No, Mozart was not a genius composer at birth, and nope, no prodigal writer is born a writer. All of us are trained; or better yet, we train ourselves to write better through practice, practice and, oh, more practice.
I was reading Stephen King’s masterful memoir the other day, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (a must-read book for young writers as well as old!). He writes that the first ever piece of literature he wrote was an inspired short story that he proudly showed his mom, which earned him the remarks, “Stevie… I bet you could do better.”
The next four stories he wrote made King’s mother his fan, and earned him one quarter apiece – his first dollar in the business.
No. King didn’t find a holy grail off the bat. His aforementioned stories weren’t mind-blowing (so many more of his amazing short stories got rejected by magazines and publications) – but they were original, and each one was better than the previous.
Reading the book made me wonder, what would have happened if Stephen King had tried kickstarting his young writer-journey with the same mistake many among youth make: of starting off with a novel? His ship might have sunk before sailing.
The Epic Battle of Short Story vs. Novel
Your average novel is 250-page long, approximately 70,000 words. For a first-time young writer, that’s a lot of words. Let’s say you even make it to that count miraculously, even then your manuscript would lack integrity and cohesiveness. In order to write a good book, you need stamina, vision, style, voice. You would have much more success in writing around 40-50 brilliant short stories for around the same word count.
The best way for young writers to take off on their author journey is by writing short stories. Here’s why:
They’re Easy to Complete & Safe
Raise your hands if you’ve tried starting something huge but left it mid-way ‘cause you couldn’t commit? I know I’m raising my hand for this one.
It’s hellishly hard to cross the long cliff of commitment. With short stories, you have a chance to start small and start safe. That’s one of the lessons teaching a high school Short Stories Writing class for 11 years taught me. An 800-1000 words of story on a singular subject can be written in two days tops by an average writer. And guess what, if it’s a bad short story, there’s no risk involved; you get over it and write the next one.
The best thing to come out of this would be a finished product. You would feel much better having completed writing a short story than having written a poor one.
They Allow You to Explore Your Craft
To build up on the last point, completing short stories (ideally diverse ones) would leave you feeling more skilled in how to set up a scene, how to write lovable or hate-able characters, how to write descriptively, how to make your dialogue natural, and more.
You’ll learn about where to improve, too, especially if you take feedback from fellow writers. J.G. Ballad, who also started off with short stories, said:
If you write a huge number of short stories it doesn’t take long to realise you have certain strengths and weaknesses.
You’ll initially find yourself emulating the styles of your favorite writers; that’s fantastic. Following in the footsteps of the greats is an excellent strategy. Read Anton Chekhov, read Franz Kafka, read Flannery O’Connor, read all the greats and learn from them. You will eventually transcend your idols and find yourself moving to something unique, something original. That is your own style and voice, cultivated after continuously emulating and writing stories.
Short Story Collections are Publishable too!
Say you take two days to write a short story; you could write 100 stories written in less than a year. Out of these 100, at least 30 would be impressive enough to be compiled into your own short story collection; mine has 30 too! Dress it up in a book cover, format it, and voila, you have a publish-ready book of your own!
Feel 30 short stories are too much? No worries. You need a book of just 24 pages to publish it on online publishing platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. So, an anthology of about 4 or 5 short stories could suffice to start off.
Beyond that, I would highly encourage you to submit your stories to magazines or make anthology submissions. You can participate in writing contests too. Don’t be scared of rejections; the risk-reward ratio is too much in your favor. My first two short stories were rejected by Reader’s Digest, but I eventually ended up regularly writing travel articles for AAA’s magazine.
Be persistent, and it would be a major boost to the writer within you when you get that first acceptance.
The Experimentalism of Short Stories
So many stories by the best short story writers of all time are just some crazily-flung experimental ideas, written well.
Ray Bradbury writes All Summer in a Day set on the planet Venus, where sun comes out once every seven years for only a couple hours.
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is about a disturbing ritual people of a small town observe annually known as “the lottery”.
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe describes a murderer who cannot bear the guilty conscience of his crime.
In Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka fictionalizes Gregor Samsa, a man who wakes up one day as a giant dung beetle.
I write Three Wishes in my collection about a man who spends a difficult night in a holding cell hating the cops, only to accidentally pick up a female police officer for sex the next night.
The possibilities are endless with short stories.
Conclusion: Go Write a Short Story
Short stories have the potential to make you exercise your imaginative muscles, magnetize new audience, treat your creativity to a playground of ideas, and get a published collection. What’s not to love about short stories, then?
Right after you read this blog, I want you to go and pen down a short story. If not a short story, a piece of flash fiction; here’s your 15-minute timer for that. You can let me know how your experience goes in the comments section, or on my website. One excellent platform to get your writing prompts can be this Reddit sub.
Author Profile
Jenny Zimmer
Jenny Zimmer is a writer, poet, artist and book lover. She is also the author of the new book A Carpet of Violets & Clover, a soulful collection of short stories, personal essays and poems. She has previously published a poetry collection titled All The Moments are Real. Follow her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
