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How to Analyze a Short Story

Last Updated: December 19, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD and by wikiHow staff writer, Megaera Lorenz, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 118,958 times.

Despite the fact that they’re relatively short and simple, there’s still a lot to discover with an in-depth analysis of a short story. Start by trying to summarize what the story is about, then look more closely at aspects of the story such as context, setting, plot, characterization, themes, and style. Tie it all together with a thoughtful critique and summary of what you think the author was trying to accomplish.

Putting the Story in Context

Step 1 Gather basic information about the story.

  • The title of the story.
  • The author’s name.
  • The date of publication.
  • Where the story was originally published (e.g., in an anthology or a literary magazine).
  • For example, “I am analyzing ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ by P. G. Wodehouse, originally published in the November 18, 1916 edition of The Saturday Evening Post .”

Step 2 Identify the major characters.

  • A young English aristocrat, Bertie Wooster.
  • Bertie’s valet (personal attendant), Jeeves.
  • Bertie’s fiancée, Florence Craye.
  • Bertie’s uncle Willoughby.
  • Florence’s teenaged brother Edwin.

Step 3 Give a brief outline of the plot.

  • For example, “‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ is about an airheaded young aristocrat (Bertie Wooster) who tries to sabotage the publication of his uncle’s scandalous memoirs in order to please his fiancée. Meanwhile, Bertie’s valet, Jeeves, is scheming to break up Bertie’s engagement.”

Step 4 Research the author’s personal and literary background.

  • For example, P. G. Wodehouse was a Classically educated author who grew up in late Victorian and Edwardian England. During the 1910s, he lived and worked in New York as an author, lyricist, and playwright. His stories combine references to classic Western literature with references to contemporary British and American pop culture.

Step 5 Learn about the time and place when/where the story was written.

  • Take note of any major social and political issues of the time period, and any popular artistic movements. Major cultural and political shifts are often reflected in short stories, whether purposefully or in a more subtle context.
  • For example, “Jeeves Takes Charge” is set in an English country estate in the 1910s, but it was published in America during the early years of WWI (before America’s involvement in the war). It plays on humorous American stereotypes of the English aristocracy while avoiding references to contemporary historical events.

Step 6 Determine the intended audience.

  • If you’re not sure about the intended audience, the publication venue can give you some clues.
  • For example, “Jeeves Takes Charge” was published in The Saturday Evening Post , a weekly entertainment magazine for American adults. The story was designed to appeal to an adult, middle class American audience.

Step 7 Identify the physical setting.

  • For example, most of “Jeeves Takes Charge” is set at Easeby Hall, a fictional country estate in Shropshire, England. Wodehouse does not describe the setting in great detail, but creates an impression by offering minor details in passing (e.g., Bertie hides behind a suit of armor in his uncle’s library while waiting to steal the manuscript).

Step 8 Look at the historical setting.

  • For example, “Jeeves Takes Charge” is set in the summer, “about half a dozen years ago.” If we assume this means 6 years before the story was published, then it is set in 1910.
  • There are also other clues to the general time setting, like references to telegraphs and Bertie’s use of period-specific slang (like “rummy” meaning “strange,” or “a frost” meaning “a failure”).
  • Some stories may have historical settings that are changed or interrupted in the narrative structure. In these instances, look at what effect the fractured or non-linear setting might create.

Step 9 Assess how the setting affects the story.

  • For example, if “Jeeves Takes Charge” took place in 2018, how likely would it be that a young man like Bertie would employ a personal attendant like Jeeves? How would Bertie steal his uncle’s manuscript in an age when most documents are written and sent electronically?

Evaluating Plot and Characterization

Step 1 List the most important event(s) in the plot.

  • Bertie’s fiancée, Florence, asks Bertie to steal and destroy the manuscript of his uncle’s memoirs because she is worried it will cause a scandal.
  • Bertie steals the manuscript, but Florence's brother catches him in the act and tells the uncle.
  • Jeeves takes the manuscript before Bertie's uncle can find it. Bertie thinks Jeeves is keeping the manuscript safe, but he has actually sent it on to the publisher.
  • Florence breaks off the engagement when she finds out the memoirs have been published. Bertie is angry at first, but Jeeves convinces him that he would have been unhappy married to Florence.

Step 2 Identify the main conflict.

  • In “Jeeves Takes Charge,” the major conflict is between Bertie and Jeeves. The 2 characters engage in a power struggle that starts out small (e.g., disagreements over what Bertie should wear) and comes to a head when Jeeves breaks up Bertie’s engagement to Florence.

Step 3 Look for exposition.

  • For example, at the beginning of “Jeeves Takes Charge,” Bertie’s narration starts with a brief explanation of his relationship with Jeeves. This sets the stage for the rest of the story.

Step 4 Divide the plot into its main parts.

  • Rising action: Bertie visits his uncle, hires Jeeves, and steals his uncle’s manuscript.
  • Climax: Jeeves intercepts the manuscript and secretly sends it to the publisher, causing Florence to break the engagement.
  • Falling action: Bertie is ready to fire Jeeves, but Jeeves convinces him that Florence was not a good match for him.

Step 5 Pinpoint the resolution.

  • For example, in “Jeeves Takes Charge,” the conflict is resolved when Bertie decides that he trusts Jeeves’s judgment—not just in the matter the engagement, but in all of his personal affairs. This ties in with the opening paragraph, where Bertie explains that he has come to rely on Jeeves’s wisdom.

Step 6 Analyze the structure of the plot.

  • For example, “Jeeves Takes Charge” has a straightforward, linear plot that moves from 1 event to the next in chronological order.

Step 7 Evaluate the point of view of the story.

  • From whose point of view is the story told? Is it one of the characters in the story, or an unnamed observer?
  • Is the story narrated in the first person (the narrator refers to themselves as “I” and “me”) or third person?
  • Does the narrator present a clear, straightforward account of the events of the story, or do they misunderstand what’s happening or deliberately mislead the reader (an unreliable narrator)?
  • Is the narrator’s perspective limited, or do they understand everything that is happening in the story?

Step 8 Identify the major characters’ defining traits.

  • Physical appearance (e.g., height, hair color, attractiveness, style of dress).
  • Personality traits (such as kindness, creativity, cowardice, sense of humor).
  • Speaking style (slangy, formal, terse, poetic).
  • Other traits, such as age, profession, or social status.

Step 9 Determine what role each character plays in the story.

  • Bertie Wooster is the protagonist and narrator of “Jeeves Takes Charge.” He is a comedic figure rather than a classic literary hero, and he consistently fails to accomplish his goals throughout the story. He is a stereotype designed to appeal to American audiences of the time.

Step 10 Assess the motivations of each character.

  • For example, in “Jeeves Takes Charge,” Jeeves tells Bertie that he sabotaged the engagement because he thinks Bertie would be unhappy married to Florence. He also hints indirectly at a more self-serving motivation—he worked for Florence’s family in the past, and doesn’t want to have to work for her again.

Step 11 Examine how the characters change during the story, if at all.

  • For example, at the beginning of “Jeeves Takes Charge,” Bertie views Jeeves as a competent servant, but resists Jeeves’s efforts to advise and guide him. After realizing on reflection that he agrees with Jeeves about Florence, Bertie decides that he is better off with Jeeves “doing the thinking for me.”
  • When looking at character development, consider not only the nature of the change, but how and why the change occurs. If you don’t think the characters have changed or developed, think about why that might be as well.

Exploring Themes, Tone, and Style

Step 1 Determine what the major themes are in the story.

  • For example, a major theme in “Jeeves Takes Charge” is the nature of power and authority in a master-servant relationship. Bertie is Jeeves’s employer, but Jeeves has the upper hand in the relationship because of his intelligence and relatively forceful personality.

Step 2 Examine the story for references and allusions.

  • For example, “Jeeves Takes Charge” contains a reference to Thomas Hood’s ballad, The Dream of Eugene Aram (1831), in the form of a misremembered quote by Bertie. The ballad deals with the theme of murder, to which Bertie compares his crime of stealing and destroying his uncle’s manuscript.

Step 3 Identify symbolism and imagery.

  • For example, at the end of “Jeeves Takes Charge,” Bertie tells Jeeves that he can get rid of a checked suit that Jeeves dislikes. Jeeves remarks that he has already gotten rid of it. The suit is symbolic of Bertie’s agency—when he gives up the suit, he also hands over control of his life to Jeeves (who was really already in charge).

Step 4 Check for other literary devices.

  • Foreshadowing, in which clues are given early in the story that suggest later plot developments.
  • Irony, in which there is a discrepancy between what a character says and what they actually mean, or between what they intend to achieve and what they actually accomplish.
  • Allegory, in which the events, characters, or setting of the story are meant to reflect some more general truth or idea.

Step 5 Assess the tone of the story.

  • The tone of “Jeeves Takes Charge” is light and humorous. Wodehouse (the author) views the events of the story as trivial and silly. He highlights the humor of the characters and situations by using heightened, dramatic language and imagery.
  • For example, while trying to decide how to dispose of his uncle’s manuscript, Bertie compares himself to a murderer trying to hide a body.

Step 6 Define the mood of the story.

  • In “Jeeves Takes Charge,” Wodehouse combines formal, poetic Edwardian language with contemporary slang to create a unique, humorous style.
  • For example: “The sun was sinking over the hills and the gnats were fooling about all over the place, and everything smelled rather topping—what with the falling dew, and so on . . .”

Writing Up Your Analysis

Step 1 Start with a...

  • For example, “‘Jeeves Takes Charge,’ by P. G. Wodehouse, is one of the earliest short stories to feature Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves, who would eventually become iconic figures in the canon of comedic English literature. This story utilizes humor and dramatic irony to explore themes of agency, authority, and the nature of interpersonal relationships.”
  • The form and content of the thesis may depend on the assignment. For example, if you are supposed to answer a specific question about the story, make sure your thesis addresses that question.

Step 2 Describe your overall impressions of the story.

  • Which turns of phrase or word choices stood out to you the most?
  • Which character(s) did you like the best or least, and why?
  • Which moment in the plot made the greatest impression on you? Were you surprised by anything that happened?
  • How do you feel about the story? Do you like it or dislike it? Did you feel like you learned something from it, or did it evoke any particularly strong feelings in you?

Step 3 Discuss whether you feel the story is successful.

  • Did this story evoke the kinds of emotions that the author intended? Why or why not?
  • Is the style distinctive and interesting?
  • Did the story feel original?
  • Were the characters and plot sufficiently developed? Did the characters’ actions make sense?

Step 4 Support your arguments with evidence.

  • If you wished to argue that Wodehouse drew intentional parallels between Jeeves and Florence in “Jeeves Takes Charge,” you could support this by quoting passages that highlight these parallels.
  • For example, "Bertie says of Jeeves early on that '. . . unless I was jolly careful and nipped this lad in the bud, he would be starting to boss me. He had the aspect of a distinctly resolute blighter.' Later, he agrees with Jeeves’s assessment that Florence 'is of a highly determined and arbitrary temperament, quite opposed to your own.'”

Step 5 Summarize your interpretation of what the author was trying to say.

  • For example, you might say, “‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ is a story about a young man struggling to maintain his agency and autonomy as he becomes caught up in parallel conflicts with 2 other major players in his life: his fiancée and his valet. In the end, Bertie decides that Florence is too controlling and manipulative. Ironically, he ultimately embraces those same qualities in Jeeves.”

Community Q&A

wikiHow Staff Editor

  • For more theories and ways to analyze short stories, take a look at Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition”, which is available for free online. [20] X Research source Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

how to read a short story

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  • ↑ http://learnonpoint.com/blog/writing-a-summary-of-a-short-story
  • ↑ https://languagetool.org/insights/post/how-to-write-a-summary/
  • ↑ https://www.readingrockets.org/books/authorstudy/reasons/researchauthor
  • ↑ https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-historical-context-1857069
  • ↑ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/introliterature/chapter/how-to-analyze-a-short-story/
  • ↑ https://writingcenter.tamu.edu/Students/Writing-Speaking-Guides/Alphabetical-List-of-Guides/Academic-Writing/Analysis/Analyzing-Novels-Short-Stories
  • ↑ https://www.texasgateway.org/resource/analyze-development-plot-through-characters-literary-textsfiction-english-7-reading
  • ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/575/01/
  • ↑ https://literarydevices.net/mood/
  • ↑ http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson209/definition_style.pdf
  • ↑ https://www.bucks.edu/media/bcccmedialibrary/pdf/HOWTOWRITEALITERARYANALYSISESSAY_10.15.07_001.pdf
  • ↑ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69390/the-philosophy-of-composition

About This Article

Christopher Taylor, PhD

If you need to analyze a short story for a class, there are a few things to consider. Do some research into the author’s background and any political or social context that’s relevant to the story. Identify the main themes of the story, such as redemption, religion, or isolation. You should also identify the main conflict of the short story, which usually revolves around the main characters. If the author does anything unusual with structure or language, you can write about this. For instance, in William Faulkner’s A Rose For Emily, the story is told from the collective point of view of the town instead of any single character. You can also write about the author’s use of symbolism and imagery and what effect this has on the story. For more tips from our English co-author, including how to write up your short story analysis, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Read Short Stories Like an Underdog

how to read a short story

W hen someone asks you, “What are you reading?” while you are reading short story writer Juan Carlos Onetti’s “A Dream Come True,” you will have to think twice. You’ll probably reply something like: “A story about a woman who had a dream and then commissions the bankrupt owner of a theater to stage a play called ‘A Dream Come True’ to recreate a scene she dreamt in which nothing happens—merely because she is looking to feel the happiness she felt while dreaming.” And the person who asked the question will probably stare at you in confusion and wonder why you are reading such a thing.

Short stories are supposed to be brief and to tell a story. As a genre, they are often measured against an ideal parameter of rules for how they should be composed: a short story must be fully developed within a limited number of pages, it must assemble the plot in a coherent structure with no gratuitous elements, and the reader must be able to finish the tale in one sitting.

But what happens when the rules of short stories are broken? In Latin America, this rupture is embodied by two of the most prolific and famous writers of short stories of the 20th century: the Uruguayan Onetti (1909–94), whom we met above, and the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro (1929–94). In spite of having been relatively successful writers, they are often regarded as outcasts, underdogs, or obscure authors. They are always seen in the shadow of their most successful counterparts of the Latin American Boom generation, who mastered the art of storytelling by following the rules or publishing successful long novels.

