To write a short story, find one moment that changes a character, tell it through one pair of eyes, and start as close to that moment as you can. Draft the whole story in one or two sittings, end it soon after the change lands, then revise in passes, from structure down to sentences. When it's finished, format it as a manuscript and send it to markets whose length limits it fits.
One invented story runs through the steps below. In "The Flat Note," a piano tuner leaves one note out of tune on purpose, because a widow needs to hear her husband's hymn the way he played it. Every step tracks that one decision. If you still need the idea, start with the story ideas or the creative writing prompts. For the shapes a finished story can take, see story structure.
What a short story needs
A novel can follow a life. A short story usually catches one moment of it: a decision, a discovery, a loss, the instant someone sees what they can't unsee. Edith Wharton, who wrote both, put the difference this way in 1925:
The chief technical difference between the short story and the novel may therefore be summed up by saying that situation is the main concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form, or presentation.
She traced the form's compression to two rules:
The effect of compactness and instantaneity sought in the short story is attained mainly by the observance of two “unities”—the old traditional one of time, and that other, more modern and complex, which requires that any rapidly enacted episode shall be seen through only one pair of eyes.
That gives three working rules: one moment of change, one point of view, and a short span of time, hours or days rather than years. Stories break each of them, but every break costs words, and a short story has few to spare. A story that covers years, Wharton warned, turns into "the bald scenario of a novel."
Write it in eight steps
- Find the moment of change
Not the idea, the moment. "A piano tuner and a widow" is a situation. "A piano tuner leaves one note out of tune on purpose" is a moment: something is different at the end, and someone chose it. Test yours by finishing the sentence: by the last page, ___ has changed because ___.
- Choose whose eyes
Tell it through the person who changes, or the one who watches it happen, and stay with them. The point of view guide compares the options, and first-person narrative goes deeper on "I." In a 4,000-word story, a second viewpoint usually costs a scene you can't spare.
- Start close to the change
Begin on the day it happens, in the hour if you can. The first paragraph should say whose story this is, where we are and that something is already off. Backstory gets a clause, not a page, and how to start a story collects opening techniques.
- Draft it in one sitting
Or two. Write from the first line to the last without rereading, and mark gaps in square brackets, such as [what does a tuning hammer sound like on a pin?], instead of stopping. A finished rough draft gives you a whole story to revise; a polished opening on its own doesn't.
- End soon after the change
Often within a page of it. The reader should feel the change before anyone explains it, so cut any paragraph that says what it meant. The endings below show five ways to stop.
- Revise in passes
Rest the draft for a few days, then read it in one sitting, as a reader would. Fix structure first: does every scene push toward the change? Then scenes: enter late, leave early, cut the one that repeats a beat. Then sentences: read it aloud and cut what you skip. Expect the draft to shrink.
Between passes, ask the Strokes Assistant to review the draft and point out what is unclear or repeated, such as a key marked on page one that is never played.
- Title it
A story's title is read twice, before the first line and again after the last, when it should mean more. An object, a phrase from the text, a place or a double meaning all work, and the techniques in how to write a book title scale down.
- Send it out
Format it as a manuscript, choose markets whose limits it fits and follow each one's guidelines exactly. The section on sending a story out covers the details.
One story, from moment to draft
Here is how the steps shaped "The Flat Note."
The moment. Teodor Lisk, a piano tuner in Duluth, tunes the upright that Ruth Halvorsen's late husband played for forty years. She asks to hear his hymn, flinches at the corrected note, and Teodor puts it back out of tune.
Whose eyes. Teodor's, in close third. He is the one who changes: a man who has never left a piano less than true breaks his own rule. Ruth stays a little opaque, which keeps her grief her own.
Time and place. One February afternoon in her front room. Two characters, and a third who is present only in the piano.
First draft. Teodor Lisk had been tuning pianos in Duluth for twenty-six years, ever since he left Gdańsk with a tuning hammer and a cardboard suitcase, and on the morning of the Halvorsen job he scraped the ice off his van and thought, as he often did in February, about going back.
Revision. The B-flat below middle C had a pencil cross on it, small and faint, the kind you make on a map to say here. Teodor saw it before he saw the dust.
The first draft spends its opening on a commute and a biography, and nothing in it points toward the decision the story is about. The revision starts at the piano, on the detail the ending depends on: the marked key is the note the hymn turns on, and the note Teodor will leave flat. Gdańsk can arrive later in a clause, if the story needs it at all.
