How to Prepare to Write a Short Story

In this article, I'll share a few foundational areas that will help you in creating a great short story. Preparing well will make a story easier to write and increase its overall quality.

1) Explore Your Characters

If you think of your favorite stories, books, and movies, almost 99% are great because they were character-driven. With fictional characters, it's helpful to create a profile including background information, motivations, and physical descriptions for continuity. You can keep this in a file folder, notebook, or a database file on your computer for handy reference.

2) Research Your Setting

This is going to vary based on the nature of the story. A historical short story for instance can benefit from little details from the time period the story is set. Due to the attention span of the average person, you want to balance creating a solid environment and not boring the reader. There is a happy medium by making the setting details you share relevant to the conflict or characters' actions.

3) Create a Framework for Your Plot

Even if you don't have all the details, creating a framework for your story generally makes things a lot easier. With novels you generally have more room to explore multiple sub-plots, but short stories are generally very focused.

4) Revise More Than Once

Walk away from the story for a few days, then revisit it. You will find ways to improve it several times. Eventually you will reach a point that adding or changing would actually take away from it. Then you're really done.

Additional Tip:

• Start doing these steps on paper, and over time it does get easier to do it automatically. I still use physical notebooks as a reference for ideas I want to use later.