Instead of thinking about the story as a genre with boundaries and a particular form, Ribeyro and Onetti employed the short story as a laboratory of writing, a space where they could explore certain themes without necessarily being conclusive or encoding information. Certainly, they did not know where any particular plot would lead. What mattered to them was the journey, not the destination; the telling of the tale, not its closed form or its ending.

To celebrate the recent publication of collections of each of their oeuvres— A Dream Come True by Onetti, published by Archipelago Books, and The Words of the Speechless by Ribeyro, published by New York Review Books, both masterfully translated into English by Katherine Silver—as well as their own rule breaking, I propose five counterintuitive rules for reading the tales of these unusual storytellers for the first time. The first three rules will be directly related to Onetti and his unique way of constructing stories, and the last two to Ribeyro and his marginal characters with unfortunate fates.

Broadly speaking, the rules are intended to help the reader enjoy the stories regardless of their defiance of rules. Allow yourself to not take seriously the limits of a genre in which, for Ribeyro and Onetti, a story always ends up badly and in an unexpectedly expected tragedy. Read the stories as they are told, as small figments of the imaginations of these atypical Latin American writers who refused to be imprisoned in the “perfect form” of the short story. See how they refuse to believe that a short story should be short, or, indeed, that it should even tell a story.

What mattered to these writers was the journey, not the destination; the telling of the tale, not its closed form or its ending.

What Onetti and Ribeyro rebelled against were claustrophobic rules of writing, which unduly constrained their genre. Surprisingly, these rules were often offered by writers of short stories themselves. And it is these rules—touted by the more successful writers of the Boom and other canonical authors—that Onetti and Ribeyro rejected.

We can conclude that these Latin American authors isolate three principles of the short story: an economy of means, a purposeful structure, and the encrypting of information. All three of these principles were completely overturned by Onetti and Ribeyro. But how are we to read their short stories without clinging to these expectations? These rules will serve you as a roadmap into an unknown territory.

how to read a short story

The South According to Coetzee

RULE #1: Read the stories carefully but don’t try to make sense of the story or struggle to find a plot. Take time off to recover after reading each story, otherwise you run the risk of losing your mind.

Even if it were physically possible to read more than one story by Juan Carlos Onetti in one sitting, I wouldn’t recommend it. Instead, be willing to misunderstand, to slowly enter his dreamy and incoherent world where time stops.

The stories collected in A Dream Come True were created over a 60-year span. They range from Onetti’s first story, published in La Prensa in 1932, to his last stories, published posthumously in 1994. You will find that all of the stories, however, function outside of their time, weaving a tangled web made up of many times. Don’t be afraid to read the stories out of order or to skip one that you might not like: you will be disconcerted regardless.

Most of the stories Onetti published around or after 1950 take place in a fictional town called Santa María. The town, with its narrative charm, first appeared in stories—prior to the publication of Onetti’s famous novels, such as “The House in the Sand” or “The Album.” These stories thus served as writing laboratories, contained environments in which a world could initially be created.

But the turning point of Onetti’s literary work can be located in his most complex novel, A Brief Life (1950), which inaugurates the Santa María saga. In this novel, the character Juan María Brausen imagines an entire fictional port town and the characters that inhabit its streets. At the end of the novel, to free himself from his reality, Brausen moves to the town he has created. From that point, the town’s founder disappears from Onetti’s works as a narrator and “writer” of the fiction of Santa María.

As you read each story in A Dream Come True , you will see the reality of Santa María , as a world that exists on its own and is constantly being constructed. From A Brief Life onward, Onetti’s narrative becomes a tapestry of rewritings, where plots, characters, and spaces are displaced and reconfigured in a different light each time they appear.

RULE #2:  Never trust the narrator of a short story. He will offer different versions and conjectures, and you will step into uncertainty.

Reading Onetti’s short stories will make you doubt your judgment and your ability to decode a text. When you first read the Uruguayan author’s work, you will fall for his peculiar use of language and his awkward adjectives, which destabilize images. You will be enchanted by the story, but you will be utterly frustrated when you cannot tell what the plot of that story is.

If you are a reader who does their homework, you will try to put the events in order, make lists of characters, and come up with hypotheses about the time and space of the stories. And yet, you will not be able to tell anyone what Onetti’s fiction is really about—because it is perhaps not necessary to try to define it.

As you will find out, his work does not revolve around the plot or theme, or the characters and their motives. Rather, it relies on an unpredictable curiosity and a desire to know the stories and rumors about strange characters who appear to be wandering aimlessly. Every tale in this book has the air of a detective story; it is guesswork. Characters tell tales, of themselves and of others; read traces and clues; listen to gossip; gather the pieces of the puzzling stories. I am certain, however, that even if all of your efforts to reconstruct a plot are unsuccessful and you run out of patience, you will keep on reading.

RULE #3:  Assume that nothing is true and there is no final destination. The only thing you can assume to be certain is the telling of the tale.

“Certainties are questionable,” says the narrator of Onetti’s “The Album,” while trying to make sense of the dazzling tales told to him by a mysterious woman who wandered the pier of Santa María . Another narrator concludes: “Everything had been or was like that, just like that, although perhaps otherwise, and every person imaginable could offer a different version. And undoubtedly not only could I not be pitied but I wasn’t even credible.” You will realize that Onetti’s stories are built on conjectures that multiply themselves, minimal details and gestures that partially reveal an aspect of the characters, dialogues that seem not to communicate anything, and imprecise plots.

At times, you will ignore which story you are reading. Guided by the untrustworthy narrators, you will discard options presented by them in your desire to solve the enigma that is defying elucidation. The main twists and turns of the plot often happen within the mind of the characters. Some short stories postpone the revelation of a mystery hinted at in the title—“The Kidnapped Bride,” “Death and the Girl,” “Most Dreaded Hell,” “As Sad as She.”

In most stories, nothing happens. But that nothingness is filled with speculative narratives and an obstinate desire to find thrilling memories. Narrators “lie always,” to make you take a guess and get it wrong.

RULE #4: Hear the words of the speechless, the humble, and the wretched outcast.

When you read Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s stories collected in The Words of the Speechless —selected from 10 different volumes, dating from 1952 to 1993—you will be surprised by the realization that the simple folks we meet every day also have a story to tell. In the Peruvian writer’s stories, as the book’s epigraph states, “those who are deprived of words in life find expression—the marginalized, the forgotten, those condemned to an existence without harmony and without voice.” In finding expression, these characters modulate their longings, distress, and goings-on in an environment that is hostile to them.

You will read stories with characters such as: creditors, a grocery store owner who is about to lose everything, a substitute teacher, jealous fishermen fighting over a woman, a foreigner who falls in love but cannot communicate with his beloved, children with overactive imaginations, a relentless smoker, and pretentious bourgeois women who want to appear smart at book club. The lives of these minor characters (victims of modernity), and their circumstances, give Ribeyro’s stories a unique perspective that will make you think twice about the untold stories of the cashier you always run into at the store.

RULE #5: Expect a simple story and never a happy ending. Complement your reading of the stories with a dose of irony.

Ribeyro portrays his characters with such affection, sympathy, and humor that you will not feel that their bad luck and misery is a tragedy. You will find many of Ribeyro’s stories hilarious in spite of the unfortunate outcomes for the characters. These tales are rich in ironies, both subtle and blatant.

In “For Smokers Only,” Ribeyro’s uncanny self-portrait as a smoker, the writer looks back on the moments in his life when smoking led him to take desperate measures: when, for example, he sold the last copies of his first book of short stories to buy cigarettes, or when he threw himself out of the window in “a suicidal leap into the void” to recover a pack of cigarettes he had tossed out the night before after deciding to quit smoking.

In “The Insignia” you will read the peculiar story of a man who finds a silver insignia in a trash can and is then invited to become part of a secret society. After performing tasks whose meaning he ignores, he rises in rank and becomes the supreme leader of the society—all the while living in “total and abject ignorance” of the purpose of the organization.

At the end of the book, in an even more pathetic story, you will witness the demise of a great orchestra conductor, who ultimately ends his career swigging beer at a party, conducting a symphony played from a cassette on the stereo. Ribeyro’s stories have more in common with Chekhov’s or Maupassant’s ironic tragedies than with most of his Latin American contemporaries, who often wrote fantasy stories or portrayed their eras and geographies.

how to read a short story

Novels of Colombia’s Patriarchy

Ribeyro’s irony and simplicity and Onetti’s plotless stories told by untrustworthy narrators defy our definition of a short story. They provide us with a different way of framing our reading of fiction. Ribeyro’s speechless characters will sprout up in the most unexpected corners of your imagination, just like the lingering higuerilla (wild castor bean) that appears in “At the Foot of the Cliff.”

This plant “germinates and spreads in the steepest and least hospitable places.” In growing, the huigerilla “doesn’t ask anyone for any favors, just a tiny bit of space to survive … [It] keeps growing, propagating, feeding off rocks and garbage.” These stories can become this “tiny bit of space” that the words of the speechless need to survive.

When you read Onetti, you will find that time stops in order that you may explore its meaning. And at those moments, life will seem richer and more intense. Even if you are reading and don’t know what is going on, you will, like the narrator of “A Dream Come True,” begin to “know things” the “way we know the soul of a person and words are useless to explain it.”

icon

  • Horacio Quiroga, “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista,” Todos los cuentos , edited by Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León and Jorge Lafforge (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), p. 1194. ↩
  • Julio Cortázar, “On the Short Story and its Environs,” in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds , translated from the Spanish by Thomas Christensen (North Point, 1986), p. 158. ↩
  • Juan Bosch, “ Notes on the Art of Writing Stories ,” translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph, Calque , 2007. ↩
  • Ricardo Piglia, “ Theses on the Short Story ,” New Left Review , vol. 70, July/August 2011. The same idea appears in Josefina Ludmer’s book about the work of Juan Carlos Onetti: Onetti, los proceso de construcción del relato (Editorial Sudamericana, 1977), pp. 46–48. ↩

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Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is a queer book nerd and freelance writer, known on the internet for loving winter, despising summer, and going overboard with extravagant baking projects. In addition to her work at Book Riot, she reviews for BookPage and AudioFile, and writes a weekly newsletter, Books & Bakes , celebrating queer lit and tasty treats. You can catch her on Instagram shouting about the queer books she loves and sharing photos of the walks she takes in the hills of Western Mass (while listening to audiobooks, of course).

View All posts by Laura Sackton

I used to read a ton of short stories. My love of short fiction grew out of the many creative writing classes I took in my early 20s. I didn’t finish college, but living outside Boston as a young adult, I took advantage of the many workshops on offer, and took as many writing classes as I could afford. We read a lot of short stories in those classes, and I fell in love with story after story.

I started filling an old binder with the photocopied printouts of stories we read in class. Writer friends recommended stories, which I’d track down in the library, copy, and add to the binder. Of course I’d read short fiction before, both in and out of school. But during those years in my early twenties I was hungry for short stories in a new way. I couldn’t get enough. I loved their quickness, how they could sharpen a character or an emotion down to its essential truth and lay it bare on the page.

Photo taken by me

So, naturally, I started seeking out short story collections. I’d read a story in class that utterly floored me, and then I’d go read a whole collection by that author. Between 2006 and 2016 I read 40 short story collections—which might not sound like a lot spread over ten years, but it certainly felt like a lot. I was always tracking down new collections.

But then something disappointing started happening: the more story collections I read, the less I enjoyed them. I can still remember the first time I read the story “Shadow on a Weary Land” by Lydia Peele. It remains one of my favorite stories to this day. But I felt kinda meh about her collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing . I still get shivers thinking about Julie Orringer’s story “Note to Sixth Grade Self,” but I literally cannot remember a thing about her collection How to Breathe Underwater . It left no mark.

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Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

At first this shift in my reading was freeing. Getting disappointed over and over again by short story collections was so frustrating. It was a relief to just pass over short fiction, knowing a novel would be more likely to satisfy me. I’d see people raving about new collections and feel absolutely no pressure to read them. I’d tried whole books of short fiction, and it hadn’t worked. I honestly didn’t even notice that I’d barley read any short fiction last year. I had too many other things to read.

But here’s the thing: I desperately miss short stories. I haven’t read one since July 2019, and I’m starting to notice the loss. I’m craving them like some delicious treat I’ve been denying myself. So I’m faced with a dilemma: how do I incorporate short stories back into my reading life without the same thing happening all over again?

I fell in love with short fiction reading it piecemeal, viewing stories as whole pieces of art, separate from the collections they sometimes appeared in. These days, I read almost nothing but books. I prefer reading essay collections over online articles; whole books of poetry over a single poem.

But I’m starting to realize that whole books aren’t the best way for me to read short fiction. I recently found that old binder where I collected stories, and just flipping through it gives me shivers. I can still feel those stories in my bones. I want to find new stories that feel that way to me, that surprise me and open me, like the best writing does.

Photo taken by me

I doubt I’ll ever wholeheartedly love short story collections. But I can see now that I didn’t have to stop reading short stories altogether. I just had to find a different way to take them in. In the end, cutting short story collections out of my reading life for a while reminded me how much I love short fiction. And it taught me not to put restraints on how I read: enjoying a single story is just as valid as reading a whole book of them.

If you, like me, love short stories but not whole collections, Sarah has some great recs for where to find short stories online , as well as a list of individual short stories you can read free online right now .

how to read a short story

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34 English Short Stories with Big Ideas for Thoughtful English Learners

What if you could understand big ideas in English with just a little bit of text?

You don’t need to read an entire English book to learn. A good English short story is often enough!

Stories are all about going beyond reality, and these classics will not only improve your English reading but also open your mind to different worlds.

1. “The Tortoise and the Hare” by Aesop

2. “the ant and the grasshopper” by aesop, 3. “white wing: the tale of the doves and the hunter”, 4. “royal servant”, 5. “emily’s secret”, 6. “the bogey beast” by flora annie steel, 7. “love is in the air”, 8. “the tale of johnny town-mouse” by beatrix potter, 9. “paul bunyan” adapted by george grow, 10. “cinderella” by charles perrault, 11. “little red riding hood” adapted by the british council, 12. “the lottery” by shirley jackson, 13. “the happy prince” by oscar wilde.

