How To Write Short Stories

You don't have to be an "aspiring novelist" or a working writer to have a desire to write a short story. Many people find that writing short stories is fun for them - it makes them feel relaxed. Short story writing can be a great creative outlet during your free time, and it can be a wonderful hobby. At the same time, however, short story writing is not all that much fun if no one reads your story!

Kurt Vonnegut was one of the masters of modern American literature. For over fifty years - from the late 1940s to the mid-2000s - he wrote novels, essays, and short stories that were widely-read and highly acclaimed. At one point during Vonnegut's writing journey, he compiled his list of "rules" for short story writing. The next few paragraphs capture these ideas of his.

Vonnegut's first two rules dealt with the way you should take care of the reader - first off, by making absolutely sure the reader won't feel like you wasted their time, and secondly, that you 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 encouraged writers to make awful things happen to their characters, no matter how sweet and kind these characters are. In this way, the reader can see what the character is made of. Vonnegut also advised writers to start their story as close to the end as they possibly can, and to write to please one person. The idea in this last one, of course, is that if the one person loves the story, everyone else who loves such stories will 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," he said. He claimed that the reader should always have a complete understanding of what is going on.

Of course, Vonnegut allowed that it is entirely possible for someone to break every one of these rules and still write great short stories. 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.