The more short stories I read, the more I learn about how they're written, and I've read hundreds. Flipping through the pages of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Impact: 50 Short Short Stories, Short Stories: Reflections in Literature, The Story and Its Writer, and other anthologies, not to mention collected works of Hemingway, Poe, Hawthorne and others, I am reminded of countless hours of often pleasurable, sometimes challenging reading, but also of all I learned from these scores of wonderful authors that heavily influenced my own writing.

Of course, reading all, or even some of, these stories could teach the student more than I ever could about writing short fiction, but since we don't have the time (or the books themselves) for that, I can only attempt to impart what I have learned. Many of the principles I have picked up are represented and discussed in the General Writing Resources on this website. For this page, however, I'd like to address a few specific issues that have come up in recent student writing projects.

Relationship/Dating Stories
In all of the anthologies mentioned above I cannot find or remember one single story whose sole purpose was to reveal the progress and outcome of a romantic/dating relationship. Relationships are complicated; they take time, they have a series of ups and downs, and they depend heavily on the specific and unique characteristics of the individuals involved; essentially, they are too complex for short fiction. Romance is very frequently the topic of novels and feature films, not short stories.

Still, I have seen and read so many of these in all my years of teaching, and they are all so frustratingly similar and overwhelmingly ordinary that I often wonder why, despite my advice, students still attempt to write them, and I try very hard to think of ways in which they could work, but it just doesn't seem to happen. The problem with relationships as fodder for fiction in general is that the experiences are so common, so universal, and have been dealt with in every way imaginable in every art form known to man, that it becomes almost impossible to create a new, unique, or interesting take on the subject; even then, it takes a novel or other book-length work such as a play or feature film to develop the characters and scenario to the point where the story, as Thomas Hardy put it, is able "to justify its telling."

The main problem with relationships in short fiction is the simple fact that relationships take time to develop and run their course, while short stories are generally limited in scope to a single day's events. A relationship is not, strictly speaking, a singular experience. As a result, short stories about relationships become rushed, summarized, over-simplified, over-generalized, trivialized, or any or all of the above, and these are things you should never do when you write. Therefore, when dealing with relationships, the first thing the short fiction writer needs to do is narrow the scope of the story and reveal something that happened within the context of the relationship; in other words, the relationship itself is actually more akin to the setting than the plot, conflict, or theme.

Short stories about relationships can be redeemed by two things: extraordinarily unique and interesting characters, and exceptional writing skill. Without these, it's just another average, ordinary, mediocre boy-meets-girl yarn. Surely we all aspire to be more than average, ordinary, and/or mediocre.

Being "Popular"
Aside from being an overrated concept (but understandably so) among adolescents, "popularity" is not a character trait. Popularity, by definition, refers to the public perception of someone or something, and has little or nothing to do with the empirical or intrinsic value of the person or thing. Not to belittle the idea, but we all come to realize eventually that being "popular," the way it's generally regarded in youth, has no real value. As anyone will tell you, who you are is much more important than the way other people think of you.

Too often, the desire to be "popular" is a character's only motivation in a story, and while the need to fit in with one's peers can be a very strong and influential feeling, it is almost always based upon something more substantial; it doesn't exist for its own sake. By itself, for literary purposes, it's a weak motivation, and always begs the questions: Why does this person not fit in, or feel welcome or comfortable, among his peers? How to his peers regard him, and why? Why does he desire so strongly to be accepted by others; what is it about them that appeals to him?

The odd thing about this is that, in my experience, people who are not "popular" are the most unique,  interesting, creative, remarkable people who go on to achieve great things, while those who are "popular" tend to be generic, ordinary, dime-a-dozen, mindless drones who ultimately lead superficially productive yet substantively dreary lives. So if the desire for popularity is so prevalent, why don't I see more interesting characters in these stories?

Additionally, few students have managed to come up with anything more creative, interesting, or precise than the vague, generic, blanket activity "drinking and doing drugs" as measures their characters take to achieve the "popularity" they so desire. I admit I have little experience in those areas, but I don't imagine it could be so easy for anyone to just "decide to start drinking and doing drugs" the way one might decide to take the subway instead of the bus. Such things cannot and should not be over-simplified or trivialized.

If a character's motivation is the desire for acceptance, that desire needs to be based on something specific and substantial; the character's actions in pursuit of that goal also need to be specific and substantial, and they must have real consequences, either way. Remember, though, the "just-be-yourself" moral is a bit too simplistic and obvious; again, the key (and the challenge) is to create unique, interesting people and scenarios bolstered by strong, effective narrative writing.

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