Short stories

What in your experience makes a good short story? And if there's anyone who knows the market, how do anthologies do compared to novels?

 

This is a great question! and one I havent thought about (even though i have had short stories of mine published).

For me as a writer... I just write. I dont think about making a good story. I just write until I feel satisfied with what I've written.
As a reader... I tend to gravitate toward the darker short stories (or at least, darker themes are what stick with me the most). I read 2 recently that i couldnt put down. I wanted more. one of them, i felt like could be a whole tv series. It gave just enough detail for me to fill in the blanks, which made the story feel longer than 7k words.

The story introduced 2 elementary aged girls who where neighbors but not friends at all... then skipped ahead to HS, then skipped ahead to college, then skipped ahead to adulthood and then their deaths...THEN the last half of the story was about them as ghosts finally becoming friends with each other and getting revenge on the town that contributed to the circumstances of their deaths. the author didnt spend too long on their childhood, but it was enough for me to feel like I got the whole picture, knew them, and sympathized with them.
The other short story was very short and didnt span a life time. It was more hopeful than the previous, but still had a darker theme (slaves being whipped until they sprouted wings and flew away.... which I interpret as them dying and flying away to peace).

In terms of anthologies... I've read 2 short story anthologies recently, Tananarive Due's The Wishing Pool. Her stories were horror and SFF. I really enjoyed them! They were all her original stories.
the other was Jordan Peele's Out There Screaming. I didnt finish it.... for one thing, he edited it, so the authors were all different. Which, isnt a problem, really, but I felt some stories by some authors were just better than others, and some, I slogged through. The ones I slogged through, ended up making me stopped reading.

 

I purchased the moon over the mountain the other day by Atsushi Nakajima. There was only one story though I thought I had bought the entire collection. $11.99 for one story. Was a good one though, about a bureaucrat who wished to make a name for himself as a poet. His refusal to take care of the things that were most important, i.e. his wife and children, and just focus solely on what he wanted caused him to lose his humanity, eventually turning into a tiger.

 

The main elements are being well written and engaging, but also having a satisfying conclusion for the reader. Much like a longer story, you just have less space to do it in. You don't have endless pages for character development or worldbuilding, so cut out all the fluff and make each scene move the story forwards.

 

A good short story begins with a hook to keep the reader reading. What happens next? And there should always be something happening next. That, and characters the reader cares about.

 

Short stories as a form lend themselves to a tighter focus and faster pacing, so some ideas just don’t play well with them.

For example, romance dominates fiction sales…but you don’t see too many romance short stories. Why? Because the confines of ~7500 words makes it really hard to develop a satisfying, believable romantic relationship between two characters. Hence why novellas and novelettes make up most romance short fiction and why the novel dominates the genre as a whole.

Same thing with epic fantasy and space operas: there’s just not enough room to develop those complex plots, build the world, and flesh out a large cast of characters. Try it and you’ll end up with a dry, unsatisfying read that feels more like an outline than a short story.

So, in my experience, good short stories:

• Have a small cast of characters
• Tend to be more localized in terms of setting. Rather than hopping across a country or continent, they’re often confined to one region, one community, one building, or even one room.
• Unfold over a short period of time. Minutes, hours, days, sometimes a week or two in contrast to the months or even years you’ll see in novels. Exceptions tend to be more character-focused and use lots of time-skips.
• Feature intense character focus, relentless plots meant to leave the reader on the edge of their seat the entire time, or both.

Nowhere near as good, unfortunately. Some anthology series sell well, and their names carry lots of weight, but they’re relatively few and competition for a slot in them is fierce.

Good news is there are tons of anthology calls for submissions out there. If you’re a competent author—especially of genre fiction—you’ve got a pretty good chance of landing a story in one sooner or later.

Novels are definitely where most of the money and readers are, though.

 

Some authors, like Gene Wolf, remain primarily short story writers, and it certainly doesn't make them any lesser writers. There are lots of markets, ranging from paid to free that you can submit to. A professional market like, say, Analog, or the Atlantic, pay around 8 cents per word for first publication rights, but they are very competitive.

That would be $600 for 7500 words, which is more than many people make from their self-published novels.

 

A piece of advice I take to heart is that most short stories should be about change. Ideally, the state the characters or setting are in should be different at the conclusion, and the story should focus on how that change happens. And, due to the length of short stories in general, you want to start as close to the change as possible and end as soon after the change as you can, often times the change itself is the ending with little to no denouement.

 

It doesn't *have* to be that way. Sometimes, the story is about a character who learns nothing and ends up in the same kind of self-inflicted mess that he did in the next story. Granted, that's the exception, rather than the norm.

 

Yeah, that's why I was very careful with my wording and said "most". I absolutely think there can exist excellent stories where the lack of change is the focal point.

 

Like every episode of Scooby Doo.

 

I mean, I would argue that the change in an episode of Scooby Doo is the villain has been caught. Because the status quo at the start of an episode is "hey, this spooky thing has been happening and we don't know why!" So by the end, the gang knows why and stops the bad guy.

 

Ah, but the meddling kids are still meddling kids by the end. And you'll still hate Scrappy.

 

I'm screwed.

So screwed.

Soooooooooooo screwed.

Didn't someone once advise macrame as an alternative...damn these thumbs!

Hey, look at that. I'm back, baby! I'm back!

Oh, fuck it.

 

Who would y'all say is the most sold or well known contemporary short story writer? And which authors from the past would be good to study in terms of form.

 

Asimov, Bradbury, Vance, Conan Doyle, King, Gene Wolfe, Roald Dahl, Lovecraft all wrote short stories. I don't know about contemporary authors though.

Their methodologies still work.

 

Ive read Flannery Oconner, Eudora Welty, Nadine Gordimer, Claire Keegan in my literary classes.

In my genre fiction classes: King, Bradbury, clive barker..... a horror anthology called "The New Uncanny" which had good stories in it

 

(In addition to Morrison and Hurston, but, even though they have short stories, they are more known for their novels than shorts)

 

Carver, Mansfield, O’Connor (who let those women in) for classics. Kevin Barry, Blindboy, lots of others for contemporary anthologies. Check the magazines that many of us here keep getting rejected by.

edit: JT got to them as I was typing

 

My favorite short-story writer, sometimes very short, is HH Munro, a/k/a Saki. His stories have clever use of language, good hooks, incisive intense descriptions of personalities, and his endings are often unexpected, or if not that, seem like the only appropriate ones. He's one of the few writers I can pick up and anytime and drop into a story I've read many times, and still find it engaging.

 

Authors whose short stories I really like: Junot Diaz, Raymond Carver, Stephen King, Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood, Kij Johnson, Ambrose Bierce...

I know there are more but those are who come to mind immediately.

 

Learning a lot, cant wait to check out those listed above.

Myself I only write short stories, no way could keep up with tons of characters, back stories, names.

Doesnt help i write on my phone at lunch or out in my shop with sad old country songs playing.