Despite all the changes in publishing, new short stories are still appearing in print and digitally. Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen magazines continue to publish short stories, as do various anthologies, and of course they are also an option for indie authors.
Short stories can also be a proven way to level up your writing, helping you improve existing skills and forge new ones in just a few thousand words. Typically much less writing time is at stake with short stories versus novels, and even if your latest story doesn’t work, it can teach you something in the process.
Today’s Words of Wisdom reaches into the archives for insights on writing short fiction from posts by James Scott Bell, Reavis Wortham, and John Gilstrap.
As you know, we’ve been celebrating the release of Fresh Kills here on TKZ. It’s been a pleasure working with my blogmates, pros all, to bring you these new stories, at an attractive price. Look for Fresh Kills at amazon, scribd or smashwords.
My contribution to the anthology is “Laughing Matters,” a title that has more than one meaning, as you’ll find out. And that’s sort of what the best short stories do; they work on at least a couple of levels.
Certainly, the literary short story is like that. In college I got to take a writing workshop with Raymond Carver, and that’s what his stories are famous for. They have something going on up top, on the surface, but when you finish you realize there’s a rich layer underneath that you’ve missed (and I have to confess, I usually did, and would have to re-read each one a couple of times).
In the suspense or mystery category, you need to deliver a story that has a surprise in it somewhere, to keep the reader guessing. Jeffery Deaver has written two volumes of such tales in his Twisted series, and even challenges the reader to try to outguess him. It’s cool when it works, but it’s hard to do. Which is why this kind of story is every bit as challenging as the literary sort.
The germ of “Laughing Matters” came one day when I was thinking about all the standup comics in LA who never make it. I must have just seen some clip of a comedian doing post-Seinfeld observational humor (one of thousands) and just thought, this is dull. This is derivative. This guy’s not going to go very far.
Which reminded me of a time when I was living and acting in New York, and went to a comedy club for “open mike.” There were some funny guys, and then there was this one kid who was obviously onstage for the first time. The sort whose grandmother must have told him, “Sonny, you are so funny! You should go tell your jokes on television!”
Anyway, the kid comes out, he’s nervous, and tells a joke. It fell to the ground with a thud that echoed through the club. He got rattled. And you know what happens when you get rattled in front of the 11 p.m. crowd in New York City on open mike night? It was brutal. The kid made it through maybe two more jokes, neither of which worked, and then froze. As the crowd piled on with jeers and snorts, he stood there, choking the mike stand, unable to move or speak.
The emcee, noting what was going on, jumped in from the wings with his big smile, clapping his hands, shouting “Let’s hear it for _____ !” and then took the guy’s arm and guided him off the stage.
There must have been public hangings easier to watch.
So all of that came to me as I wrote the opening lines:
He died.
Pete Harvey, “The Harv” as he billed himself, just flat out died in front of the 11 p.m. crowd at the Comedy Zone.
Then I have Pete sitting at the bar afterward, drowning his sorrows, when a most interesting gent sits down next to him. And the story came to me in a flash, twists and all. This is, I’d wager, how the best short stories usually appear. But then you write, re-write and polish, and hopefully come up with something that works.
I’ve reclaimed my love of the short story, and have decided to keep writing them. Maybe I’ll put out my own collection sometime. It’s nice to have a market for stories again. Because short stories matter, it seems to me. A good story can deliver a hugely satisfying reading experience in small span of time.
FWIW, here are some of my favorite short stories, based on the wallop I felt at the end:
“Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway
“Soldier’s Home,” Ernest Hemingway
“The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” William Saroyan
“A Word to Scoffers,” William Saroyan
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” J.D. Salinger
“The End of the Tiger,” John D. MacDonald
“Chapter and Verse,” Jeffery Deaver
James Scott Bell—February 7, 2010
Joe laughed and took a sip of iced tea. “There’s your short story.”
I came home thinking about it, but haven’t yet written it down. But it’s there, perking along until the day I write the first sentence, “The boys finished their Schlitz beers and decided they were going to meet Elvis Presley, come hell or high water,” or something like that.