  • 14. “The Night Train at Deoli” by Ruskin Bond

15. “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury

  • 16. “Orientation” by Daniel Orozco

17. “Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu

18. “the missing mail” by r.k. narayan, 19. “harrison bergeron” by kurt vonnegut.

  • 20. “The School” by Donald Barthelme

21. “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid

22. “rikki-tikki-tavi” by rudyard kipling, 23. excerpt from “little dorrit” by charles dickens, 24. “to build a fire” by jack london, 25. “miracles” by lucy corin.

  • 26. “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal

27. “The Boarded Window” by Ambrose Bierce 

28. “the monkey’s paw” by w.w. jacobs, 29. “a tiny feast” by chris adrian, 30. “the story of an hour” by kate chopin, 31. “the zero meter diving team” by jim shepherd, 32. “the velveteen rabbit” by margery williams, 33. “the friday everything changed” by anne hart, 34. “hills like white elephants” by ernest hemingway, how to use short stories to improve your english, and one more thing....

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The Tortoise and the Hare

This classic fable (story) is about a very slow tortoise (turtle) and a speedy hare (rabbit). The tortoise challenges the hare to a race. The hare laughs at the idea that a tortoise could run faster than him, but the race ends with a surprising result.

Have you ever heard the English expression, “Slow and steady wins the race”? This story is the basis for that common phrase . You can read it for free , along with a number of other stories in this list!

very short english stories

This is another great story that teaches a lesson that’s written for kids but adults can enjoy, too . The story tells of a grasshopper who lounges around all summer while his friend the ant prepares for the winter. When winter comes, the two friends end up in very different situations!

The moral is that those who save up during the good times will get to enjoy the benefits when times are bad.

White Wing The Tale of the Doves and the Hunter

This very short story from India was originally written in Sanskrit (an ancient language). When a group of doves is caught in a hunter’s net, they must work together as a team to escape from the hunter’s clutches.

You can listen to a reading of the story as you read along on this website.

very short english stories

In this story, an old man sets out to ask an African king to dig some wells in his village when their water runs dry. But first, he teaches the king a lesson in humility by showing him how all people help each other. Read the story to see how the clever old man gets the king to do as he asks!

very short english stories

This is a modern-day story about a little girl with a big secret she can’t tell anyone about. When her teacher finds out her secret, they work together to fix the issue.

This story is a good choice for absolute beginners, because it uses only the present tense. It’s also written in very basic English with simple vocabulary and short sentences.

english short stories

The woman in this story finds a pot of treasure on her walk home. As she carries it home, the treasure keeps changing, becoming things of lesser value.

However, the woman’s enthusiasm makes her see only the positive after each change, which would have upset anyone else. Her positive personality tries to make every negative situation seem like a gift!

This story shows how important it is to look at things from a positive point of view. Instead of being disappointed in what we don’t have, this story reminds us to view what we do have as blessings.

very short english stories

This modern story is about a young woman named Penny who is anxious about going to her family’s annual reunion barbecue. But despite screaming children and arguing cousins, Penny ends up happy that she came to the reunion when she starts a conversation with a handsome man.

The story is written in simple English, using only the present tense, so it’s perfect for beginners.

The Tale of Johnny Town-mouse (Peter Rabbit)

This classic children’s story is about two mice, one from the country and one from the city. Both mice think that the other mouse is so lucky to live in what they think is a wonderful place!

The two mice decide to visit each other in their homes. It turns out that the country mouse has a difficult time in the city, and the city mouse struggles in the country.

In the end, they realize that they believed the old English saying: “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” In other words, each mouse thought the other had a better life, only to discover that they actually preferred their own life!

Paul Bunyan

The story of Paul Bunyan has been around in the United States for many years. He’s the symbol of American frontier life, showing the ideal strength, work ethic and good morality that Americans work hard to imitate.

Paul Bunyan is considered a legend, so stories about him are full of unusual details, such as eating 50 eggs in one day and being so big that he caused an earthquake. It can be a pretty funny read, with characters such as a blue ox and a reversible dog.

This version of the story is also meant to be read out loud, so it’s fast-paced and entertaining. This website has an audio recording with the story, which you can play at slower or faster speeds.

Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper

You may already know the story of Cinderella, whether you saw the Disney movie or read a children’s book of it.

However, there are actually many different versions of “Cinderella.” This one by Charles Perrault is the most well-known and is often the version told to children.

“Cinderella” is a beloved story because it describes how a kind and hard-working person was able to get a happy ending. Even though Cinderella’s stepsisters treated her awfully, Cinderella herself remained gentle and humble. It goes to show that even though you may experience hardships, it’s important to stay kind, forgiving and mindful.

Little Red Riding Hood

This is a story that every English-speaking child knows. It’s about a little girl who meets a wolf in the forest while going to see her sick grandmother. The wolf pretends to be her grandmother in order to trick the little girl.

This story is presented by the British Council as a video with the text clearly spoken. You can then play a game to rearrange the sentences below the video into the correct order, read the text of the story in a PDF file and answer some activity questions (then check your answers with the provided answer sheet.

This website has many other stories you can read and listen to, like “Circus Story” by Sue Clarke, which is an excellent option for learning animal vocabulary, and even adaptations of Shakespeare plays for younger readers.

The Lottery and Other Stories (FSG Classics)

Every year, the small town in this story holds an event known as “The Lottery.” During this event, someone from the community is randomly chosen.

What are they chosen for? You’ll have to read the story to find out.

You may have heard of the term “mob mentality” and how it can allow for some pretty surprising (and terrible) things to happen. This classic story looks at society, and how much evil people are willing to overlook to keep their society stable.

This is considered to be one of the most famous short stories in American literature. It’s a great example of what is known as a dystopian society, where people live in a frightening way. To learn more, check out this TED-Ed video that tells you how to recognize a dystopia.

English short stories

Since the story is old, much of the English is outdated (not used in modern English). Still, if you have a good grasp of the English language, you can use this story to give yourself a great reading challenge.

14. “The Night Train at Deoli”  by Ruskin Bond

The Night Train at Deoli

Ruskin Bond used to spend summers at his grandmother’s house in Dehradun, India. While taking the train, he always had to pass through a small station called Deoli. No one used to get down at the station and nothing happened there.

Until one day, when he sees a girl selling fruit and is unable to forget her.

Ruskin Bond is a writer who can communicate deep feelings in a simple way. This story is about our attachment to strangers and why we cherish (value or appreciate deeply) them even though we might never meet them again.

There Will Come Soft Rains

The title is taken from a poem that describes how nature will continue its work long after humanity is gone. But in this story, we see that nature plays a supporting role and the machines are the ones who have taken its place.

They continue their work without any human or natural assistance. This shows how technology has replaced nature in our lives and how it can both destroy us and carry on without humanity itself.

16. “Orientation”  by Daniel Orozco

Orientation and Other Stories

This is a humorous story in which the speaker explains the office policies to a new employee while gossiping about the staff. It’s extremely easy to read, as the sentences are short and the vocabulary is simple.

Many working English learners will relate to this story, as it explains the silly, nonsensical moments of modern office life. Modern workplaces often feel like theaters where we pretend to work rather than get actual work done. The speaker exposes this reality that few would ever admit to.

He over-explains everything from the view out the office window to the intimate details of everyone’s life—from the overweight loner to the secret serial killer. It talks about the things that go unsaid; how people at the office know about the deep secrets of our home life, but don’t discuss them.

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Jack’s mother can make paper animals come to life. In the beginning, Jack loves them and spends hours with his mom. But once he grows up, his mother’s inability to speak English keeps Jack from talking to her.

When his mother tries to talk to him through her creations, he kills them and collects them in a box. After a tragic loss, he finally gets to know her story through a hidden message that he should have read a long time ago.

The story is a simple narration that touches on complex issues, like leaving your home country and the conflicts that can occur within families when different cultures and languages collide.

The Missing Mail in Malgudi Days

Thanappa is the village mailman, who is good friends with Ramanujam and his family. He learns about a failed marriage and helps Ramanujam’s daughter get engaged to a suitable match.

Just before the wedding, Thanappa receives a tragic letter about Ramanujam’s brother. To spare them heartache, he decides not to deliver the letter.

The story explores the idea that despite the best of intentions, our actions can cause more harm to our loved ones than we ever intended. If you like this and want to read more by R.K. Narayan, check out the other stories in the author’s “ Malgudi Days” short story collection.

Harrison Bergeron in Welcome to the Monkey House

The year is 2081, and everyone has been made equal by force. Every person who is superior in any way has been handicapped (something that prevents a person’s full use of their abilities) by the government. Intelligent people are distracted by disturbing noises. Good dancers have to wear weights so that they don’t dance too well. Attractive people wear ugly masks so they don’t look better than anyone else.

However, one day there is a rebellion, and everything changes for a brief instant.

Technology is always supposed to make us better. But in this case, we see that it can be used to disable our talents. Moreover, the writer shows us how the mindless use of a single value like equality can create more suffering for everyone.

20. “The School”  by Donald Barthelme

easy English short stories

And that’s just the beginning of the series of unfortunate events at the school in this short story, narrated by a teacher. The story is absurd (ridiculous to the point of being silly), even though the topic is serious. By the end, the kids start asking difficult questions about death that the adults don’t quite know how to answer.

This story leaves a lot of things unsaid, which means you’ll need to “read between the lines,” or look closer at the text to understand what’s really happening.

english short stories

In “Girl,” a mother tells her daughter how to live her life properly. The mother instructs the girl to do all the household chores, in very specific ways, making it seem like that’s her only duty in life.

Sometimes the mother tells the girl how to attract attention, not to talk to boys and to always keep away from men. Other times, the mother hints that the girl will need to be attractive to men to live a good life.

This story doesn’t feel like a story. There’s no plot, and nothing really happens. But read closely, and you’ll see an important message about how girls are taught to live restricted lives since childhood.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is a classic tale about a Mongoose who regularly visits a family in India. The family feeds him and lets him explore their house, but they worry that he might bite their son, Teddy.

One day, when a snake is about to attack Teddy, the Mongoose kills it. This event helps the family accept the mongoose into their family.

This is a simple story about humans and animals living together as friends. It’s old, but the language is fairly easy to understand. It reminds us that animals can also experience feelings of love and, like humans, they will also protect the ones they love.

“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is part of Kipling’s short story collection “The Jungle Book,” which was famously made into a movie by Disney.

Little Dorrit (Penguin Classics)

Dorrit is a child whose father has been in prison ever since she could remember. Unable to pay their debts, the whole family is forced to spend their days in a cell. Dorrit dreams of seeing the world outside their little cell.

This excerpt (short part of a larger work) introduces you to the family and their life in prison. The novel is about how they manage to get out and how Dorrit never forgets the kindness of the people who helped her.

Injustice in law is often reserved for the poor. “Little Dorrit” shows the government jailing people for not being able to return their loans, a historical practice the writer hated since his own father was punished in a similar way.

To Build a Fire and Other Tales of the North

A man travels to a freezing, isolated place called Yukon with only his dog for company. Throughout his journey, he ignores the advice other people have given him and takes his life for granted.

Finally, he realizes the real power of nature and how fragile (easily broken) human life actually is.

Nature is often seen as a powerful force that should be feared and respected. The animal in this story is the one who’s cautious and sensible in this dangerous situation. By the end, readers wonder who is really intelligent—the man who could not deal with nature, or the dog who could survive?

This is a modern-day story that describes a group of children gathering around their father to watch little spiders hatch out of their eggs. But the story gets a different meaning as it nears the end. What do you think happened?

26. “Evil Robot Monkey ” by Mary Robinette Kowal

english short stories

Sly is a character who doesn’t fit into society. He’s too smart for the other chimps, but humans don’t accept him. He is punished for acting out his natural emotions.

But the way he handles his rage, in the end, makes him look more mature than most human beings. Nominated for the  Hugo award , many readers have connected with Sly since they can see similarities in their own lives.

“The Boarded Window” is a horror story about a man who has to deal with his wife’s death. The setting is a remote cabin in the wilderness in Cincinnati, and he feels helpless as she gets sick.

There’s an interesting twist to this story, and the ending will get you thinking (and maybe feeling a bit disturbed!).

If you enjoy older stories with a little suspense, this will be a good challenge for you. It talks about the event that made a hermit decide to live alone for decades, with a mysterious window boarded up in his cabin. It also uses a lot of psychology and symbolism, so you may want to read the story more than once to understand everything it has to say.

The Monkey's Paw and Other Tales of Mystery and the Macabre

Be careful what you wish for! One man finds this out the hard way when he brings a magical monkey’s paw home from India. This paw is supposed to grant three wishes to three people. People start to wish on it, only to realize that our wishes can have severe consequences.

The characters in this story immediately regret when their wishes come true. Even though they get what they wanted, it comes at a large cost!

This short story is from the early 1900s and uses some outdated English, but it’s still easy to follow. It reminds us that there are no shortcuts in life, and to be wary if something seems too good to be true.

This story centers around Titania and Oberon, two fairy characters from Shakespeare’s famous play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The two fairies are having a rough time in their marriage when they find a human child. They decide to adopt him, hoping that he’ll help them save their relationship. However, the child develops a deadly, modern disease and the fairies have no idea what to do since they have never known illness or death.

This is a tragic tale about how they try to understand something they’ve never seen before and their deep love for a stranger who is so unlike them. The story explores the grief of parenthood and the uncertainty of knowing whether your child will ever even know you.

The Story Of An Hour

This story, written by a woman, is a sad look inside an unhappy marriage. Mrs. Mallard is a woman with heart troubles. When her husband dies, the people who come to give her this news tell it to her gently, so she doesn’t have a shock.

Mrs. Mallard busts into tears and locks herself in her room. At first, she’s upset by the news. But the more she considers it, the more excited she becomes about the idea of the freedom that would come from her husband’s death.

What happens, then, when her husband comes home after an hour, alive and well?

The story explores the conflicting range of the human emotions of grief and hope in a short span, and the impact it can have on a person’s mind and body.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster was one of the deadliest accidents of the twentieth century. This is a story about that event seen through the eyes of a father and his sons, who were all unfortunate enough to be close to the disaster area.

