The slowest way to write a novel is to start writing a novel.
That sounds backward, but think about the analogy of running a marathon. Nobody gets off the couch and runs 26 miles on day one. They run a mile, then a 5K, then a 10K, then a half marathon, building up gradually until the full marathon is possible. Skip that progression and you’ll end up injured or discouraged, and no closer to finishing a marathon.
Yet that’s exactly how most new novelists approach fiction. They open a blank document and start typing chapter one of a 90,000-word novel, often the first book in a series they haven’t earned yet, without ever having practiced the craft.
By the time anyone reads it, the same beginner mistakes are baked into 600 pages, and revising all of it is so exhausting that most writers either quit or publish a book that readers can’t finish.
Short stories are the “mile run” of fiction. For the word count of one novel, a writer could produce 18 short stories, 18 openings, 18 endings, and 18 chances to hand a finished piece to a reader and find out what works.
Short stories also double as reader magnets that build an email list, and they can be sold, licensed, or bundled into collections.
To learn about how to write short stories well, I interviewed Joanna Penn. She is a bestselling author who has sold more than a million books and hosts one of the longest-running podcasts for writers anywhere, longer-running even than Novel Marketing. She’s Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn, and she’s a friend of the show.
Joanna: Thanks for having me back. I do have to burst your bubble a little on short stories though. I wrote five novels before I ever wrote a short story, so we’ll be taking a slightly different tack today. They can be good practice, but they can also just be wonderful things in themselves. Two different angles.
Thomas: Most authors do start with novels, and the ones who make it are the ones with persistence. I knew a guy in college who just got up and ran a marathon cold. He was sore afterward, but he finished.
Still, in terms of reproducible strategies that make success more likely for more people, starting small does work, because not everyone is as great as the great Joanna Penn.
What makes a short story a completely different art form?
Joanna: For a long time I thought, “What’s the point of writing a short story?” You’d think a 5,000-word short story takes a week and a 50,000-word novel takes ten weeks, but that’s not true. A 5,000-word story can take you a day, or it can take months. I reworked one submission for a Stephen King competition for ages.
The main thing is to read a lot of short stories because they’re far more varied than novels. They don’t have to have the shape of a novel or a clear ending. You can play with genre more, and they’re just creative fun. I make money from book sales, so that matters to me too, but with a short story, almost all of that pressure comes off.
I love your marathon metaphor, but let’s face it, training for a marathon isn’t fun either way. I want people to take the idea of a short story as, what if writing was fun again? We get so obsessed with sales and marketing and platforms and reader magnets. Why not just write something silly, or dark, or romantic, without the stress of trying to sell it?
Thomas: It’s a bit like innovation in cinematography. A full-length blockbuster that has to make a billion dollars looks exactly like you’d expect, because there’s only one kind of movie that sells a billion tickets.
Compare that to a music video. They’re two to five minutes long and incredibly creative visually, using techniques you’d never see in a film. It’s a lot easier to experiment with something wacky when you’re only committing to two minutes, and there’s a surprising amount of storytelling you can pack into a short song.
Short stories work the same way for experimenting with genre. If someone wants to try their hand at a mystery, they should write a mystery short story first. Mystery makes a great format for short fiction, because you can practice withholding and divulging information at the same time.
Joanna: Mystery is a good example because a mystery novel has specific things that have to happen, but a short story can start with just a question. A mystery is essentially a question of who did it, how did it happen, or even just "what if?" If you don’t tie things up in a crime novel, readers feel short-changed.
I got into short stories young with Roald Dahl. People think of him as a children’s author, but Tales of the Unexpected is dark stuff. I was allowed to read them because they were shelved with the kids’ books. What I love about them is that feeling of "Whoa, what just happened?" where the mystery is almost what happens next, and you’re never going to know because the story has already ended.