He played the hymn through once more, slowly, and on the eleventh bar the B-flat came out flat, exactly as flat as it had been when he arrived. In the kitchen doorway Mrs. Halvorsen closed her eyes. On the invoice Teodor wrote Tuned, 87 of 88, and did not charge for the one.
The decision from the first step is now on the page as a gesture, not a speech. Nobody says what the note meant, and the last line turns a piece of paperwork into the story's verdict.
Five ways to end a story
A short story ends closer to its turn than a novel does, so the last lines carry more weight. These public-domain endings show four common options. The fifth is the gesture above.
“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
The case closes on the last line: the narrator who has insisted all along on his calm gives himself up. A closed ending answers the question the opening raised, which suits suspense and crime.
On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
After a rumor that Bartleby once worked in a dead-letter office, the narrator widens one strange clerk into everyone. The risk of this ending is a moral tacked on. Melville earns it with a whole story about a man who would prefer not to.
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.
Gurov and Anna's affair has become love, and nothing is solved. The story stops at the moment the problem becomes clear, which is itself the change. An open ending works when the reader knows exactly what is still undecided.
It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
After a party and his wife's confession about a boy she once loved, Gabriel Conroy sees his life differently, and Joyce gives the feeling to the weather instead of to Gabriel's mouth.
A twist is a closed ending with a reversal, and it usually works only if the clue was in plain sight early on. The foreshadowing examples show how to plant one.
Sending a story out
Short fiction reaches readers mostly through magazines, anthologies and contests, each with its own guidelines, and a story that ignores them can be turned down unread.
- Read the market. Read an issue to see what it publishes, then the guidelines for length, reading periods and file format.
- Check the length. Limits vary widely: as of November 2026, The Threepenny Review took stories of 4,000 words or less and Clarkesworld 1,000 to 22,000.
- Check simultaneous submissions. Some magazines, including Clarkesworld, Asimov's and Analog, won't consider a story that is under consideration elsewhere. Others, such as Ploughshares, accept it if you say so and tell them at once when the story is taken somewhere else.
- Format the manuscript. Twelve-point type, double spacing, the word count rounded to the nearest hundred on the first page and a centered # for scene breaks. The manuscript formatting guide has the rest.
- Keep the cover letter short. Title, word count, a line of bio and any credits. Follow the guidelines on whether to summarize the story.
- Track everything. Story, market, date sent, response. When a story comes back, send it to the next market on your list that week.
Dear Editors,
Please consider my short story “The Flat Note,” about 4,200 words, for [Magazine]. My fiction has appeared in [Journal] and [Journal]. I live in Duluth, Minnesota, where I teach piano and, in the summers, tune pianos.
Thank you for reading.
Maren Ekdahl
Three sentences are usually enough. The story does the persuading.
Short story mistakes to avoid
- The warm-up opening. An alarm clock, the weather, a commute. Start at the first thing that is different.
- Too many scene changes. Five locations in 3,000 words leave no time to feel any of them. Merge scenes that do the same job.
- Dialogue that explains. Characters telling each other what both already know. Cut it, or turn it into an argument; how to write dialogue shows how.
- The reset ending. It was a dream, or everything goes back to how it was. If nothing changed, there is no story.
- Sending the first draft. Some markets won't look at a story twice: Strange Horizons, for one, took no resubmissions as of November 2026. Rest it, revise it, then send it.
- One market at a time, with no list. Before you send a story anywhere, list ten markets that fit it, and move down the list as the answers come in.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a short story be?
Most run between about 1,000 and 7,500 words. Under 1,000 is usually called flash fiction, and the Nebula and Hugo awards treat 7,500 to 17,500 words as a novelette. Magazines set their own limits, often well below the award line, so check the guidelines of the markets you have in mind before you revise.
Can a short story have chapters?
It can be divided into sections, numbered or marked with a break, and many longer stories are. Use a break where time jumps or the scene moves. If a story seems to need real chapters, though, check its length and its turns: it may be a novelette, or it may hold more than one story.
How long does it take to write a short story?
A first draft of a few thousand words can be written in a day or two, and many writers find that drafting in one or two sittings keeps a story unified. Revision takes longer: several passes over a few weeks, with a few days of rest between them so you read the story fresh each time.
Do I need an outline for a short story?
A few lines are usually enough: the moment of change, whose eyes, where it starts and where it stops. A fuller outline helps with a twist that needs carefully placed clues. If you prefer to discover the story as you write, draft it first and outline it afterward to check its shape.
