Can writing short stories make me a better writer?

The benefits of short stories in making you a better and more skilled creative writer. There might be more than you think!

Should I be writing short stories?

It’s not something I had ever really appreciated properly until a few years ago, but short stories are a great way to learn about the craft. It was only while completing my Masters that I ever really experimented with the format, and now I write them regularly.

I guess in the past, short stories was a form of writing that I never saw as worth doing. They are virtually impossible to make money out of and are far less read than other formats of writing.

It’s only since writing my own that I’ve really come to love writing them, and actually think it’s a really fun way to learn the craft.

Writing Succinctly

This was the big one I’ve noticed. When you write short stories, you have far fewer words to tell a story and convey whatever you want to convey. I find when writing longer pieces, I have a tendency to write needlessly flowery language that over-describes what something looks like.

But give yourself a 3000 word cap and all of a sudden you can’t do that. You have to be direct and efficient. I would say that much of the language from my short stories has continued into my longer pieces of writing, and I’m actually much stronger in regard to pacing a novel than I was previously.

When I wrote one of my short stories, I needed to develop characters to some degree and write an entire narrative in a short amount of words. I cut the fluff, the descriptions, the unnecessary words. I hate novels that are needlessly wordy, so goodness knows why I used to be a writer who wrote too much to say too little.

Instead, the short story practice was superb for getting me to write succinctly and effectively. You simply don’t have room for anything else, and it gives you space to tidy and edit

Playing with Formats

It’s partly for the love of the craft, this, but I really enjoy playing around with formats when writing short stories. It gives you a really unique insight into writing, and helps with ideas for how your novel might best be told.

In the recent past I’ve written a piece of metafiction, similar to Maragaret Atwood’s Happy Endings. I’ve also written a short story with dual perspectives that flow through the narrative. A third was more conventionally told, but as a horror it gave me the chance to surprise and shock in such a short space of time. It let me play with perspective in a way that is much harder on a novel scale.

Above all else, it was fun. I write as a career now, including some really tedious stuff (because not all writing is necessarily enjoyable, let’s be honest). I had fun writing it, and playing with formats and styles gave me a real joy that the drag of writing a novel can take away at times. If rekindling a love of writing feels necessary sometimes, I can’t recommend writing short stories enough. And mess about with it! It’s much more fun that way.

Experimenting

Okay, so maybe this is similar to the above, but I consider it slightly different because when I say experiment, I don’t necessarily mean the format.

Experimenting can mean anything. Perhaps you are a man who finds writing women difficult (I am always conscious of being one of those writers who gets the piss taken out of on TikTok for writing a woman poorly), perhaps you’ve never written in the third person, maybe there’s a certain surprise you want to try and pull off.

A short story gives you a chance to experiment with these. Write them as best you can, but if it goes wrong, or it looks clunky, then your edits only take a short amount of time to correct, or maybe you just leave it hidden in a folder on your computer and never open it again.

But you might get better at it. Perhaps you’ve been a first-person writer all this time, and you never knew. Perhaps you’re like a young Emile Brontë. Who knows? Short stories give you the space to be creative, free yourself and experiment with what you can do or, while I wouldn’t say ‘can’t do’, perhaps feel less confident with?

I’ve had success in writing older characters this way. I’ve never been an elderly man on my deathbed, but writing a short story about this gave me the chance to experiment with what did and didn’t work. It was pretty good in the end, and I’m quite confident that I’m a better writer for doing it.

Dialogue

Goodness me, this helped my writing.

Again, it’s partly down to the practice, but the dialogue in a short story needs to do far more than in a novel. Not one piece of dialogue can be a throwaway or irrelevant. In such a short story, the dialogue needs to be perfect.

It must tell us about the characters and the plot because there is no time for anything else. It needn’t be flowery. It should not be unnecessary.

Again, it helps you practise such an important skill, and it really does teach you about dialogue in a far simpler way to understand. When you read it back through, does the dialogue seem real? Would those characters actually say what they’ve said? Is it relevant? You can polish and edit that dialogue in a manageable format, but that’s far harder to do in a novel.

Once again, it creates a manageable place to practise a writing skill.

Confidence

You know that feeling that you can actually do this? Yeah. Much easier when it’s just a few thousand words. It gives you a similar feeling of satisfaction and completion, and a huge confidence boost that you really can write something with a coherent start, middle and end. Is it the same as writing a novel? No, of course not. Can it convince you that you really can write one? Absolutely.

If you want to read a few great short stories to see about some of the above, try Happy Endings by Margaret Atwood, The Man Who Loved Flowers by Stephen King or How to Transform an Everyday, Ordinary Hoop Court into a Place of Higher Learning and You at the Podium by Martin de la Peña.

All influential writers write short stories, trust me!