The story exposes the whole system of corruption that led to a massive explosion taking innocent lives and poisoning multiple generations. The technical vocabulary and foreign words make this text a little more difficult. However, its plot is relatively easy to follow.

The story is divided into small parts that make it both easy and exciting to read. Its various events show what it was like to live in the former Soviet Union . And just like any other good story, it’s also about human relationships and how they change due to historic events.

The Velveteen Rabbit

A simple, stuffed rabbit toy is given to a young boy as a Christmas present. At first, the rabbit isn’t noticed, as the boy is distracted by much fancier gifts. While being ignored, the rabbit begins to wonder what it means to be “real.”

One day, a certain event brings the rabbit into contact with the boy, and changes the toy’s life forever.

Have you ever loved a toy or doll so much, that you treated it as if it were alive? This story shows the power of love from a very unexpected viewpoint: that of a fluffy stuffed rabbit. It also highlights the importance of self-value, being true to yourself and finding strength in those who love you.

Tradition is important in this school, where the boys always go to fetch water for the class. The girls are teased for being “weaker,” and are last to get other privileges, like having the first choice of magazines. One day, a girl asks the teacher why girls aren’t allowed to get the water, as well. This one question causes a big reaction and leads to a huge change.

The girl’s courage surprises everyone, but it also inspires other girls to stand up for themselves. One act from one brave person can lead to change and inspire others. The story reflects on gender equality and how important it is to fight for fairness. Just because something is accepted as “normal,” doesn’t mean it is right!

Hills Like White Elephants

At a Spanish train station, an American man and a young woman wait for a train that would take them to the city of Madrid. The woman sees some faraway hills and compares them to “white elephants.” This starts a conversation between the two of them, but what they discuss seems to have a deeper meaning.

This is another very well-known story that asks you to “read between the lines” to find the hidden meaning behind the text. Much of the story is a back-and-forth dialogue between two people, but you can tell a lot about them just from what they say to each other.

There’s a lot of symbolism that you can analyze in this story, along with context clues. Once you realize what the real topic of the characters’ conversation is, you can figure out the quiet, sadder meaning behind it.

Short stories are effective in helping English learners to practice all four aspects of language learning: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Here’s how you can make the most out of short stories as an English learner:

  • Use illustrations to enhance your experience: Some short stories come with illustrations that you can use to guess what the story is about. You can even write your own caption or description of the picture. When you finish the story, go back to your image description. How did you do?

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  • Explore stories related to a theme: Do you like ghost stories? Science fiction? Romance? If you’re learning about food or cooking, find a short story with a lot of food vocabulary .
  • Choose the right reading level: Make sure that you always challenge yourself! One easy way to tell if a story is just right for you is to use the “five-finger test.” Hold up your fist as you read a paragraph, and put up one finger for each word you don’t know. If you have all five fingers up before the end of the paragraph, try to find an easier text.
  • Practice “active reading”: Your reading will only help you learn if you read actively . You’re reading actively when you’re paying very close attention to the story, its words and its meanings. Writing with a notebook nearby and in a place with no distractions can help you focus on active reading.
  • Choose only a few words to look up: You may be tempted to stop at every unknown word, but it’s actually better to try to figure out its meaning from context clues. This means looking at everything else in the sentence or paragraph to try and guess the meaning of the word. Only look up words that you can’t figure out even with context clues.
  • Summarize the story: When you’ve finished reading the story, retell it in your own words or write a summary of it. This will help you to practice any new words you learned, and make sure that you understood the story well. If you’re struggling, read the story again and take notes as you read.
  • Take breaks: Just because these stories are short, doesn’t mean you need to read them in one sitting! If you find it hard to focus or you’re struggling to understand the story, take a break. It’s okay to read it one paragraph at a time.

I hope you have fun with these English short stories while improving your English language skills.

Happy reading!

If you like learning English through movies and online media, you should also check out FluentU. FluentU lets you learn English from popular talk shows, catchy music videos and funny commercials , as you can see here:

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If you want to watch it, the FluentU app has probably got it.

The FluentU app and website makes it really easy to watch English videos. There are captions that are interactive. That means you can tap on any word to see an image, definition, and useful examples.

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FluentU lets you learn engaging content with world famous celebrities.

For example, when you tap on the word "searching," you see this:

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FluentU lets you tap to look up any word.

Learn all the vocabulary in any video with quizzes. Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning.

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Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)

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Last updated on Oct 29, 2023

How to Write a Short Story in 9 Simple Steps

This post is written by UK writer Robert Grossmith. His short stories have been widely anthologized, including in The Time Out Book of London Short Stories , The Best of Best Short Stories , and The Penguin Book of First World War Stories . You  can collaborate with him on your own short stories here on Reedsy .  

The joy of writing short stories is, in many ways, tied to its limitations.  Developing characters, conflict, and a premise within a few pages is a thrilling challenge that many writers relish — even after they've "graduated" to long-form fiction.

In this article, I’ll take you through the process of writing a short story, from idea conception to the final draft.

How to write a short story:

1. Know what a short story is versus a novel

2. pick a simple, central premise, 3. build a small but distinct cast of characters, 4. begin writing close to the end, 5. shut out your internal editor, 6. finish the first draft, 7. edit the short story, 8. share the story with beta readers, 9. submit the short story to publications.

But first, let’s talk about what makes a short story different from a novel. 

The simple answer to this question, of course, is that the short story is shorter than the novel, usually coming in at between, say, 1,000-15,000 words. Any shorter and you’re into flash fiction territory. Any longer and you’re approaching novella length . 

As far as other features are concerned, it’s easier to define the short story by what it lacks compared to the novel . For example, the short story usually has:

  • fewer characters than a novel
  • a single point of view, either first person or third person
  • a single storyline without subplots
  • less in the way of back story or exposition than a novel

If backstory is needed at all, it should come late in the story and be kept to a minimum.

It’s worth remembering too that some of the best short stories consist of a single dramatic episode in the form of a vignette or epiphany.

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A short story can begin life in all sorts of ways.

It may be suggested by a simple but powerful image that imprints itself on the mind. It may derive from the contemplation of a particular character type — someone you know perhaps — that you’re keen to understand and explore. It may arise out of a memorable incident in your own life.

how to read a short story

For example:

  • Kafka began “The Metamorphosis” with the intuition that a premise in which the protagonist wakes one morning to find he’s been transformed into a giant insect would allow him to explore questions about human relationships and the human condition.
  • Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” takes the basic idea of a lowly clerk who decides he will no longer do anything he doesn’t personally wish to do, and turns it into a multi-layered tale capable of a variety of interpretations.

When I look back on some of my own short stories, I find a similar dynamic at work: a simple originating idea slowly expands to become something more nuanced and less formulaic. 

So how do you find this “first heartbeat” of your own short story? Here are several ways to do so. 

Experiment with writing prompts

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that the story premises mentioned above actually have a great deal in common with writing prompts like the ones put forward each week in Reedsy’s short story competition . Try it out! These prompts are often themed in a way that’s designed to narrow the focus for the writer so that one isn’t confronted with a completely blank canvas.

how to read a short story

Turn to the originals

Take a story or novel you admire and think about how you might rework it, changing a key element. (“Pride and Prejudice and Vampires” is perhaps an extreme product of this exercise.) It doesn’t matter that your proposed reworking will probably never amount to more than a skimpy mental reimagining — it may well throw up collateral narrative possibilities along the way.

Keep a notebook

Finally, keep a notebook in which to jot down stray observations and story ideas whenever they occur to you. Again, most of what you write will be stuff you never return to, and it may even fail to make sense when you reread it. But lurking among the dross may be that one rough diamond that makes all the rest worthwhile. 

Like I mentioned earlier, short stories usually contain far fewer characters than novels. Readers also need to know far less about the characters in a short story than we do in a novel (sometimes it’s the lack of information about a particular character in a story that adds to the mystery surrounding them, making them more compelling).

how to read a short story

Yet it remains the case that creating memorable characters should be one of your principal goals. Think of your own family, friends and colleagues. Do you ever get them confused with one another? Probably not. 

Your dramatis personae should be just as easily distinguishable from one another, either through their appearance, behavior, speech patterns, or some other unique trait. If you find yourself struggling, a character profile template like the one you can download for free below is particularly helpful in this stage of writing.   

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A story is only as strong as its characters. Fill this out to develop yours.

  • “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman features a cast of two: the narrator and her husband. How does Gilman give her narrator uniquely identifying features?
  • “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe features a cast of three: the narrator, the old man, and the police. How does Poe use speech patterns in dialogue and within the text itself to convey important information about the narrator?
  • “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor is perhaps an exception: its cast of characters amounts to a whopping (for a short story) nine. How does she introduce each character? In what way does she make each character, in particular The Misfit, distinct?

how to read a short story

He’s right: avoid the preliminary exposition or extended scene-setting. Begin your story by plunging straight into the heart of the action. What most readers want from a story is drama and conflict, and this is often best achieved by beginning in media res . You have no time to waste in a short story. The first sentence of your story is crucial, and needs to grab the reader’s attention to make them want to read on. 

One way to do this is to write an opening sentence that makes the reader ask questions. For example, Kingsley Amis once said, tongue-in-cheek, that in the future he would only read novels that began with the words: “A shot rang out.”

This simple sentence is actually quite telling. It introduces the stakes: there’s an immediate element of physical danger, and therefore jeopardy for someone. But it also raises questions that the reader will want answered. Who fired the shot? Who or what were they aiming at, and why? Where is this happening?

We read fiction for the most part to get answers to questions. For example, if you begin your story with a character who behaves in an unexpected way, the reader will want to know why he or she is behaving like this. What motivates their unusual behavior? Do they know that what they’re doing or saying is odd? Do they perhaps have something to hide? Can we trust this character? 

As the author, you can answer these questions later (that is, answer them dramatically rather than through exposition). But since we’re speaking of the beginning of a story, at the moment it’s enough simply to deliver an opening sentence that piques the reader’s curiosity, raises questions, and keeps them reading.

“Anything goes” should be your maxim when embarking on your first draft. 

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How to Craft a Killer Short Story

From pacing to character development, master the elements of short fiction.

By that, I mean: kill the editor in your head and give your imagination free rein. Remember, you’re beginning with a blank page. Anything you put down will be an improvement on what’s currently there, which is nothing. And there’s a prescription for any obstacle you might encounter at this stage of writing. 

  • Worried that you’re overwriting? Don’t worry. It’s easier to cut material in later drafts once you’ve sketched out the whole story. 
  • Got stuck, but know what happens later? Leave a gap. There’s no necessity to write the story sequentially. You can always come back and fill in the gap once the rest of the story is complete. 
  • Have a half-developed scene that’s hard for you to get onto the page? Write it in note form for the time being. You might find that it relieves the pressure of having to write in complete sentences from the get-go.

Most of my stories were begun with no idea of their eventual destination, but merely an approximate direction of travel. To put it another way, I’m a ‘pantser’ (flying by the seat of my pants, making it up as I go along) rather than a planner. There is, of course, no right way to write your first draft. What matters is that you have a first draft on your hands at the end of the day. 

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the ending of a short story : it can rescue an inferior story or ruin an otherwise superior one. 

If you’re a planner, you will already know the broad outlines of the ending. If you’re a pantser like me, you won’t — though you’ll hope that a number of possible endings will have occurred to you in the course of writing and rewriting the story! 

In both cases, keep in mind that what you’re after is an ending that’s true to the internal logic of the story without being obvious or predictable. What you want to avoid is an ending that evokes one of two reactions:

  • “Is that it?” aka “The author has failed to resolve the questions raised by the story.”
  • “WTF!” aka “This ending is simply confusing.”

Like Truman Capote said, “Good writing is rewriting.”

Once you have a first draft, the real work begins. This is when you move things around, tightening the nuts and bolts of the piece to make sure it holds together and resembles the shape it took in your mind when you first conceived it. 

In most cases, this means reading through your first draft again (and again). In this stage of editing , think to yourself:

  • Which narrative threads are already in place?
  • Which may need to be added or developed further?
  • Which need to perhaps be eliminated altogether?

how to read a short story

All that’s left afterward is the final polish . Here’s where you interrogate every word, every sentence, to make sure it’s earned its place in the story:

  • Is that really what I mean?
  • Could I have said that better?
  • Have I used that word correctly?
  • Is that sentence too long?
  • Have I removed any clichés? 

Trust me: this can be the most satisfying part of the writing process. The heavy lifting is done, the walls have been painted, the furniture is in place. All you have to do now is hang a few pictures, plump the cushions and put some flowers in a vase.

Eventually, you may reach a point where you’ve reread and rewritten your story so many times that you simply can’t bear to look at it again. If this happens, put the story aside and try to forget about it.

When you do finally return to it, weeks or even months later, you’ll probably be surprised at how the intervening period has allowed you to see the story with a fresh pair of eyes. And whereas it might have felt like removing one of your own internal organs to cut such a sentence or paragraph before, now it feels like a liberation. 

The story, you can see, is better as a result. It was only your bloated appendix you removed, not a vital organ.

It’s at this point that you should call on the services of beta readers if you have them. This can be a daunting prospect: what if the response is less enthusiastic than you’re hoping for? But think about it this way: if you’re expecting complete strangers to read and enjoy your story, then you shouldn’t be afraid of trying it out first on a more sympathetic audience. 

This is also why I’d suggest delaying this stage of the writing process until you feel sure your story is complete. It’s one thing to ask a friend to read and comment on your new story. It’s quite another thing to return to them sometime later with, “I’ve made some changes to the story — would you mind reading it again?”

how to read a short story

So how do you know your story’s really finished? This is a question that people have put to me. My reply tends to be: I know the story’s finished when I can’t see how to make it any better.

This is when you can finally put down your pencil (or keyboard), rest content with your work for a few days, then submit it so that people can read your work. And you can start with this directory of literary magazines once you're at this step. 

The truth is, in my experience, there’s actually no such thing as a final draft. Even after you’ve submitted your story somewhere — and even if you’re lucky enough to have it accepted — there will probably be the odd word here or there that you’d like to change. 

