So you want to write a short story? Does your short story have a beginning and an end? You do realize that the concept of a short story requires it to dispense with a gradual build up to introduce the location, place-in-time and the characters and their many relationships. Thus, the successful short story usually depends on known and familiar places to the reader.
If you are writing for the people of your town or your part of the world, you would know that they are familiar with the locations. But if you are writing a short story located in remote Siberia and the story is meant for a global audience, you want to limit yourself only to the very obvious aspects of Siberia.
The story needs to begin rather immediately with a situation that every reader would be familiar with. The protagonist and the antagonist need to be identified rather at the very beginning and their conflict must be written about with good clarity. The antagonist may actually be carrying the entire story and it should be made clear very early.
The advantage of a short story is that it has to certainly have a beginning and an end. It helps you confine the story to a certain number of words and pages. The disadvantage is that as an author you begin to fall in love with the characters and you may not want either of them to lose so abruptly. You may thus want to keep on writing.
That is the reason why one needs to impose a maximum number of words for the first draft. Stop your writing at that limit. One can expand on the story or the conflict when one goes from the first to the second draft. The story will definitely grow but it will not gain strength to become a novel.
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(1) How short is a short story?
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(3) Does your story have a clear protagonist?
Bharat Bhushan, 11 July 2021
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