Short Stories and Me: A Semester of Having to Write Short Fiction and What it Taught Me

Over this past semester, I had the opportunity to take a short story class as a part of my writing minor. At first, I almost wished I could have taken the novel class instead, as the short story class was required to complete said minor, I learned much more than I ever expected I would.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always been one of those writers who would rather write an epic-length novel than a single piece of short fiction. Worldbuilding is my strength, after all, and the connections I often create in the worlds of my stories are too much to boil down into a few thousands words–and still have room for the plot. And ending things concisely? I could never.

But I had told myself coming into this past semester that I needed to push myself out of my comfort zone, and that included my writer’s comfort zone.

So short stories it was.

The class was broken down into five short stories: four focused on specific genres, and one free-choice for the final piece. 

And just my luck, we began with our lowest word count with mystery.

Oh, yeah. We had word count maximums in this class. 

Keeping to the word limits was certainly a challenge, and I could see that reflected in the amount of detail I could include in my characterization and worldbuilding. Suddenly, what I saw as my biggest strengths were becoming the weak points in my work. 

Each story, though, gave me a bit more confidence in my ability to write short fiction, especially when it came to the plot. With my mystery, the plot was shaky and relatively convenient for my protagonist. As I then moved to fantasy, then horror, then suspense/thriller, and finishing with my sci-fi, I found more ways to cause problems for my characters and learned more about how to balance the action, the disasters, and the moments to give the character’s thoughts the spotlight.

Short fiction has also given me the ability to continue to push myself out of my comfort zone in a lower-stakes environment. My fantasy piece was nearly half fight scenes, and I usually try to avoid them until absolutely necessary. For my final short story, I even attempted a description of my protagonist performing surgery on herself, which I never expected to do.

I will admit, I did skirt around any romance in my assignments. One day I’ll commit to it beyond silly, half-finished snippets that float around my mess of documents and Flash Fiction Friday tags, but this class was not that day.

Though I still need to work on that balance of characterization and worldbuilding within short fiction, I find myself a little less scared of its, well, shortness. I even plan on writing more short stories next year, though more specifics on that goal will come with my yearly goals blog post. 

Overall, despite my hesitations, this short story class did a lot to fine tune my writing and help me understand what I need to focus on in the future. It made me more confident in my ability to write short fiction, even when the assignments included those pesky word limits.

Where will this lead me? I guess only time will tell.