Don’t worry about this. Large-scale changes are probably out of the question at this stage, but a sympathetic editor should be willing to implement any small changes right up to the time of publication. 

how to read a short story

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Story Analysis: How to Analyze a Short Story Step-by-Step

Adela B.

Table of contents

Have there been times that you have read a short story in class and tried to analyze its meaning by deep-diving into the text to understand it better? If yes, this article is for you.

Short stories are relatively much shorter and less complex than most novels or plays. But that does not mean that they don’t require an in-depth analysis of what is written in the text and what messages the author of the book intends to convey to its readers.

In this article, you will learn how to analyze a short story step-by-step, along with the essential elements of a short story.

What are the Elements of a Short Story

In order to analyze a short story step-by-step, it is important to know the basics of story analysis. Let’s take a look at the five key elements of a short story.

Characters (both major and minor) are what bring life to a story. Writers use them to transcend important messages throughout the plotline.

Every character has a purpose, a particular personality, and a developmental arc. To analyze these characters for your short story, you must have the answer to the following questions:

  • Who is the plotline’s protagonist?
  • Do you have your antagonist? If yes, who is it? What antagonistic qualities do they have?
  • Are the characters dynamic (changing) or static (unchanging)?
  • How does the author describe the character's appearance, personality, mindset, and actions?
  • What are your thoughts, feelings, or opinions about the characters?
  • What is the relationship between all the characters?

People get invested in fictional characters, relate to them, and see them as real individuals with real personalities, going through real hardships in life.

That's the key motive of the author, and that's what needs to be analyzed.

Setting or Theme

The setting of a short story depicts the theme of the plot through key metaphors. It revolves around three important points:

  • Circumstances

This also aids the flow of the plotline, distinguishes the characters, influences viewpoints, and creates an aura for your story.

Even if a story is placed in a historic time and place, from when and where it was originally written, it can influence the entire context of the narrative.

Many stories would seem different and altered if their original setting was changed completely and is thus very crucial in interpreting the concept of the story.

Thus, try to assess how the setting affects the story and how it motivates its characters. Analyze why the author has chosen this particular setting, how the readers respond to it, as well as if there’s any symbolic meaning behind it.

The plotline makes a story by giving it a pattern and a structure to the events that are about to happen. Identifying and analyzing these plotlines will help in giving insights into the explanation of the story.

In short stories, the plot is majorly centered around one important character and their actions, or around one key experience that impacts the story greatly.

Usually, a short story plot has one major storyline, unlike novels, which have multiple trajectories of storylines. Thus, short stories are easier to analyze.

Authors use symbolism to convey messages poetically or indirectly, through their stories, making them more interesting and complex pieces.

Symbolism is depicted using a physical object or even a person to be an abstract idea. For example, a dove represents love and peace and a storm represents hostility and turmoil.

Symbolism can also be used as a metaphor in the narrative, such as life is a roller coaster which portrays life to have its ups and downs.

Similarly, in short story novels, authors symbolize certain conflicts and important issues by using a metaphor or a simile in their story. For example, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the officials dismantled the coronations of Caesar's statues, foreshadowing their plan to topple him.

Lastly, the reason you are reading the short story is to identify what you have learned from it and what the moral of the narrative is.

Even though short story novels are crisp, interesting, and entertaining, there is always a life lesson behind each of them. This moral is implied to help the readers understand the author’s perspective, what they want to convey, and what lesson you should learn from the text.

How to Analyze a Short Story Step-by-Step

Now that we know the major elements that are involved in crafting an exceptional story analysis, let's take a look at five tips for how to analyze a short story step-by-step.

Read and summarize

As you prepare to analyze the short story assigned to you, it is recommended to read and re-read it multiple times. Since it is a short story, you’ll have plenty of time to understand all the details included within the story and the context of the plot.

To analyze the book, divide the narrative into sections. Read each of these sections and write down key points and essential details that are related to these portions of the story. As you do that, summarize your interpretation of the plot into a more understandable and easy piece.

Brainstorm and take notes

While reading the text, if you come across an interesting subplot, a challenging character arc, or even a major theme that isn't showcased through the text, make it a point of writing them down.

These notes will be your crutch as you begin analyzing your short story for your class assignment. Taking notes brings organization to your thoughts and ideas, as well as gives you proper knowledge about every detail you find in the short story.

Brainstorm multiple ideas and write down the concepts that you find fascinating while reading the book. Always pay close attention to the details to understand the purpose of the text, as well as the author’s point of view on multiple important situations or events.

Here’s an interesting video by Jesse on how to take notes while reading

Identify crucial concepts

Identifying important concepts in the short story, such as the main conflict that helps with creating the primary argument for the thesis statement, the characters’ personalities, their defining traits, the choices they make, and also the point of view of the narrator.

The point of view is an essential aspect of the storyline as it creates a lens for the reader to understand and analyze themes, details, characters, and important events in the story.

While examining these concepts, you will realize the intention of the author, how the story was significant to them, and why they made certain choices while writing the short story.

Similarly, exploring the literary devices of the short story, such as the setting, mood, tone, and style of the text, will help further in analyzing the plotline in a more notable way.

Include examples and evidence

When you state an argument in your story analysis, it is always better to back it up with credible sources and accurate evidence. For example, you can paraphrase or directly quote a sentence from your assigned story to claim your point.

However, quotations cannot become evidence unless it is explained how it proves the claims that are being made.

Having good sources for your story analysis gives you a higher level of authority over the book that you are writing about and also makes it easier for the reader to understand the author’s perspective.

Craft the thesis statement

It is important to make sure that all the points that have been made for the analysis tie together and ultimately support your thesis.

Keep in mind that the thesis for your short story should not just summarize the plot, and neither should it be a review of the book. Your thesis statement should be an interpretation of the text or an argument that is based on the storyline.

Writing a quality analysis for short stories requires a solid thought process, an organized structure , and the ability to dive deep into the literary meaning of a text.

Here, you understand and think through the author's perspective of the book and why they have chosen to write their thoughts and ideas through this narrative.

Hence, to know how to analyze a short story step-by-step for your class assignments and also score high, you need proper guidance, key steps, and other tips and tricks that put your analysis at the front of the line. This article is here just for that!

If you still find yourself to be stuck, reach out to our analytical essay writing service . Our team of professional writers are experts in analyzing stories and will help you deliver a 100% original short story analysis written from scratch.

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Interesting Literature

10 of the Best Very Short Stories That Can Be Read Online

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

One very short story – often attributed to Ernest Hemingway but actually the work of another writer – is just six words long: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. And some of the greatest fiction-writers of the last two centuries have written memorable short stories which stretch to little more than a few pages: short enough to be read in a coffee break.

Below, we introduce ten classic short stories – very short stories – from some of the finest authors in the literary canon. All of the stories can be read online: follow the links provided to read them.

1. Anton Chekhov, ‘ The Student ’.

A key device in many Chekhov short stories is the epiphany : a sudden realisation or moment of enlightenment experienced by one of the story’s characters, usually the protagonist. In many ways, the epiphany can be said to perform a similar function to the plot twist or revelation at the end of a more traditional (i.e., plot-driven) short story.

In ‘The Student’, one of Chekhov’s shortest stories, a young seminary is travelling home on Good Friday. He meets two women, a mother and her daughter who have both been widowed, and joins them around their fire, and the conversation turns to the Gospels, since it is Easter.

The student begins telling them about the story of Peter’s denial of Jesus, and this tale reawakens painful memories in the two women. Here, the emphasis is more on character and emotion than plot and incident, as we discuss in our analysis of the story .

2. Kate Chopin, ‘ The Story of an Hour ’.

Some short stories can say all they need to do in just a few pages, and Kate Chopin’s three-page 1894 story ‘The Story of an Hour’ (sometimes known as ‘The Dream of an Hour’) is a classic example. Yet those three pages remain tantalisingly ambiguous, perhaps because so little is said, so much merely hinted at.

Chopin’s short story is a subtle, studied analysis of death, marriage, and personal wishes. Written in April 1894 and originally published in Vogue in December of that year, the story focuses on an hour in the life of a married woman who has just learnt that her husband has apparently died.

We have analysed this story here .

3. Saki, ‘ The Lumber-Room ’.

Saki, born Hector Hugh Munro, is one of the wittiest short-story writers in English, a missing link between Wilde and Wodehouse. Yet he remains undervalued.

‘The Lumber Room’ is a classic short story about a child who is too clever for the adults: a mischievous boy, Nicholas, seeks to outwit his aunt so he can gain access to the lumber-room with its hidden treasures and curiosities. The story is also about the nature of obedience and the limited view of the world adults have, when contrasted with the child’s more expansive and imaginative outlook.

We have analysed this wonderful story here .

4. Virginia Woolf, ‘ A Haunted House ’.

In the pioneering short stories Woolf wrote in the period from around 1917 until 1921, she not only developed her own ‘modernist’ voice but also offered a commentary on other literary forms and styles.

This two-page story is a good example: we find a woman living in a house which is apparently haunted by a ghostly couple. The story that emerges is less frightening than it is touching, and as much romance as horror, as Woolf provides a modernist, stream-of-consciousness take on the conventional ghost story, all in a brief vignette of around 600 words.

We have analysed the story here .

5. Franz Kafka, ‘ Before the Law ’.

This is a very short story or parable by the German-language Bohemian (now Czech) author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It was published in 1915 and later included in Kafka’s (posthumously published) novel The Trial , where its meaning is discussed by the protagonist Josef K. and a priest he meets in a cathedral. ‘Before the Law’ has inspired numerous critical interpretations and prompted many a debate, in its turn, about what it means.

A man approaches a doorkeeper and asks to be admitted to ‘the law’. The doorkeeper tells him he cannot grant him access, but that it may be possible to admit the man later. We won’t say what happens next, but the parable is typically Kafkaesque – in so far as anything else – in its comic absurdism and depiction of the futility of human endeavour. The story is often interpreted as a tale about religion.

We discuss the story in more depth in our summary and analysis of it.

6. Katherine Mansfield, ‘ Miss Brill ’.

‘Miss Brill’ is a short story by the New-Zealand-born modernist writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), published in the Athenaeum in 1920 and then included in Mansfield’s 1922 collection The Garden Party and Other Stories .

Every Sunday, a lady named Miss Brill goes to the local public gardens to hear the band play and to sit in the gardens and people-watch. On the particular Sunday that is the focus of the story, the unmarried Miss Brill comes to realise that she, and all of the other people gathered in the gardens, appear to be in a sort of play. But when she overhears a young couple making apparently disparaging remarks about her, she appears to undergo an epiphany …

We discuss the story in more detail in our analysis of it.

7. Ernest Hemingway, ‘ Cat in the Rain ’.

This short tale was published in Hemingway’s early 1925 collection In Our Time ; he wrote ‘Cat in the Rain’ for his wife Hadley while they were living in Paris. She wanted to get a cat, but he said they were too poor.

‘Cat in the Rain’ was supposedly inspired by a specific event in 1923 when, while staying at the home of Ezra Pound (a famous cat-lover) in Rapallo, Italy, Hadley befriended a stray kitten. We find a woman in a hotel seeking to rescue a cat she spots in the rain outside, but the story takes in deeper longings, too.

We have offered an analysis of this story in a separate post.

8. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘ The Lottery in Babylon ’.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is one of the great short-fiction writers of the twentieth century, and many of his classic tales stretch to just a few pages.

‘The Lottery in Babylon’, first published in 1941, is among his most ‘Kafkaesque’ tales. When he wrote the story, Borges was working a rather unfulfilling library job refilling the bookshelves, and ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ reflects the sense of futility in all human endeavour which Borges was feeling at this time. We are told of a lottery in the (fictional) land of Babylon, which becomes compulsory, and which delivers both rewards and punishments to its lucky (or unlucky) participants. Although Borges’ story is satirical and humorous, it also taps into the horrific realities of totalitarian regimes.

Find out more about this story by reading our analysis of it .

9. Lydia Davis, ‘ On the Train ’.

Very few stories in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis are longer than a few pages, and many are a single page, like prose haiku or short vignettes. Her stories are usually less about narrative and more about observation, seemingly insignificant details, and a refusal to sentimentalise. Indeed, her stories are almost clinical in their precision and emotional tautness.

We’ve opted for ‘On the Train’ as it’s one of the few Davis stories available online via the link above, but we could have chosen any number of short stories from the collected edition mentioned above. Highly recommended.

10. David Foster Wallace, ‘ A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life ’.

This is the shortest story on this list. Published on ‘page zero’ of Wallace’s 2000 collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men , it is another vignette, about how the way we behave is ultimately motivated by our longing to be liked by others.

The rise of social media has only brought home even more clearly what Wallace brilliantly and wittily reveals here: that much of our behaviour is purely performative, with the individual having lost any sense of authenticity or true identity.

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Writers.com

The short story is a fiction writer’s laboratory: here is where you can experiment with characters, plots, and ideas without the heavy lifting of writing a novel. Learning how to write a short story is essential to mastering the art of storytelling . With far fewer words to worry about, storytellers can make many more mistakes—and strokes of genius!—through experimentation and the fun of fiction writing.

Nonetheless, the art of writing short stories is not easy to master. How do you tell a complete story in so few words? What does a story need to have in order to be successful? Whether you’re struggling with how to write a short story outline, or how to fully develop a character in so few words, this guide is your starting point.

Famous authors like Virginia Woolf, Haruki Murakami, and Agatha Christie have used the short story form to play with ideas before turning those stories into novels. Whether you want to master the elements of fiction, experiment with novel ideas, or simply have fun with storytelling, here’s everything you need on how to write a short story step by step.

The Core Elements of a Short Story

There’s no secret formula to writing a short story. However, a good short story will have most or all of the following elements:

  • A protagonist with a certain desire or need. It is essential for the protagonist to want something they don’t have, otherwise they will not drive the story forward.
  • A clear dilemma. We don’t need much backstory to see how the dilemma started; we’re primarily concerned with how the protagonist resolves it.
  • A decision. What does the protagonist do to resolve their dilemma?
  • A climax. In Freytag’s Pyramid , the climax of a story is when the tension reaches its peak, and the reader discovers the outcome of the protagonist’s decision(s).
  • An outcome. How does the climax change the protagonist? Are they a different person? Do they have a different philosophy or outlook on life?

