Would You Like to Write A SHort Story?

Would You Like To Write a Short Story?


Would you like to write a short story? Would you like to write fiction?

The short story is a fiction story.

Normally the short story is between 1000-5000 words. A selling length is 3000 words. It is concerned with a single episode only. There must be brevity of time, characters, description, characterization, dialogue, incident, yet its content must be vivid with life.

The short story differs from the “short kiddie story.” Its treatment must be intense and characterization should be sharp.

According to Guy De Maupassant, “The serious writer’s goal is not only to entertain but to move us, to make us understand the deep and hidden meaning of events.”


Here are the elements of a short story:

1. Plot The plot is a sequence of events.

It begins with an exposition, then rising action (dramatization of events), climax (breaks off dramatically at this point), then falling action proceeding to resolution, and then the conclusion.

Plot shows: Then what happened? Story must involve a conflict of opposing forces.

2.Characters Characters are the people that make something happen. It is based on real people. However, fictional characters make different demand on the reader.

3.Setting The setting is the place and time of the story, the world in which the story takes place; a world of feeling.

4.Point of View This will be the authors choice of narration.

first person narration I
second person narration You
third person narration (narrator in not a participant in the story) It is like the omniscient author seeing into the minds of all the characters.


6.Style and Voice The voice is an essential element to all good fiction. It is how the author uses language to create fiction (rhetoric)

7.Symbolism and allegory Symbols are not always interpreted the same way by different readers.

The story becomes an allegory when all characters, places, things, and events represent symbolic qualities. Their interactions are meant to reveal a moral truth.

8. Theme It is the main idea of anything. The generalization about the meaning of a story.

Good fiction examines the truth.

Leo Tolstoy tells a friend:

“The most important thing in the work of art is that it should have a kind of focus, there should be some place where all the rays meet of form which they issue. And this focus must not be able to be explained in world. This indeed is one of the significant fact about true word of art – that its content in it entirety can be expressed only by itself.”

Check out for my short story “Net Chat” by Rose Flores Martinez in “http://Iwrotefiction.blogspot.com.


Rose Flores – Martinez
7.10.2010
htt://iwrotefiction.blogspot.com