The Art Of Short Story Writing

You don’t have to be an “aspiring novelist” or a working writer to have a desire to write a short story. For many people, short story writing is relaxing – it is fun, therapeutic, and enjoyable. Short story writing can be a productive use of your time, and it can be a very fun hobby. At the same time, however, it is not much fun to write short stories if no one will read them!

In modern American literature, few writers were as highly regarded as Kurt Vonnegut. With a vast collection of novels, short stories, and essays that stretched over 50-plus years, Vonnegut’s work was highly acclaimed and well regarded. At one point during Vonnegut’s writing journey, he compiled his list of “rules” for short story writing. The next few paragraphs summarize these ideas.

Vonnegut began his rules focused on what you should do for the reader – firstly, that you should make sure the reader won’t leave your story feeling like they wasted their time, and secondly that you should give the reader at least one character they can root for. Continuing with characters, Vonnegut says that every character should want something, even if it is only something small, and every sentence should either reveal something about a character or advance action. Vonnegut next implored writers to do the following: Make horrible things happen to your characters, even if they are kind and sweet. In this way, the reader can see what the character is made of. Vonnegut’s next pieces of advice were as follows: start as close to the end as possible, and write to please just one person. You can understand this last one by realizing that if you write for one person, and that one person loves it, then every other person who has the same tastes as your “one person” will certainly love it also.

Vonnegut closes his rules by telling writers to give as much information as you can, as quickly as you can. “To heck with suspense,” was his thought on this final rule. The reader should always have an absolute understanding of what is going on, is what Vonnegut said.

Of course, Vonnegut admitted that you can break all of these rules and still create a terrific short story. But you could sure do a lot worse than Kurt Vonnegut if you are going to find a writer to take advice from for writing short stories.