Of course, short stories also utilize the elements of fiction , such as a setting , plot , and point of view . It helps to study these elements and to understand their intricacies. But, when it comes to laying down the skeleton of a short story, the above elements are what you need to get started.

Note: a short story rarely, if ever, has subplots. The focus should be entirely on a single, central storyline. Subplots will either pull focus away from the main story, or else push the story into the territory of novellas and novels.

The shorter the story is, the fewer of these elements are essentials. If you’re interested in writing short-short stories, check out our guide on how to write flash fiction .

How to Write a Short Story Outline

Some writers are “pantsers”—they “write by the seat of their pants,” making things up on the go with little more than an idea for a story. Other writers are “plotters,” meaning they decide the story’s structure in advance of writing it.

You don’t need a short story outline to write a good short story. But, if you’d like to give yourself some scaffolding before putting words on the page, this article answers the question of how to write a short story outline:

https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-story-outline

How to Write a Short Story Step by Step

There are many ways to approach the short story craft, but this method is tried-and-tested for writers of all levels. Here’s how to write a short story step by step.

1. Start With an Idea

Often, generating an idea is the hardest part. You want to write, but what will you write about?

What’s more, it’s easy to start coming up with ideas and then dismissing them. You want to tell an authentic, original story, but everything you come up with has already been written, it seems.

Here are a few tips:

  • Originality presents itself in your storytelling, not in your ideas. For example, the premise of both Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden are very similar: two men and two women, in intertwining love triangles, sort out their feelings for each other amidst mischievous forest spirits, love potions, and friendship drama. The way each story is written makes them very distinct from one another, to the point where, unless it’s pointed out to you, you might not even notice the similarities.
  • An idea is not a final draft. You will find that exploring the possibilities of your story will generate something far different than the idea you started out with. This is a good thing—it means you made the story your own!
  • Experiment with genres and tropes. Even if you want to write literary fiction , pay attention to the narrative structures that drive genre stories, and practice your storytelling using those structures. Again, you will naturally make the story your own simply by playing with ideas.

If you’re struggling simply to find ideas, try out this prompt generator , or pull prompts from this Twitter .

2. Outline, OR Conceive Your Characters

If you plan to outline, do so once you’ve generated an idea. You can learn about how to write a short story outline earlier in this article.

If you don’t plan to outline, you should at least start with a character or characters. Certainly, you need a protagonist, but you should also think about any characters that aid or inhibit your protagonist’s journey.

When thinking about character development, ask the following questions:

  • What is my character’s background? Where do they come from, how did they get here, where do they want to be?
  • What does your character desire the most? This can be both material or conceptual, like “fitting in” or “being loved.”
  • What is your character’s fatal flaw? In other words, what limitation prevents the protagonist from achieving their desire? Often, this flaw is a blind spot that directly counters their desire. For example, self hatred stands in the way of a protagonist searching for love.
  • How does your character think and speak? Think of examples, both fictional and in the real world, who might resemble your character.

In short stories, there are rarely more characters than a protagonist, an antagonist (if relevant), and a small group of supporting characters. The more characters you include, the longer your story will be. Focus on making only one or two characters complex: it is absolutely okay to have the rest of the cast be flat characters that move the story along.

Learn more about character development here:

https://writers.com/character-development-definition

3. Write Scenes Around Conflict

Once you have an outline or some characters, start building scenes around conflict. Every part of your story, including the opening sentence, should in some way relate to the protagonist’s conflict.

Conflict is the lifeblood of storytelling: without it, the reader doesn’t have a clear reason to keep reading. Loveable characters are not enough, as the story has to give the reader something to root for.

Take, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story The Cask of Amontillado . We start at the conflict: the narrator has been slighted by Fortunato, and plans to exact revenge. Every scene in the story builds tension and follows the protagonist as he exacts this revenge.

In your story, start writing scenes around conflict, and make sure each paragraph and piece of dialogue relates, in some way, to your protagonist’s unmet desires.

4. Write Your First Draft

The scenes you build around conflict will eventually be stitched into a complete story. Make sure as the story progresses that each scene heightens the story’s tension, and that this tension remains unbroken until the climax resolves whether or not your protagonist meets their desires.

Don’t stress too hard on writing a perfect story. Rather, take Anne Lamott’s advice, and “write a shitty first draft.” The goal is not to pen a complete story at first draft; rather, it’s to set ideas down on paper. You are simply, as Shannon Hale suggests, “shoveling sand into a box so that later [you] can build castles.”

5. Step Away, Breathe, Revise

Whenever Stephen King finishes a novel, he puts it in a drawer and doesn’t think about it for 6 weeks. With short stories, you probably don’t need to take as long of a break. But, the idea itself is true: when you’ve finished your first draft, set it aside for a while. Let yourself come back to the story with fresh eyes, so that you can confidently revise, revise, revise .

In revision, you want to make sure each word has an essential place in the story, that each scene ramps up tension, and that each character is clearly defined. The culmination of these elements allows a story to explore complex themes and ideas, giving the reader something to think about after the story has ended.

6. Compare Against Our Short Story Checklist

Does your story have everything it needs to succeed? Compare it against this short story checklist, as written by our instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko.

Below is a collection of practical short story writing tips by Writers.com instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko . Each paragraph is its own checklist item: a core element of short story writing advice to follow unless you have clear reasons to the contrary. We hope it’s a helpful resource in your own writing.

Update 9/1/2020: We’ve now made a summary of Rosemary’s short story checklist available as a PDF download . Enjoy!

how to read a short story

Click to download

How to Write a Short Story: Length and Setting

Your short story is 1000 to 7500 words in length.

The story takes place in one time period, not spread out or with gaps other than to drive someplace, sleep, etc. If there are those gaps, there is a space between the paragraphs, the new paragraph beginning flush left, to indicate a new scene.

Each scene takes place in one location, or in continual transit, such as driving a truck or flying in a plane.

How to Write a Short Story: Point of View

Unless it’s a very lengthy Romance story, in which there may be two Point of View (POV) characters, there is one POV character. If we are told what any character secretly thinks, it will only be the POV character. The degree to which we are privy to the unexpressed thoughts, memories and hopes of the POV character remains consistent throughout the story.

You avoid head-hopping by only having one POV character per scene, even in a Romance. You avoid straying into even brief moments of telling us what other characters think other than the POV character. You use words like “apparently,” “obviously,” or “supposedly” to suggest how non-POV-characters think rather than stating it.

How to Write a Short Story: Protagonist, Antagonist, Motivation

Your short story has one clear protagonist who is usually the character changing most.

Your story has a clear antagonist, who generally makes the protagonist change by thwarting his goals.

(Possible exception to the two short story writing tips above: In some types of Mystery and Action stories, particularly in a series, etc., the protagonist doesn’t necessarily grow personally, but instead his change relates to understanding the antagonist enough to arrest or kill him.)

The protagonist changes with an Arc arising out of how he is stuck in his Flaw at the beginning of the story, which makes the reader bond with him as a human, and feel the pain of his problems he causes himself. (Or if it’s the non-personal growth type plot: he’s presented at the beginning of the story with a high-stakes problem that requires him to prevent or punish a crime.)

The protagonist usually is shown to Want something, because that’s what people normally do, defining their personalities and behavior patterns, pushing them onward from day to day. This may be obvious from the beginning of the story, though it may not become heightened until the Inciting Incident , which happens near the beginning of Act 1. The Want is usually something the reader sort of wants the character to succeed in, while at the same time, knows the Want is not in his authentic best interests. This mixed feeling in the reader creates tension.

The protagonist is usually shown to Need something valid and beneficial, but at first, he doesn’t recognize it, admit it, honor it, integrate it with his Want, or let the Want go so he can achieve the Need instead. Ideally, the Want and Need can be combined in a satisfying way toward the end for the sake of continuity of forward momentum of victoriously achieving the goals set out from the beginning. It’s the encounters with the antagonist that forcibly teach the protagonist to prioritize his Needs correctly and overcome his Flaw so he can defeat the obstacles put in his path.

The protagonist in a personal growth plot needs to change his Flaw/Want but like most people, doesn’t automatically do that when faced with the problem. He tries the easy way, which doesn’t work. Only when the Crisis takes him to a low point does he boldly change enough to become victorious over himself and the external situation. What he learns becomes the Theme.

Each scene shows its main character’s goal at its beginning, which aligns in a significant way with the protagonist’s overall goal for the story. The scene has a “charge,” showing either progress toward the goal or regression away from the goal by the ending. Most scenes end with a negative charge, because a story is about not obtaining one’s goals easily, until the end, in which the scene/s end with a positive charge.

The protagonist’s goal of the story becomes triggered until the Inciting Incident near the beginning, when something happens to shake up his life. This is the only major thing in the story that is allowed to be a random event that occurs to him.

How to Write a Short Story: Characters

Your characters speak differently from one another, and their dialogue suggests subtext, what they are really thinking but not saying: subtle passive-aggressive jibes, their underlying emotions, etc.

Your characters are not illustrative of ideas and beliefs you are pushing for, but come across as real people.

How to Write a Short Story: Prose

Your language is succinct, fresh and exciting, specific, colorful, avoiding clichés and platitudes. Sentence structures vary. In Genre stories, the language is simple, the symbolism is direct, and words are well-known, and sentences are relatively short. In Literary stories, you are freer to use more sophisticated ideas, words, sentence structures and underlying metaphors and implied motifs.

How to Write a Short Story: Story Structure

Your plot elements occur in the proper places according to classical Act Structure so the reader feels he has vicariously gone through a harrowing trial with the protagonist and won, raising his sense of hope and possibility. Literary short stories may be more subtle, with lower stakes, experimenting beyond classical structures like the Hero’s Journey. They can be more like vignettes sometimes, or even slice-of-life, though these types are hard to place in publications.

In Genre stories, all the questions are answered, threads are tied up, problems are solved, though the results of carnage may be spread over the landscape. In Literary short stories, you are free to explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and inchoate, realistic endings that suggest multiple interpretations, and unresolved issues.

Some Literary stories may be nonrealistic, such as with Surrealism, Absurdism, New Wave Fabulism, Weird and Magical Realism . If this is what you write, they still need their own internal logic and they should not be bewildering as to the what the reader is meant to experience, whether it’s a nuanced, unnameable mood or a trip into the subconscious.

Literary stories may also go beyond any label other than Experimental. For example, a story could be a list of To Do items on a paper held by a magnet to a refrigerator for the housemate to read. The person writing the list may grow more passive-aggressive and manipulative as the list grows, and we learn about the relationship between the housemates through the implied threats and cajoling.

How to Write a Short Story: Capturing Reader Interest

Your short story is suspenseful, meaning readers hope the protagonist will achieve his best goal, his Need, by the Climax battle against the antagonist.

Your story entertains. This is especially necessary for Genre short stories.

The story captivates readers at the very beginning with a Hook, which can be a puzzling mystery to solve, an amazing character’s or narrator’s Voice, an astounding location, humor, a startling image, or a world the reader wants to become immersed in.

Expository prose (telling, like an essay) takes up very, very little space in your short story, and it does not appear near the beginning. The story is in Narrative format instead, in which one action follows the next. You’ve removed every unnecessary instance of Expository prose and replaced it with showing Narrative. Distancing words like “used to,” “he would often,” “over the years, he,” “each morning, he” indicate that you are reporting on a lengthy time period, summing it up, rather than sticking to Narrative format, in which immediacy makes the story engaging.

You’ve earned the right to include Expository Backstory by making the reader yearn for knowing what happened in the past to solve a mystery. This can’t possibly happen at the beginning, obviously. Expository Backstory does not take place in the first pages of your story.

Your reader cares what happens and there are high stakes (especially important in Genre stories). Your reader worries until the end, when the protagonist survives, succeeds in his quest to help the community, gets the girl, solves or prevents the crime, achieves new scientific developments, takes over rule of his realm, etc.

Every sentence is compelling enough to urge the reader to read the next one—because he really, really wants to—instead of doing something else he could be doing. Your story is not going to be assigned to people to analyze in school like the ones you studied, so you have found a way from the beginning to intrigue strangers to want to spend their time with your words.

Where to Read and Submit Short Stories

Whether you’re looking for inspiration or want to publish your own stories, you’ll find great literary journals for writers of all backgrounds at this article:

https://writers.com/short-story-submissions

Learn How to Write a Short Story at Writers.com

The short story takes an hour to learn and a lifetime to master. Learn how to write a short story with Writers.com. Our upcoming fiction courses will give you the ropes to tell authentic, original short stories that captivate and entrance your readers.

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Rosemary – Is there any chance you could add a little something to your checklist? I’d love to know the best places to submit our short stories for publication. Thanks so much.

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Hi, Kim Hanson,

Some good places to find publications specific to your story are NewPages, Poets and Writers, Duotrope, and The Submission Grinder.

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“ In Genre stories, all the questions are answered, threads are tied up, problems are solved, though the results of carnage may be spread over the landscape.”

Not just no but NO.

See for example the work of MacArthur Fellow Kelly Link.

[…] How to Write a Short Story: The Short Story Checklist […]

' src=

Thank you for these directions and tips. It’s very encouraging to someone like me, just NOW taking up writing.

[…] Writers.com. A great intro to writing. https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-short-story […]

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5.2: How to Analyze a Short Story

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Old Fence

What Is a Short Story?

A short story is a work of short, narrative prose that is usually centered around one single event. It is limited in scope and has an introduction, body and conclusion. Although a short story has much in common with a novel (See How to Analyze a Novel), it is written with much greater precision. You will often be asked to write a literary analysis. An analysis of a short story requires basic knowledge of literary elements. The following guide and questions may help you:

Setting is a description of where and when the story takes place. In a short story there are fewer settings compared to a novel. The time is more limited. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • How is the setting created? Consider geography, weather, time of day, social conditions, etc.
  • What role does setting play in the story? Is it an important part of the plot or theme? Or is it just a backdrop against which the action takes place?

Study the time period, which is also part of the setting, and ask yourself the following:

  • When was the story written?
  • Does it take place in the present, the past, or the future?
  • How does the time period affect the language, atmosphere or social circumstances of the short story?