As a reader of thrillers, I don’t want an open ending there. I want justice. I want the bad guy to lose. But with short stories, I want open questions. I want to feel unsettled, to wonder about the world the story proposed. That’s part of why I read more techno-thrillers and science fiction in short form than I do at novel length.
When you read short stories, notice how you like to feel and try to create that feeling in your own. You’ll often need to cut what you wrote at the very beginning and the very end because your takeoff and your landing both tend to run long. Chop both ends off, and you usually have a much stronger story.
Thomas: That’s also great practice for editing generally. A common mistake is starting a short story that quietly turns into a full-length novel, the way a seed you thought was a bush grows into a tree. Sometimes that’s wonderful and becomes a great novel. Other times you have to prune it back down, because it works far better as a bonsai than as a redwood.
How can a short story help you explore your fictional world?
Thomas: Short stories are a wonderful form of exploration in more ways than one. We’ve talked about exploring technique, but you can also explore genre, dipping a toe into something new before committing a whole career to it.
A lot of writers don’t yet know where their skills and passions overlap with what readers want. Once you build a brand, readers expect more of the same, which makes it harder to diverge later. Joanna, you’ve done a good job of exploring different genres while keeping your brands separate, so people should check out your podcast if they want to see that in action.
There’s another way to explore with short stories too, and that’s your story world. Epic fantasy writers who love world-building sometimes find the idea of writing a story outside their world exhausting, but it doesn’t have to be outside the world.
Pick a point on the map your hero never visits and write a whole story about that town, or about a character’s grandfather and the adventures he had. Your world grows because of the short story.
What mistakes do authors make with short stories?
Joanna: Where people go wrong with short stories is starting with multiple characters, multiple towns, and multiple events. If you want to write a short story, pick one character, put them in one setting, give them one obstacle, and then ask whether they achieve their goal.
My story “Soldiers of God” has a character go to the Vatican during the digital scanning of the secret archives. He’s scanning something, finds a secret papal bull, and it leads him to Paris. It had one character and one thread.
You do need characters to interact somewhere, even if most of the story is internal. But as a planning tip, start with one character, one setting, and one obstacle. Then decide how you want to end the story.
George R. R. Martin is proof that the more point-of-view characters you write, the bigger your book gets. So, if your story keeps expanding, cut the number of point-of-view characters. For a short story, cut the number of scenes, too.
Thomas: The more characters you have, the harder endings become because every character needs a satisfying conclusion. Satisfying doesn’t mean happy; it means emotionally earned.
Brandon Sanderson was handed the job of concluding The Wheel of Time after Robert Jordan died, arguably one of the ultimate tests of writing endings. The series has something close to a hundred point-of-view characters, and Sanderson ended up expanding it into a trilogy just to give everyone a satisfying conclusion. It was a massive amount of work.
You can make your life much easier by learning to end a story with one character first. A satisfying ending for a villain might simply be that justice catches up with them. It doesn’t have to be happy.
And with only 5,000 or 10,000 words at stake, you can experiment with endings you’d never risk in a longer work.
What’s a story seed?
Joanna: Those of us who write stories always have far too many ideas in our heads, so I recommend keeping track of what I call your story seeds. They’re the baseline for everything, novels included.
A short story really only needs one or two seeds that come together. For example, I had laser eye surgery years ago, and lying there smelling my own eyeball burning as it was being lasered, I thought, “I have to write about this.” For about three years I had no idea what to do with the idea. A story about someone who’d had laser eye surgery felt too obvious.
I logged the seed and moved on. Later I read a memoir by the war photographer Lindsey Addario, about a combat photographer embedded with troops, and suddenly I had my character. Now I had a combat photographer and eye surgery, and a genuinely strange story. That eventually became With a Demon’s Eye (affiliate link).
The point is to write your seeds down. They don’t have to be ready. Eventually one will meet another seed, or you can slam two together on purpose.
