Step 2: If you haven’t already, decide what your story is about. Will you sit at your kitchen table? Go to a park? Do you need to acquire a notebook, or do plot research ahead of time? (You can keep track of your progress in the space at right.)Īlso to do in advance: Decide where you’ll write and what has to happen so that when your first writing session arrives, you’re ready. Different writers set different daily goals for themselves, shooting for 500 words (or 250 or 1,000) or writing for a set length of time, including using something known as the Pomodoro Technique that breaks your workday into 25-minute chunks. Though your story also can be any length you want - short stories encapsulate everything from flash fiction, which can be just a few paragraphs, to Alice Munro’s epic 70-pagers - it’s useful to have a rough idea of how long it will take to write. An ideal schedule might be for two hours each on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but whatever you can manage is fine. Step 1: Look at your calendar and decide in advance which day(s) and time(s) you’ll write.
Here’s a one-month plan for completing your first short story. It also should be fun! The act of constructing plots, developing characters and creating dialogue can be challenging, even frustrating, but I never find it boring, and it just might allow you to escape from your daily life at the same time that you access the most imaginative parts of your own brain. It’s one you’re a lot likelier to finish if, rather than waiting for the muse, you create the possibility for inspiration by planning a time and setting up the circumstances that will allow you to write regularly. Though some people have knocked out an entire short story in a single sitting, it’s more realistic to see writing a story not as an inspiration-fueled creative binge but as a multiweek project.
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