First, the image here is of my current paperback, The Priest of Blood, a medieval fantasy novel in stores as of August 29, 2006. Please do me the favor and pick it up when you're in your favorite bookstore

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WRITING THE SHORT STORY

Writing a short story is demanding of the writer, and I thought I'd offer some basic tips here to help you focus on the form itself. I've written many short stories, and make my living as a writer of fiction.

First, a short story should begin as close to the end of the story as you can make it. If you are spending page after page setting up that ending, you're moving toward novella or novel territory.

Think of the short story as a one-act play, while a novel is a three-act or a five-act play.

Begin when the thunder is overhead and the lightning is striking. Don't begin when the storm is miles away. The story is happening the second it begins, not five pages in.

Don't show your agenda: if you shoe-horn the reader into the story you want them to "get," you've just sucked the life out of that story. If your story can't naturally unfold from conflict, action, and events, it's not a story.

If you spend more time developing your idea for the story, the writing of it will be easier.

Do everything you can so that every sentence, every paragraph, and every page of your story leads inevitably -- yet surprisingly -- to the final scene. If a reader gets to that final scene and it comes from out of the blue and makes no sense beyond the trick any writer can pull, you've just written a story that probably will never find legitimate publication.

Even O. Henry's twist endings made sense, they just seemed a surprise because they were not what the reader expected -- yet they were what the stories themselves required. Don't write a bad twist ending and then claim it's "Like O. Henry." Go read O. Henry's stories backward and see that those twists came from something not from nothing. 

Better to write short than long in short fiction. If you can write an excellent short story in one page, do it.  

On the other hand, if you can write an excellent story in fifteen pages, do it, too.

READ the short fiction by the masters of the form. What works on the page works on the page. Don't base your sense of short story on a TV show you saw or a movie. The form of short fiction works beautifully within its own realm -- watch the techniques of established writers. Break down their stories into their component parts. See how each element somehow serves the theme and action and tension of the whole story.

You are not writing to just put words on a page. You are writing to draw someone else into a world that is compelling and involving. Remember the reader when you edit your work -- and you need to edit your work until you, yourself, can find nothing else to add or cut that will make the story more of itself than it has become.

When you finish the draft, put it away for a few weeks and then pull it out again to see what you have there. Be merciless with your own work -- you need to be as good or better than the best of what's being currently published. Why would an editor want your work when it's about as good as the okay stuff they get from more established writers with whom they've worked before?

Challenge yourself.

Aim high.

Demand the best of yourself in this one arena of your life.