Thomas: The story seed for The Chronicles of Narnia was reportedly a single image in C.S. Lewis’s head, a faun holding packages in a snowy scene by a lamppost. Fauns aren’t even English folklore, they’re Greek, so a faun in the snow with modern packages next to a lamppost is a genuinely odd image, and he built an entire novel out of it.
A short story is a great way to test a seed. You might give it 5,000 words and feel satisfied that’s all it needed, or realize it’s the coolest thing ever and wants to be bigger. On the other hand, you may find you’ve explored an idea fully and it just needs another seed to collide with before it becomes something more.
How do you find creative story seeds?
Joanna: Start with the idea of play.
I spent thirteen years implementing accounts payable systems before I started writing, and I didn’t think of myself as creative at all. I set up The Creative Penn only after two years of American self-help work, trying to say out loud, “I am creative, I am an author.” I do think creativity is a muscle you have to exercise, which is part of why I started with the idea of play.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think short stories make great reader magnets, because most readers would rather have a novel. My husband loves 40-hour epic fantasy audiobooks, not a one-hour short. So it’s less about the marketing case and more about holding things lightly and testing ideas out. If you think you’re not creative, start by noticing what you’re curious about. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is how I got started over twenty years ago. I would go off alone to notice things and write them down.
Thomas: Short stories are also useful for nonfiction writers. You can make a point far more entertainingly, and often more powerfully, by wrapping it in a short story. Storytelling skills make for better anecdotes and case studies, which is a lot of what nonfiction is built from.
The best-selling nonfiction, someone like Malcolm Gladwell, reads like a novel because every chapter has real narrative pull. It’s story after story, and that’s what keeps you reading.
Joanna: We’ve mentioned AI. To differentiate a genuinely authored story from a purely generated one, I think ownership has to come from your own story seeds. That’s why I’m careful with my author’s notes. I include one in every novel and every short story, and it explains where the idea came from.
An AI can generate a story about laser eye surgery, but it’s never smelled its own eyeball burning. Including that origin, even when the finished story barely resembles it, brings the humanity back into the work.
I wrote a story called “The Black Church” after visiting an ancient church by a glacier in Iceland on my fiftieth birthday. Linking to my own photos in the author’s note ties the story back to that same human source. I’d really encourage people to lean into that.
What if I just want to write for fun?
Thomas: There’s a parallel with music. You learn to play guitar by fumbling with an F chord, with your finger barred across the strings. But eventually, you can make sounds worth listening to. Soon you’re making music purely for the sake of making music. In some ways, music in its purest form is one person alone in a room playing their instrument.
Sometimes that person is good enough to take it to a stage, which is great, but it’s rarely a great living. I come from a family of musicians, and most of my friends who studied music in university didn’t want anything to do with it by the time they graduated. Music theory, notation, and performing for empty rooms had drowned out their love of it. Some were left with thousands of dollars in debt for a degree they’d never use.
A short story can be that same kind of music for a novelist—something written purely for its own sake that keeps the flame alive. That matters because when writing is a job, you do it whether you feel like it or not.
Nobody has plumber’s block, and nobody really has writer’s block either, but it still helps to have fun. A short story can be a break from a longer project, engaging a totally different part of your brain and sending you back to your larger project rejuvenated.
Joanna: These ideas bubble up in their own time.
The eye surgery idea sat for years before it resurfaced. I’m obsessed with biblical stories, and I always wanted to write about the Nephilim, then I heard a podcast about de-extinction and suddenly had my angle.
What I do practically is time block, using Google Calendar or whatever tool you like. I’ll block an hour to three hours, show up, work on the story, and stop. As a discovery writer I don’t always know what will happen in that block, but I show up anyway, the way Stephen King describes in On Writing, because if you turn up, eventually the muse turns up too. You don’t need to do much world-building for a short story. Just sit down and write it.
Thomas: The short story is the world-building. Just write it.
Joanna: When I get stuck starting, I go back to character and scene. The combat photographer is probably out taking photos in combat, so I’ll write that scene first and see what happens. Character in scene, describe what’s happening, and you work your way in from there.