Characterization

Characterization deals with how the characters in the story are described. In short stories there are usually fewer characters compared to a novel. They usually focus on one central character or protagonist. Ask yourself the following:

  • Who is the main character?
  • Are the main character and other characters described through dialogue – by the way they speak (dialect or slang for instance)?
  • Has the author described the characters by physical appearance, thoughts and feelings, and interaction (the way they act towards others)?
  • Are they static/flat characters who do not change?
  • Are they dynamic/round characters who DO change?
  • What type of characters are they? What qualities stand out? Are they stereotypes?
  • Are the characters believable?

Plot and structure

The plot is the main sequence of events that make up the story. In short stories the plot is usually centered around one experience or significant moment. Consider the following questions:

  • What is the most important event?
  • How is the plot structured? Is it linear, chronological or does it move around?
  • Is the plot believable?

Narrator and Point of view

The narrator is the person telling the story. Consider this question: Are the narrator and the main character the same?

By point of view we mean from whose eyes the story is being told. Short stories tend to be told through one character’s point of view. The following are important questions to consider:

  • Who is the narrator or speaker in the story?
  • Does the author speak through the main character?
  • Is the story written in the first person “I” point of view?
  • Is the story written in a detached third person “he/she” point of view?
  • Is there an “all-knowing” third person who can reveal what all the characters are thinking and doing at all times and in all places?

Conflict or tension is usually the heart of the short story and is related to the main character. In a short story there is usually one main struggle.

  • How would you describe the main conflict?
  • Is it an internal conflict within the character?
  • Is it an external conflict caused by the surroundings or environment the main character finds himself/herself in?

The climax is the point of greatest tension or intensity in the short story. It can also be the point where events take a major turn as the story races towards its conclusion. Ask yourself:

  • Is there a turning point in the story?
  • When does the climax take place?

The theme is the main idea, lesson, or message in the short story. It may be an abstract idea about the human condition, society, or life. Ask yourself:

  • How is the theme expressed?
  • Are any elements repeated and therefore suggest a theme?
  • Is there more than one theme?

The author’s style has to do with the his or her vocabulary, use of imagery, tone, or the feeling of the story. It has to do with the author’s attitude toward the subject. In some short stories the tone can be ironic, humorous, cold, or dramatic.

  • Is the author’s language full of figurative language?
  • What images are used?
  • Does the author use a lot of symbolism? Metaphors (comparisons that do not use “as” or “like”) or similes (comparisons that use “as” or “like”)?

Your literary analysis of a short story will often be in the form of an essay where you may be asked to give your opinions of the short story at the end. Choose the elements that made the greatest impression on you. Point out which character/characters you liked best or least and always support your arguments.

  • How to Analyze a Short Story. Authored by : Carol Dwankowski. Provided by : ndla.no. Located at : http://ndla.no/en/node/9075?fag=42&meny=102113 . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

How to watch and stream the 2024 Oscar-nominated shorts

  • Updated: Feb. 20, 2024, 12:52 p.m. |
  • Published: Feb. 20, 2024, 12:31 p.m.

Nominated shorts - live-action, animated and documentary

Scenes from the 2024 Oscar-nominated shorts, including animated, live-action and documentary films. Film stills via YouTube, Disney+, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times

  • Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

The nominees for best picture get all the shine at the Oscars .

But quality storytelling can also be found in nominated films that aren’t feature-length.

The Oscar-nominated shorts span three categories at the Academy Awards : animated shorts, live-action shorts and documentary shorts. However, it can sometimes be challenging to find ways to watch all of these films.

With the 2024 Oscars set for Sunday, March 10, the time is ripe to catch up. So how do you screen the Oscar-nominated shorts?

Read on for movie theater and streaming information. You can also watch some full films right in this post ( caution: videos may contain profanity or explicit material ).

The short film categories are worlds unto themselves, diverse in story, style and language (English, French, Farsi, Mandarin, Hebrew and Danish).

A sampling of live-action shorts, for example, yields a rich array of drama, tragedy and comedy:

Wes Anderson ’s very Wes Anderson adaptation of a 1977 Roald Dahl tale starring Benedict Cumberbatch , Ralph Fiennes , Dev Patel and Ben Kingsley (” The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar ”); a Danish film about a man who forges an unlikely connection while trying to avoid confronting his wife’s death (” Knight of Fortune ”); the journey of a single mother in Arkansas ( Brittany Snow ) who must travel across state lines for an urgent abortion (“ Red, White and Blue ”); and the harrowing story a driver ( David Oyelowo ) trying to survive deep grief in England (“ The After ”).

“Short” is relative — the films run anywhere from seven minutes to 39 minutes.

Select movie theaters, including The Clairidge in Montclair , the Bernardsville Cinema 3 , the IFC Center in Manhattan and the Palisades Center AMC in West Nyack, N.Y., are currently screening nominated short films by category.

Each short (five per category, 15 total) is screened back-to-back in the time it would take to see one full-length movie. That means you can buy tickets to see all of the animated shorts, documentary shorts or live-action shorts — or all three (at IFC, the documentaries are split into two screenings).

It’s not binge-watching ... it’s the Oscar-nominated shorts.

Some films are also available to watch for free or no additional cost on streaming services, YouTube and websites, or can be rented or purchased for on-demand viewing.

See the full list of nominated films below with online viewing options (if available) and run times for each.

Oscar-nominated shorts

Live-action shorts.

“ The After ,” directed by Misan Harriman, is streaming on Netflix (18 minutes)

“ Invincible ,” directed by Vincent René-Lortie, is available on Vimeo (free, 30 minutes)

“ Knight of Fortune ,” directed by Lasse Lyskjær Noer, is available via The New Yorker’s YouTube channel (watch below, 24 minutes)

“ Red, White and Blue ,” directed by Nazrin Choudhury, is available to rent on Vimeo ($1.99, 22 minutes)

“ The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar ,” directed by Wes Anderson, is streaming on Netflix (39 minutes)

Animated shorts

“ Letter to a Pig ,” directed by Tal Kantor, can be rented on Vimeo ($3.99, 17 minutes)

“ Ninety-Five Senses ,” directed by Jerusha Hess and Jared Hess, can be watched on Documentary+ (free, 13 minutes)

“ Our Uniform ,” directed by Yegane Moghaddam (7 minutes)

“ Pachyderme ,” directed by Stéphanie Clément, can be rented ($3.99) or purchased ($9.99) on Vimeo (11 minutes)

“ War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko ,” directed by Dave Mullins (11 minutes)

Documentary shorts

“ The ABCs of Book Banning ,” directed by Sheila Nevins, Nazenet Habtezghi and Trish Adlesic, can be streamed on Paramount+ (27 minutes)

“ The Barber of Little Rock ,” directed by John Hoffman and Christine Turner, is available via The New Yorker’s YouTube channel (watch below, 35 minutes)

“ Island in Between ,” directed by S. Leo Chiang, is available via The New York Times’ YouTube channel (watch below, 20 minutes)

“ The Last Repair Shop ,” directed by Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers, is also available on YouTube, via the Los Angeles Times and Searchlight Pictures (watch below, 39 minutes)

“ Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó ,” directed by Sean Wang, is streaming on Disney+ (17 minutes)

Stories by Amy Kuperinsky

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scenic view of the river Lerryn and hills behind in Cornwall

What are the proposals to restrict short-term lets in England?

Ministers hope a registration scheme for holiday lets on sites such as Airbnb will increase the supply of homes for locals

New rules for short-term holiday lets in England were unveiled by the government on Monday, with the aim of reining in a sector that campaigners claim is “ out of control ”.

Amid growing concern about an explosion in the number of properties being let out on a short-term basis, leading to local residents being pushed out of their communities, ministers are proposing to introduce a registration scheme for holiday lets, and will also require them to get planning permission.

However, many campaigners say the planned changes do not go nearly far enough.

So what’s the problem?

In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people turning their properties into holiday rentals and short-term lets. A lot of this has been fuelled by the ubiquity of platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com that arguably make it easy to do this as a potentially lucrative and often largely unregulated side hustle .

The coronavirus pandemic then turbo-charged this trend because it triggered a boom in domestic holidays and short breaks – something that has continued during the cost of living crisis.

At the same time a less favourable tax regime for buy-to-let following changes made in 2015 has meant many landlords and investors have left that sector and switched to catering to tourists – particularly in popular destinations such as the Lake District and Cornwall.

The result of all this, said campaign group Generation Rent , was that “families are being driven out of their communities by the disastrous loss of homes into holiday lets, with over 35,000 privately rented homes lost to Airbnb-style short-term lets since 2019”.

Registered holiday lets and second homes have an arguably negligible effect on housing supply across England , accounting for 26,000 properties compared with the 682,000 new homes added to the nation’s housing stock over 2019-22. However, the effect they do have is highly concentrated: 80% of the recent growth in holiday homes has happened in 25 local council areas.

There is also the issue of antisocial behaviour linked to short-term lets, such as fly-tipping, bags of rubbish and noisy parties.

What has the government announced?

It has acknowledged there is a problem. The housing secretary, Michael Gove , said on Monday that in some areas “too many local families and young people feel they are being shut out of the housing market and denied the opportunity to rent or buy in their own community”.

It has been consulting on this issue and has now announced a shake-up of the rules in England.

There are two main proposals. Planning permission will be required for future short-term lets, which the government argues will give councils more power to “control” them. The proposed changes would create a planning “use class” for short-term lets that are not used as a sole or main home.

Meanwhile, a mandatory national register will be set up to provide local authorities with information on short-term lets in their area and, in theory, enable them to monitor their use, the impact on the local area and whether health and safety rules are being met.

More detailed information will be set out by ministers in the coming months, and the government said the reforms would be introduced “from this summer”.

I sense a ‘but’ …

So yes, while many commentators were happy to see the government taking action, some pointed out omissions or what they argued were sizeable flaws in the shake-up.

The “future short-term lets” aspect of the first proposal is important: the government said existing short-term lets “will automatically be reclassified into the new use class and will not require a planning application”. Generation Rent said that allowing existing holiday lets to automatically gain permission to continue “risks shutting the stable door once the horse has bolted” and would do nothing about the thousands of homes that had already been lost.

Meanwhile, ministers said homeowners would still be able to let out their own home for up to 90 nights a year without planning permission. The government had been looking at whether there should be a limit of 30, 60 or 90 nights a year.

On top of this, the government also said it was looking at how to ensure the register “does not apply disproportionate regulation – for example on property owners that let out their home infrequently”.

The fact that the government announcement included a positive quote from Airbnb welcoming the register as “good news for everyone” was seized on by some commentators, with Jonathan Eley of the Financial Times posting on X that it “tells you everything you need to know about the pointlessness of the legislation”.

Aren’t some areas already cracking down on holiday lets?

Yes. In Scotland, for example, new rules took effect on 1 October last year. There, people must have a licence before they offer short-term lets, and operating without one is a criminal offence: you could get a fine of £2,500 and be banned from applying for a licence for a year. The rules apply even if someone occasionally lets out their spare room or sublets their property while on holiday.

What do campaigners say needs to be done?

Groups such as Generation Rent say the government should rethink its approach and give councils the power to require holiday lets to join a licensing scheme.

It has also called for the introduction of local caps on the number of holiday lets that can operate in an area – particularly those locations with especially serious housing affordability problems.

There is already precedent for a national licensing regime. A fairly strict one is in place for larger private rented homes – large houses in multiple occupation – in England and Wales.

  • Renting property
  • Michael Gove

More on this story

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Private tenants in Scotland ‘face big rent rises and mass evictions’ from April

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Renters in England face rising no-fault evictions as reform bill delayed again

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Cost of private renting in UK rising faster than ever, says ONS

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UK renters offer tenant CVs and year’s rent upfront to try to secure a home

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Cashing in? The mortgage-free landlords who are raising the rent anyway

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No-fault evictions in England ‘soaring out of control’, say campaigners

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Ministers ‘betray’ renters in England with delay to no-fault evictions ban

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High rents and benefit cuts push poorer renters out of UK’s cities, report finds

Most viewed.

How the ‘Who TF Did I Marry?’ series took over TikTok

Reesa teesa’s story of marrying and divorcing a man she called a ‘pathological liar’ has had users on the edge of their seats.

how to read a short story

Reesa Teesa posted nearly eight hours of video to TikTok in her quest to tell the story of a messy marriage and divorce she claimed to have had with a “pathological liar.” Millions of views on each of her 50 videos suggest people are listening from start to finish.

On a platform known for dances and seconds-long dopamine rushes, Teesa’s story shows people can pay attention after all.

A growing number of viewers have committed to watching the 50-part TikTok story “Who TF Did I Marry?”, a saga in which Teesa, the series’s narrator, recounts her whirlwind relationship with Legion, a man she is convinced is a pathological liar.

In it, Teesa says she describes a love so riddled with red flags, “you would have thought I was colorblind because I ignored all of that.” She tells the story without any frills, and in the hopes that her traumatizing story can help others trust their gut and avoid a similar fate.

“If just one woman watches these videos and she’s like, ‘You know what? Something don’t sit right with me. Let me look into this,’ then it was worth it,” Teesa said in an interlude video.

The Style section

In the videos, Teesa tells her story to the camera like she’s on FaceTime with a friend — sometimes wearing heatless curlers and sometimes while driving. When Teesa met Legion in March 2020, she says, she fell hard for him and his desire to provide for her financially. He told her during their first phone conversation that he was a former football player and divorced regional manager who recently moved to Georgia from California, she said, and on their first date he talked about wanting to get married, start a family and own a house — goals Teesa also dreamed of.

Within months, Legion moved into the townhouse Teesa was renting so they could weather covid lockdown together, she said. After Teesa found out she was pregnant, she said the pressure, also fueled by religious expectations, was building to settle down.

They looked at several homes, Teesa continued, but they never closed a deal after Legion refused to show proof that he had the money to support his $700,000, all-cash offers. She recounted how Legion said he was transferring money from his offshore account to buy her an Audi Q8 and said that the SUV would be delivered to their home, but it never arrived.

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Throughout the series, Teesa is quick to acknowledge the mistakes she made staying with her ex-husband despite him not keeping his word: “I’m not a dumb person,” she said in one video . “But it just never dawned on me the things that you have to now investigate.” She also emphasizes that the pandemic made their relationship’s progression and delays Legion said they were experiencing more believable.

