Writing Short Fiction
Learn how to write small words with big impact.
Short stories aren’t just easier versions of the novel. They’re a broad, complex and rewarding art form in their own right. Writers’ HQ’s online writing short story course will help you see the bigger picture and compress it into short stories with real punch.
Short stories have been here since the dawn of time. Based in the oral tradition (stop sniggering at the back), they’re the apocryphal family legends your grandmas/weird uncle used to tell you over Christmas dinner; they’re the school-yard urban myths; the sleepover ghost stories; the soliloquies in your diary; the wine-soaked rants to that random person you cornered in the kitchen at that party after so-and-so dumped you. Short stories are all around us. <cue X-Files theme>
But super short stories are not super easy for writers (natch). In fact, the shorter your story becomes, the harder it is to distill what really matters onto the page. I would have written a shorter letter, so the famous quote goes, but I didn’t have the time...
So what makes truly great short fiction? The kind that leaves you dribbling, slack-jawed, slap-faced when you finish it? The kind you remember forever, like some weird dream-memory? Well. We can’t write it for you, but we can give you a nudge, a shove, and a poke with a sharp stick (whatever floats your boat) to help you on your way.
With the help of writing prompts, advice from award-winning short fiction writers, inspiring exercises, and our awesome little online community, you’ll come out the other side at least one fully formed short story to call your very own, ready to send out into the world.
WHAT YOU GET
READ: Introduction
READ: Character + Conflict = Story
EXERCISE: Ooh, taboo!
READ: Layers
EXAMPLES: Let’s read some darn good stories
EXERCISE: Capture a character at bursting point
RESOURCES (Week 1)
READ: Where to start. Beginning, middle or end?
EXERCISE: Get in, get out
READ: How much can you leave out?
EXAMPLES: Ready read read
EXERCISE: Time for a threeway
RESOURCES (Week 2)
READ: Character, setting, action
EXERCISE: The past, present and future walked into a bar…
EXAMPLES: Moar stories!
WATCH: Structure and experimentation
EXERCISE: Don’t think. Just Write. The voice will come.
RESOURCES (Week 3)
READ: Character drives plot. Plot develops character.
EXERCISE: In which identity theft is a totally valid method of characterisation
EXAMPLES: Reeeeeeead
READ: Character & Dialogue
READ: Playing with status
RESOURCES (Week 4)
READ: Remember Week 0 (and 1, and 2, and 3, and 4…)?
EXERCISE: Is it worth it?
READ: Redrafting like a mofo
READ: Cut the fluff
WATCH: Don’t give up – find your theme
RESOURCES (Week 5)
READ: Sooo, there’s this great big enormous world of short fiction out there
EXERCISE: Find a lit mag
READ: What do editors and competition judges actually want?
EXERCISE: Pick a theme, any theme
READ: One last treatise on short fiction
RESOURCES (Week 6)