Some people plot heavily. I don’t, though with my shorts I usually have a sense of where it’s headed, and it’s usually a disturbing ending.
Thomas: The stakes of a short story are lower too, which makes it easier to fix. If you’re 50,000 words into a novel and realize you took a wrong turn 30,000 words back, that’s a genuine crisis.
If you’re 3,000 words into a short story and the wrong turn was 2,000 words ago, it’s an easy fix. You can just start writing and correct course as you go, which is a much more forgiving approach for a short piece.
Does a short story need a three-act structure?
Joanna: No. You need some kind of character, some kind of setting, and something to happen, whether you call it a plot or an obstacle. Beyond that it can be very wide open.
Literary short stories, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (affiliate link), are essentially a woman confined to one room, and it’s stuck with me for how disturbing the ending is.
I learned to write novels the same way I now study short stories. I analyzed my favorites by asking questions like these:
- What happens in this chapter?
- How many words is it?
- What happens to the character?
- How does it end?
The real skill is manipulating the reader into feeling a certain way. That’s why I still use a professional human editor. I want to know whether I achieved the effect I was going for.
For example, writing “Thomas stood under a tree” tells the reader nothing. We don’t know what kind of tree, who Thomas is, or why he’s there. The word “tree” alone will never do enough work, and neither will the name “Thomas” alone.
Writing is about manipulating another person’s mind through words, which is a kind of telepathy, and it goes wrong when you put something in a reader’s head that you didn’t intend. You don’t need a three-act structure so much as a sense of what you’re going for. And you get that sense by reading a lot of short stories.
I’m an intuitive writer rather than a plotter. What’s nice about a short story is you can write it, rest it for a week or two, then read the whole thing aloud in half an hour and edit with fresh eyes.
How do you analyze a good short story?
Thomas: An old technique that’s almost fallen out of practice is taking a piece of literature you admire and rewriting it by hand. It forces you to look closely at how the sentences and paragraphs were built. Writing by hand makes you slow down enough to see the details a fast reader blazes past.
If a short story hits you hard and you want to know why, it’s entirely legal to take a piece of paper and copy it out yourself. You can’t sell your copy, and you wouldn’t want to, but you’ll learn how the sentences are structured and start noticing things you never saw on a normal read. It’s a strange thing to suggest in an age of AI and spell check, grabbing an actual pen and paper, but it still works. You don’t have to do the whole thing, but even copying 5,000 words might be enough to change how you write.
Joanna: I’m for all of it. Whether you’re dictating, using AI to help, or handwriting, if you’re expressing yourself and getting your ideas onto the page, that’s what matters. We’re creative humans, so let’s just create more, and I look forward to all the short stories that come out of this episode.
Thomas: You can share them in the comments of the blog version of this episode. Post a one- or two-sentence pitch for your short story in the comments there, with a link to where people can read it for free.
The point of a reader magnet is for readers to give their email address, get the story, and discover what other authors have written recently.
Joanna: It doesn’t have to be a reader magnet. Mine isn’t. You can listen to my short stories free on YouTube, Spotify, or read them for free on my website.
Which short story collections are worth reading first?
Thomas: Reading widely matters here too. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files includes short stories set between the novels, often curated into collections alongside other urban fantasy writers.
Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International works differently, letting other authors play in his world. The books are apparently huge in Czechia, and the Czech publisher eventually had local authors write Monster Hunter stories using Czech folklore monsters, which were later translated back into English. The quality varies, since the authors were writing in a second language, but it was genuinely fun to read monsters I knew nothing about.
Joanna: One that comes to mind for their premises alone are Robots vs. Fairies (affiliate link), which pairs two very different genres and includes Seanan McGuire and Jonathan Maberry.
Another is AI 2041 (affiliate link) by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan, which pairs a short story about each possible AI outcome with a nonfiction essay explaining how we might get there. I’ll also mention Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected again. It hasn’t been edited for modern sensibilities the way some of his children’s books have, because it was always written for adults, so look for an earlier edition.