She miscarried, which Teesa said she later saw as a blessing. No house was purchased, she said. And Teesa said she bought herself a car, a Nissan Altima.

They got married in January 2021, she said, but the lies didn’t stop.

By the time she filed for divorce, she allegedly learned that he never lived in California and had divorced at least twice before marrying her. Through government records, and conversations with his family members, Teesa said she found out he lied profusely about his family — pretending to have two sisters and two half-brothers, lying about family members dying of covid when they had passed away years prior and pretending to be on phone calls with relatives for half-hour periods — or longer.

Legion lied about his money and his job, Teesa said: He was a forklift operator, not a regional manager or vice president.

The Washington Post has been unable to confirm Legion’s identity or reach him for comment.

@reesamteesa Who TF Did I Marry- Part One #pathologicalliar #reesateesa #fypシ #fyp ♬ original sound - ReesaTeesa

After the series ended last week, it became the talk of TikTok, compared to other stories told online that were later adapted, such as “Zola” and “Dirty John.” Viewers began suggesting the titles “Legion of Lies” or “Surviving Legion” for the eventual book or Netflix or Lifetime movie the series would inspire.

Some have begged for “proof of funds” to be emblazoned on merchandise. (Official T-shirts were announced Tuesday, but they say “I survived Legion” and “#WhoTFDidIMarry.”) Other commenters said Teesa’s dreams deserved to come true: to own a BMW X5, take the trip to London and Paris she mentioned in the story, and find an honest, loving partner. (She announced Wednesday that she’ll be traveling to London and Paris, and she’ll document her trip on TikTok.)

“People always say, ‘People have such short attention spans now. … I actually think it takes more brainpower to scroll every 10 seconds and have to process a new face, a new topic, a new caption, a new comment section,’” said Coco Mocoe, a 28-year-old podcast host and digital media trend predictor in Los Angeles. “People are craving the ability to find creators where they put their phone up, they find the video, and they can just set it to the side while they listen and they brush their teeth, or they do the dishes.”

After Universal Music Group pulled its songs from the platform, TikTok’s desire grew for content that does not rely on TikTok sounds and pop music, Mocoe added.

Fans have latched onto Teesa because of her gracious and genuine demeanor despite what she experienced, said Alex Pearlman, a 39-year-old TikTok creator and stand-up comedian in Philadelphia.

“She also reminds you that he’s [Legion] a person. And, like, that’s rare in a story,” he said. “Usually, someone is a villain. And she’s like, ‘No, this is the man I married.’”

Amber Wallin , a 32-year-old comedian, host and podcaster in Los Angeles, made her own comedic video, earning millions of views for interrogating her husband in reaction to the series. Wallin said Teesa’s honesty and thorough rationale for overlooking red flags might have helped many viewers sympathize with her instead of judging her.

“We all were in a state of desperation during the pandemic , ” Wallin said. “Who amongst us didn’t do something ridiculous when we all thought the world was ending?”

With her growing group of supporters, Teesa has become something of a case study for entertainment producers, said Meridith Rojas, 36, co-founder of the brand studio Free Electron in Los Angeles.

“People want to be on TikTok, so they will stop scrolling if you give them something to really sink their teeth into,” Rojas said. “That’s what this creator did.”

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Here’s Where Biden’s Climate Law Is Working, and Where It’s Falling Short

Electric vehicles are booming as expected, a new analysis found, but renewable power isn’t growing as quickly as hoped.

A worker stands on a line of solar panels being installed near a home as he drills the panels into place.

By Brad Plumer

Reporting from Washington

A year and a half after President Biden signed into law a sweeping bill to tackle climate change, sales of electric vehicles have largely boomed in line with expectations, according to a new analysis by three groups tracking the impact of the law.

But problems with supply chains, obtaining permits and overcoming local opposition have bogged down one of the climate law’s other big goals: generating vastly more electricity from wind, solar and other nonpolluting sources. Even though the United States added record amounts of renewable power and batteries last year, that rapid growth fell short of the levels needed to meet the country’s goals for slashing the emissions that are rapidly heating the planet, the analysis said.

When the law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, was approved in 2022, analysts predicted that it would help cut America’s greenhouse gas emissions roughly 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The measure contains hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and spending for clean energy technologies like wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and hydrogen fuels.

The law is meeting expectations in some areas and falling short in others, according to the new assessment by researchers from the Princeton-led REPEAT project, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, the research firm Rhodium Group, and Energy Innovation, a nonprofit organization.”

Electric vehicle sales are largely on track to help fulfill the law’s projected emissions reductions after increasing more than 50 percent over the past year. A record 9.2 percent of all new cars sold in the United States in 2023 were either fully electric or plug-in hybrid models, which was on the high end of what analysts had predicted would happen after the law passed.

It is less certain that automakers will repeat that torrid sales growth this year. Many of the most enthusiastic early adopters have already bought plug-in vehicles, while potential buyers are put off by high sticker prices and the relative scarcity of charging stations. Companies like Tesla are already warning that sales growth will probably slow in the near term.

Still, if electric vehicle sales only rise between 30 and 40 percent in 2024, a noticeable slowdown from last year, that would be in line with the law’s emissions targets, the analysis found.

The picture for renewable power is mixed, however. Last year, the United States added a record 32.3 gigawatts of electric capacity to the grid from solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. In many parts of the country, the tax credits provided by the law are making renewable sources of electricity cheaper to build than more polluting sources like coal or natural gas.

But when the Inflation Reduction Act passed, analysts had projected that the United States would add an average of 46 to 79 gigawatts of carbon-free electricity to the grid annually in 2023 and 2024. There are projects pending this year that would deliver about 60 gigawatts but not all of them are expected to be completed on time, the analysis said. That means the country will be behind schedule in deploying new clean electricity sources.

The biggest obstacles facing renewable electricity are logistical, the report said. Wind and solar projects are facing lengthy waits to connect to the nation’s clogged electric grids, and it can take a decade or more to get permits for new high-voltage transmission lines and build them. In many parts of the country, new wind or solar farms are facing opposition from local residents . Plans for offshore wind farms have been bogged down by snarled supply chains and shipping restrictions.

These obstacles could pose an even bigger challenge over time. To meet the law’s expected emissions reductions, the nation would need to add roughly 70 to 126 gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity each year between 2025 and 2030 — a staggering increase from today’s levels, the analysis found. Without major changes to permitting and transmission, neither of which were addressed by the Inflation Reduction Act, those numbers could prove unattainable.

“Tackling these non-cost barriers will be critical,” the analysis says, for the law “to achieve its full clean energy deployment and emissions reduction potential.”

Separately, the Inflation Reduction Act also provided hefty tax credits to companies that manufacture batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and other technologies in the United States rather than abroad. That provision has proved popular: Companies invested $44 billion last year in domestic clean-energy manufacturing, with more planned in the years ahead.

Other aspects of the law will take longer to have an impact. There are tax credits for businesses that build advanced nuclear reactors or create hydrogen fuels using renewable electricity or add devices to factories that capture carbon dioxide emissions and bury them underground . While multiple companies are developing such projects in the United States, none have been built yet.

Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming. More about Brad Plumer

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  1. How to Begin a Short Story: 5 Ways to Hook Your Readers Quickly

    How to Begin a Short Story: 5 Ways to Hook Your Readers Quickly Written by MasterClass Last updated: Sep 2, 2021 • 3 min read Short stories are self-contained works of prose fiction whose function is to impart a moral, capture a moment, or evoke a certain mood.

  2. PDF might Terms to Know

    How to Read a Short Story Before Ö Look at the story's title. What might this story be about? Terms to Know • character • conflict • conventions • imagery • metaphor • mood • motif • plot • repetition • structure • suspense • symbol • theme(s) • tone Ö Use and develop your background knowledge about this subject.

  3. How to Analyze a Short Story (with Pictures)

    4. Divide the plot into its main parts. Traditional plots can be divided into a clear beginning, middle, and end, also known as "rising action," "climax," and "falling action.". Keep in mind, though, that these 3 parts may not be balanced, especially in a short story, where the text might be mostly rising action.

  4. How To Read And Understand Short Stories Properly

    Identify The "Meat and Potatoes" Of The Story. This is really important. There will always exist an essence, a decisive moment in many short stories in which readers should eagerly anticipate. This in turn will help them get high on the characters while finding purpose to what the story really talks about.

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    📚 Read the Great Books with Hardcore Literature: https://www.patreon.com/hardcoreliterature/about————————————🎙️ https://open.spotify ...

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    How to Read Short Stories Like an Underdog 4.17.2020 Literature in Translation By Christina Soto van der Plas W hen someone asks you, "What are you reading?" while you are reading short story writer Juan Carlos Onetti's "A Dream Come True," you will have to think twice.

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    "The Devil in America " by Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor) Kai Ashante Wilson has quite a talent. This ties present day police brutality towards African Americans to post-emancipation America and a family of freed slaves that are living with the Devil that followed them from Africa. "The City Born Great" by N.K. Jemisin (Tor)

  8. What is a Short Story? Definitions and Examples

    Definitions and Examples A short story is a form of fiction writing defined by its brevity. A short story usually falls between 3,000 and 7,000 words — the average short story length is around the 5,000 mark.

  9. What I Learned From Reading a Short Story a Day For a Month

    For the Long Short Story Project, I mined the library and my private collection of books for short story anthologies in a variety of themes, from YA romance to locked-room mysteries to Chinese speculative fiction in translation and Native and Indigenous-focused kid lit stories.

  10. How to Read Short Stories by Shmoop

    Short stories are really the best of both worlds: short enough to hold your attention but long enough to be meaningful—but only if you read them well. This v...

  11. How Do I Go About Reading Short Stories Again?

    We read a lot of short stories in those classes, and I fell in love with story after story. I started filling an old binder with the photocopied printouts of stories we read in class. Writer friends recommended stories, which I'd track down in the library, copy, and add to the binder. Of course I'd read short fiction before, both in and out ...

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    Which short story should you read next? Discover the perfect short story for you. Takes 30 seconds! Start quiz Free Short Stories to Read Right Now These individual short stories are the best of the best — and the even better news is that they're available for free online for you to peruse.

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    25000+ Best Short Stories to Read Online for Free with Reedsy Prompts Thousands of Short Stories to Read Online Looking for a steady supply of short stories? Every week thousands of writers submit stories to our writing contest. Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest . Recently featured

  14. 34 English Short Stories with Big Ideas for Thoughtful ...

    This very short story from India was originally written in Sanskrit (an ancient language). When a group of doves is caught in a hunter's net, they must work together as a team to escape from the hunter's clutches. You can listen to a reading of the story as you read along on this website. 4. "Royal Servant"

  15. How to Write a Short Story in 9 Simple Steps

    1. Know what a short story is versus a novel 2. Pick a simple, central premise 3. Build a small but distinct cast of characters 4. Begin writing close to the end 5. Shut out your internal editor 6. Finish the first draft 7. Edit the short story 8. Share the story with beta readers 9. Submit the short story to publications

  16. Story Analysis: How to Analyze a Short Story Step-by-Step

    In order to analyze a short story step-by-step, it is important to know the basics of story analysis. Let's take a look at the five key elements of a short story. Characters Characters (both major and minor) are what bring life to a story. Writers use them to transcend important messages throughout the plotline.

  17. 10 of the Best Very Short Stories That Can Be Read Online

    1. Anton Chekhov, 'The Student'. A key device in many Chekhov short stories is the epiphany: a sudden realisation or moment of enlightenment experienced by one of the story's characters, usually the protagonist.In many ways, the epiphany can be said to perform a similar function to the plot twist or revelation at the end of a more traditional (i.e., plot-driven) short story.

  18. How to Read Very Short Fiction and Enjoy It

    The enjoyment of reading a short story will be enhanced if the reader has the appropriate expectations. The difference between long and short fiction is comparable to the difference between a mansion and a cabin on the lake. Long fiction gives the reader everything they could want in the story, including backstories, side stories, and many ...

  19. Short Story Writing For Beginners

    How can you start writing short stories if you're a beginner? First, what is a short story? Neil Gaiman has a good definition: "Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner." Why should you write a short story?

  20. How to Write a Short Story: The Short Story Checklist

    In your story, start writing scenes around conflict, and make sure each paragraph and piece of dialogue relates, in some way, to your protagonist's unmet desires. 4. Write Your First Draft. The scenes you build around conflict will eventually be stitched into a complete story.

  21. Take risks and tell the truth: how to write a great short story

    Short stories can explore ideas as well as emotions - huge ideas can fit into short stories. For proof, read the work of Jorge Luis Borges . In fact, I second Roberto Bolaño's advice to ...

  22. How to Write a Short Story: Step-by-Step Guide

    Give enough explanation so the reader understands what's happening in a scene; don't slow them down with paragraphs of backstory and exposition. Keep the ending in mind. As you write, determine whether each sentence ultimately progresses the plot. If it doesn't, either cut it or rework it so it does progress the plot.

  23. 5.2: How to Analyze a Short Story

    A short story is a work of short, narrative prose that is usually centered around one single event. It is limited in scope and has an introduction, body and conclusion. Although a short story has much in common with a novel (See How to Analyze a Novel), it is written with much greater precision. You will often be asked to write a literary analysis.

  24. How to watch and stream the 2024 Oscar-nominated shorts

    Read on for movie theater and streaming information. ... The short film categories are worlds unto themselves, diverse in story, style and language (English, French, Farsi, Mandarin, Hebrew and ...

  25. What are the proposals to restrict short-term lets in England?

    New rules for short-term holiday lets in England were unveiled by the government on Monday, with the aim of reining in a sector that campaigners claim is "out of control". Amid growing concern ...

  26. How the 'Who TF Did I Marry?' series took over TikTok

    Other commenters said Teesa's dreams deserved to come true: to own a BMW X5, take the trip to London and Paris she mentioned in the story, and find an honest, loving partner.

  27. Here's Where Biden's Climate Law Is Working, and Where It's Falling Short

    Even though the United States added record amounts of renewable power and batteries last year, that rapid growth fell short of the levels needed to meet the country's goals for slashing the ...