that in Drama!

How I do is, sketch out the idea with the begining-middle-end,

then fill in the characters (It's best if you can portray them well, fully devoloped, or devoloping through an incident in the story)

Then comes the incident itself.

Tips:

try and limit it to just one incident in the story. That way it'll remain a "short" story.

as Dan says, Experiment- make it interesting... diary entries, flashbacks, 2nd person naratives... - you can even mess up the timeline a bit, to make it interesting.

That's all i've got. Have fun writing!

Ps- if your work feels more like a novel's first chapter, then maybe you should continue it that way. I dont know... try both?

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Asuntha
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Asuntha Adams
14/03/2014

I love writing short stories! Particularly flash fiction. For me, the formula that works perfectly is something I read somewhere - start as close to the end as possible. For me, that means that I begin when, metaphorically speaking, the finger is already on the trigger, ready to shoot. And as I shoot, I give my readers (and myself) a whizzing picture of setting and character.

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Varsha
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Varsha Seshan
07/03/2014

Thanks a lot everyone.

Your comments is really very useful.

Warm Regards to all.

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Carmelita
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