I love Kickstarter for short fiction. I launched my own collection, The Buried and the Drowned on Kickstarter partly because I buy so many collections from authors I’ve never heard of just because the premise grabs me.
With a collection, you don’t need to feel guilty about not finishing every story, just stop reading the ones that don’t grab you and move to the next. Audio short fiction is booming too. Spotify wants more of it, and roughly 9,000 words runs about an hour at normal narration speed, which fits a commute nicely.
Thomas: I’d add the Norton Anthology, especially an older edition, which is likely what most people studied in school. It’s a compendium of stories that have stayed resonant for a hundred years, The Yellow Wallpaper almost certainly included.
How do you want your reader to feel when a short story ends?
Thomas: They’re not going to make you a million dollars directly, but becoming a better writer faster is ultimately the only path to making real money from fiction.
You can’t sell a million copies of a badly written novel the way you sometimes can with nonfiction. The extreme example is that Marco Rubio’s book reportedly hit the New York Times bestseller list during a presidential run. The number of sales apparently helped pay his student loans, whether or not people read it.
Those shenanigans don’t work in fiction. You have to become a genuinely good author.
Most successful authors got there the normal way, writing full-length books. But the short story path teaches you to write good endings, which a lot of authors publishing long series never quite learn, since they can keep deferring the ending indefinitely.
What’s your advice for sticking the landing on a short story?
Joanna: Read enough short stories to know what kind of ending you want. There’s the resolved ending, where something happens and it’s genuinely done. There’s a character, or the reader, realizing something. And there’s the open ending, which is what I tend to write, something ambiguous that leaves you unsettled afterward.
With The Yellow Wallpaper, we never find out what happens to the woman in the end, and that’s exactly the point. Then there’s the Roald Dahl twist, an unexpected turn I lean toward in some of my own work.
Read enough short fiction and you’ll see the range of options available, then either study how a favorite writer achieved a feeling and adapt the technique or just try it and see.
What’s nice about a short ending is that it’s genuinely easy to rewrite the final thousand words if you decide you want an up ending instead of a down one, or vice versa. There are no real rules with short stories, which is what should excite people. You can give a story away, sell it, or put it in a collection.
Minority Report and The Green Mile were both short stories to begin with. Plenty of short fiction has gone on to become something much bigger.
How can we learn more about writing and leveraging short stories?
Thomas: If you want to go deeper on writing short stories, check out Joanna’s brand-new book How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories.
Joanna: When I launched The Buried and the Drowned on Kickstarter, I ran a webinar on how to write, publish, and market short stories as part of the campaign. It turns out that writing a nonfiction book about how to do it is another way to make money from short fiction.
Building a coherent collection out of a pile of unrelated stories turned out to be a genuinely interesting challenge in its own right. It took about two years to turn that original webinar transcript into the book. One tip is to record yourself talking through an idea on a walk, then edit the transcript later.
It’s out in the usual places and on my website, thecreativepenn.com, along with everything else, or come find me on The Creative Penn Podcast.
Thomas: Turning a short story into a reader magnet is a low-stakes way to practice cover design and back-cover copy, the kind of skill you’d rather learn small before it matters on a full series.
We’re in the middle of rebuilding our flooded kitchen right now, and I’m learning more about sinks than I ever wanted to know. By the time it’s done, I’ll have exactly the skills to design a kitchen, which I’ll hopefully never need again.
It’s the same with a book. You don’t want your readers to be the ones working through your freshman mistakes on book one of a ten-year series. Book one needs to be your best work, and writing standalone novels and short stories first is what gets you there faster. It also lets you experiment, because sometimes the only thing standing between you and success is a genre change you haven’t tried yet.
Write three short stories in three different genres, and the third one might just click. Nobody watches Peter Jackson’s early horror films, but everybody loves his Lord of the Rings.
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