Shaping Short Stories
Kathleen Jennings
11 September 2023
Kathleen Jennings is a writer and illustrator who has devoted a great deal of time and effort to understanding the craft of short stories… She generously shares the lessons learned with us!
A confession: I've had an uneven relationship with short stories. I enjoy many of them hugely, and often write them, with a fair degree of success. But at other times I've struggled to "get" what a writer is doing with a story (particularly experimental ones), and when I'm stuck on writing a short story, a lot of the common structural advice results (for me) in mechanical prose (although it is very useful for editing).
So over the past eighteen months, I've read over 500 short stories, turning them inside-out and upside-down and shaking them until lessons fall out.
Understanding the short story
This is what I learned: a short story can be understood as a progression of three moods. It could be (for example) about resistance — processing — release (often stories about coming to terms with grief are shaped that way). Or a story might be about inkling — alarm — lingering discomfort (a classic MR James-style Gothic story). Or any of an infinity of other moods (or aesthetics, or vibes…), familiar or subverted, logical or out of left field.
Looking for the three moods is a fun way to appreciate a story, and a good first step to reading more deeply (I've written a lot of long posts discussing stories that way). Further, it complements a lot of traditional advice on narratives. But it is also a useful way to quickly and intuitively shape a story you want to write.
Using moods to write stories
Sometimes when I begin to write, an idea for a story will have an obvious shape. But not always. Now, when I'm stuck, I will shape an idea into a short story by flowing it into a three-mood shape.
For example, I might have an image (e.g. someone waiting at a bus-stop). If I drop that into one of the mood sequences above, I can feel out some different stories. It could become the story of a passenger processing grief as they take what seems an ordinary bus-ride, or about someone grieving the memory of someone they last saw at a bus-stop, as that image recedes forever. Or it could be a horror story of a very unsettling passenger who gets on the bus (or is eternally waiting…).
Some ways to keep a story a short story
This approach also helps keep a short story short! My writing tends to escape the compact scale of a short story. But a novella or novel has a much more complicated shape. Keeping a story to a progression of three moods helps keep it short. It could be just three sentences! But at too-great a length, the moods will start breaking up and subdividing.
There are other mechanics you can use to keep a story short, of course. I've kept a long list of ways I've observed other writers managing this (I started analysing each of their stories by looking for the three-mood shape). Here are five other techniques:
Maybe you have written a compelling scene, which could be the start of a story of any length! Set yourself the challenge of bringing it to a neat end in as few sentences as possible. (To ensure is still satisfyingly story-shaped, try making sure it passes through three moods.)
Or perhaps you have a novel-sized idea! Try starting the story just before the end (or if you're up for a challenge, set it just after the end).
Perhaps you want to write a short story that feels like a type of novel you enjoy (a reflective tale of late 20th century suburbia, a technothriller, a romance…). In that case, you might rely on your reader knowing a lot about how that sort of world and story usually works. Let the reader assume as much as possible about the bigger picture, and set your story around one key moment (a shift or crisis) in such a story. For example, the heist-gone-wrong could be competence — horrified realisation (e.g. of betrayal) — terror (e.g. skin-of-teeth escape). Or the life-redefining moment of a sunlit novel of finding your true path could be pre-dawn — dawning — radiance (metaphorically and literally, if you want), as a character steps out into a new day and understanding of the life they are choosing.
Find a striking voice or unexpectedly strong point-of-view. A really vibrant, quirky, opinionated voice or a surprising viewpoint can sometimes carry a short story. The raconteur, the watcher through the window, the endlessly distracted narrator, the teller who is focussed on something else entirely…
Use the space or setting to choose just enough of what could be a sprawling story. Maybe it is told on a walk through a house to answer the front door, or you only see the part of a disaster that happens in the common area of an office.
There are many other techniques to try. When you read a short story you like, try asking whether it feels like the author coaxed it from a small idea, or somehow stopped it from becoming a whole novel. Then make a note of how you think they did it. But as a starter, I've written more about 35 ways writers keep short stories short.
Kathleen Jennings is a writer and illustrator based in Brisbane, Australia. Her short story collection Kindling will be published by Small Beer Press in January 2024. Her Australian Gothic debut Flyaway was published by Tor.com (USA) and Picador (Australia) in 2020. It won a British Fantasy Award (the Sydney J Bounds Award) and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and the Courier-Mail People’s Choice Book of the Year Award, among others. It has also been translated into French. Her debut poetry collection Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion (part written travel-sketchbook, part poetry) was published by Brain Jar Press in 2020. As an illustrator, she has won one World Fantasy Award (and been a finalist three other times), and has been shortlisted once for the Hugos, and once for the Locus Awards, as well as winning a number of Ditmars. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, and blogs at tanaudel.wordpress.com.