Those stories come easier than I expected. Maybe it’s because I write mini-stories every week for my newspaper columns in The Paris News, Country World, and now for Saddlebag Dispatches magazine. They come to mind as a single sentence, and then I watched as my fingers type out 950 words in one sitting that will “go to press” the next day. They’re mini-short stories, a snippet of time or experience, in which I give readers a quick glimpse into the view from my own hill.
When we’re working on novels, authors create whole new fictional worlds and can revel in taking their time to describe these worlds and establish character backgrounds and settings. In a short story, we create a can of condensed soup in a sense that, if we wanted to, could sometimes expand into a novel.
I think of them as that tiny world inside a globe, those glass spheres containing a tiny piece of a mythical world. In this case, these miniature scenes don’t always have snow, unless it’s essential to the plot.
Essential to the plot. In short stories, every element, word, character, and bit of dialogue has to be informative, moving the story forward, and must relate to everything else. The logic of the narrative has to be short and concise.
To me, it’s like flipping through the pages of a novel and picking out the necessary bits and pieces to write a book report. A quick read of what could be more, but isn’t.
There’s no room for sweeping descriptions and extensive development. In my view, the author has to know the character’s entire backstory at the outset, and the setting’s history that’s revealed by bits of information dropped in a sentence or two, or as action dialogue tags.
Readers must be swept into these juicy stories with the right words, phrases, and pacing. I suppose it’s like satisfying our need for immediate satisfaction these days. In other words you have about 6,000 words to set up the story arc, very short Acts 1 and 2, before that last couple of pages in which the bombshell drops. In fact, some authors set off that climax bomb in a couple of paragraphs, or even one breathtaking sentence.
Writing short stories is an excellent way to warm up, to refill the creative basket between novels, and to achieve the personal satisfaction of a job well done.
Reavis Wortham—April 12, 2025
“All Revved . . .” is, hands down, the darkest story I’ve ever written. You can find it in the recently published anthology, Bat Out Of Hell, edited by Don Bruns, and the story is inspired by the title of one of the songs on the famous Meat Loaf album from the 1970s. The story tells the tale of Ace Spade, an off-duty firefighter and search and rescue operator who’s trying to impress a young lady with his four-wheeling skills in the back woods of West Virginia when things go terribly wrong. After he wrecks his Jeep in the middle of nowhere, the man who they think is there to lend assistance turns out to be a killer who wants to hunt them down and kill them.
As regular Killzoners know, I don’t outline, so even I was surprised by the lengths to which our characters would go to stay alive. I don’t want to give to much away, but let’s just say that in the end, everyone acts in his or her best interests.
As a writer who’s carved a niche for myself by writing stories with moral clarity where good triumphs over evil, it was kind of refreshing to clean the creative pipes with a story where there really are no good guys–just . . . survivors.
Here’s my take on short stories: They’re not really part of an author’s permanent record, in the sense that I think they don’t necessarily reflect their true storytelling sensibilities. In a short story, I can feel free to kill a cat or cavort with vampires. I could even write a romance–even though I don’t think I’m actually capable of doing that.
This is why I cringe when I hear writerly advice given to newbies that they should cut their teeth writing short stories before they take on the burden of a novel. To me, that’s like telling a budding cook that they need to perfect the art of scrambling eggs before they bake Thanksgiving turkey. One has nothing to do with the other–or where the skill cross, the intersection is so tangential as to be meaningless.
It’s equally important to note that novel-writing skills can get you in trouble when crafting a short story. I was fortunate that submission rules asked for an approximate submission length of 8,000 words for Bat Out of Hell. If I’d had to turn in flash fiction, or anything under, say, 3,000 words, I would have considered myself unqualified from the start.
John Gilstrap—August 20, 2025
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There you have it, three more insights on writing short stories and why short fiction matters.
Here are links to the two previous Words of Wisdom on Short stories: https://killzoneblog.com/2024/01/words-of-wisdom-short-stories.html and https://killzoneblog.com/2025/05/more-short-story-words-of-wisdom.html
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Do short stories matter to you, and if so, how?
If you write short fiction, have you ever started from an event you witnessed or experienced personally?
Do you agree with John Gilstrap short stories don’t count on your “permanent record?”