It’s the obstacle the protagonist has to overcome or the goal they’re attempting to reach. This is the point the author wants readers to take away from their work.Ĭonflict is the action that drives the story’s plot. With a short story, you don’t have space for a lengthy exposition, so drop your readers right into the action.Ī short story’s theme is its central message. You can build up a backstory later through tools like dialogue, flashbacks, and the protagonist’s actions. In other words, if your story is about an alien who visits Earth and then retreats, horrified, back to her spaceship, start your story just as she’s approaching Earth or just as she’s touching down. When you’re writing a short story, it’s generally best to start your plot as close to the end as possible. Plot is the series of events that illustrate the story’s conflict.

>Read More: What Is Direct Characterization in Literature? To clarify, the antagonist doesn’t have to be a person-it could be the protagonist’s environment, their society, or even an aspect of themselves. Your antagonist is the character (or something abstract) attempting to prevent the protagonist’s change. Your protagonist is the character who undergoes some kind of change (or lack thereof) as a result of the story’s main conflict. What’s in a short story?Įvery short story has these five elements:Ĭharacters are the people (or animals, aliens, mythical creatures, or sentient objects) who do the action in your story. This is an extreme example of a short story, and it relies on the reader extrapolating meaning from the words, but because it does so successfully, it counts as a short story. In just six words, Hemingway evokes an entire scene and the backstory that led to that scene. Consider Hemingway’s famous six-word story: There’s really no limit to how short a story can be, though. Stories that clock in under 1,000 words are known as flash fiction and stories of 500 words or fewer are considered microfiction. Once you hit about 50,000 words, you’re in novel territory (and you’ve won NaNoWriMo!) You might even come across the term novelette to refer to a story between 7,500 and 17,000 words.

Stories longer than 10,000 (but shorter than 40,000) words are generally considered novellas. Like we said in the previous section, short stories typically contain between 1,000 and 10,000 words. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.If you’re looking to read a powerful short story and see how other authors communicate substantive themes in just a few thousand words, check out these famous, impactful works: While short stories have fewer words, simpler settings, and smaller casts than novels, they can have just as much of an impact on readers. You don’t need an extensive world with a complex magical system and an entire cast of three-dimensional characters to express a theme effectively. Generally, long, intricate plots with multiple subplots are better suited to novel-length works than a short story.ĭon’t take this to mean your short story’s theme can’t be as deep as a longer work’s theme. Similarly, you can have multiple fleshed-out characters, but you can’t give every character a full backstory and meaningful character arc like you can in a lengthier work. In a short story, you can build a world, but not to the extent you can build a world in a (longer) novel.

Grammarly helps you communicate confidently Write with Grammarly What is a short story?Ī short story is a short, self-contained work of fiction that generally falls between 1,000 and 10,000 words.īecause of this length constraint, short stories tend to be less complex than longer works-in certain ways.

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