HOW TO HOOK YOUR READERS WITH RIVETING SHORT STORIES

Short stories have been popular since the 19^th century hooking readers with the likes of such pioneering Modernists as Edgar Allen Poe, Anton Chekov, James Joyce and O. Henry. In the 1990s, short-short story genres seized new dimensions with edgy, hooky titles to capture new readers, such as Flash, Sudden, and Micro Fiction. Basically, these genres are compelling postcard-style flash stories, to be read in one sitting; riveting with impact, and lingering in the reader’s heart.

This is no easy task. The short story must tell a tale of observation, with strong characters that may face death, sacrifice, danger, solitude, isolation, tough decisions or family upheavals. Storylines must make readers care; the ending must send readers over an emotional cliff with a defining revelation.

I read one such story as a teenager, and it has stayed with me; Guy de Maupassant’s classic “The Necklace”. The finale leaves one dizzy with remorse that a young girl slaved for a decade, in near poverty, to repay the loss of a borrowed necklace, perceived to be diamonds, only to discover the jewels were faux. A revelation, voilà!

Short story writing may be difficult to navigate, as restrictions dictate not just good prose, but the compressed narrative of tight prose, knitted with contextually compelling characters and plots, often concluding with twists, revelations or epiphanies. Short story genres present solid reasons to read, prompted by minimal word counts.

Many short stories have 2500 to 5000 words, but Washington Irving’s enduring 1820s classic, about a headless horseman, “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” is nearly 12,000 words.

Flash fiction, postcard fiction, and short-short stories require extreme brevity of about 300 words or less. Magazines often feature shorts that fit on two pages.

To make an extreme point: Hemingway is said to have written the most fleeting flash of a six-word story, on a bet at the fabled Algonquin Hotel. “Baby Shoes for Sale, Never Worn.” He won the bet.

Let’s explore what else short stories entail; bullets pinpoint some important aspects.

• A short story starts as close as possible to the conclusion
• Catch readers in paragraph one by developing powerful characters
• Set the point of view with good, precise dialogue
• Create setting. Where does plot take place? Time, location, context, atmosphere and background information
• Set the story in context with strong, page-turner, “5-Ws” plots: What happens and where? When does it happen? Why does it happen? Who causes the action and what are consequences?
• Define plot in one sentence;  man is injured in explosion, gets hooked on pain killers, neglects children, wife divorces him, he leaves town, gets clean, becomes new person, returns home, falls into debt, fails, kills self to appear accidental, family starts new life with million dollar insurance policy
• Create explosive narrative. Hook reader to story. Engage immediate attention
• Mystery, empowerment, progression, causality, surprise, empathy, insight, high status. Character could lose everything, turning point, recognition, decision, resolution—the worm turns—outcome matters
• Word count is important when submitting to competitions. Follow guidelines
• Timing is crucial; crisis cannot start too early. Readers expect another turning point—cannot happen too late in storyline—they become impatient and vexed without a what’s next trajectory
• Crisis must always be presented as a scene—it must happen when the slipper      fits, when the crux of the story resolution is revealed
• Create conflict and tension. Complications hook readers. What will happen next? Basic conflicts; birth, love, sex, work, change, God and death—the social balance of opposing forces with use of symbolism or metaphors
• A story can be riveting by setting the spirit, mood and social mores of another time; zeitgeist if you will
• Create a compelling crisis and climax—the rising action that reaches a peak
• Falling action releases after the climax, deliver the resolution, conflict resolved
• What does protagonist desire, want, need, yearn for? Realism holds a mirror to narrator’s anecdotes. Protagonist must choose moral actions before climax
• Create unexpected consequences and emotional energy. Transition the story without jumping around. Readers will get lost
• Cut scenes by omitting conversations we already know, do not repeat message. Readers will skip redundancies
• Readers should not see what twist is coming, it should have elements of surprise
• Show, don’t tell. Write images for reader to see, feel, and understand. Create dialogue that knits story to protagonist. Protagonist must not do things out of character. Surprises don’t work
• Show, don’t tell example; ‘my father was funny’, better idea; ‘my father did hilarious things like streaking at football games, wearing nothing but a clown nose or crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue…’
• Use the power of flashbacks. What happened in the past affects the present. Was the character in the war, police force, or a dangerous job? Does he react to loud noises, was he in an accident, does he have nightmares?
• Keep an idea notebook; record overheard conversations, phrases, and images.

Ideas are all around you, write on a regular basis

• Collect stories from casual conversation, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, strange people, and news. Ideas are everywhere
• Don’t waste dialogue, make every word count. Purge redundancy
• Make reader see character, feel anguish, see what characters are like
• Convey the pain. The reader must enter the story, become part of action
• Build a character in your mind, stick to it. Make reader want to meet/love/hate her. Do not bamboozle readers
• Create characters with name, job, age, ethnicity, appearance, residence, favourite colour, friends, drinking patterns, phobias, faults, pets, religion, hobbies, single, married, children, temperament, love/hate, secrets, strong memories, illness, nervous gestures, actions, speech, thoughts, sleep patterns. Does protagonist fidget, pick at nails, cross and uncross legs, scratch face, whistle, hum, or clear her throat? Is she anguished?
• Who tells story? Is it told through eyes of a first person, second or third person; me, you or him? Plan plot at onset. Write story-line backwards as an exercise
• First person unites reader to writer; “I awoke when the earth shook the first time. By the second wave of shaking, the roof was falling on me. Panicked, I grabbed my infant boy and made for the door. Josie didn’t make it. They found her crushed body near the crib under fallen rafters. I will never get over it. It was then I hit the bottle. I will never forgive Mother Nature for her hatred.”
• Build a strong denouement—the winding down phase before the ending
• Create the resolution, story must be resolved or readers will feel cheated
• Never write an action-filled story and then finish with “and then he woke up…” Never cheat readers with cheap twists. Dreams kill a story unless relevant to character; “she dreamed he was beside her, but when she awoke, he was still dead…”
• An ending can be either literal or symbolic; “her eyes looked towards the hills, that decisive day ended her dilemma to leave him,” or, “she drove into the fog never to understand why it all happened.”
• Endings can be a monologue; “I wish I had known what was to happen, but then again I wouldn’t have a story to tell, would I?”
• A short story is compact, tight, no subplots, and no loose ends at ending. If the story ends with a climax, it must show how the finale affects the protagonist and have elements of powerful surprise, or readers will be let down
• Write, write, write and write. Read, read, read and read Chekov, Hemingway, James Joyce, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolf, Joyce Carol Oates and every short story you can access
• You will grasp the rhythm, the routine and learn how to craft a short story from the masters of fiction. Short stories are great exercises to confine writers to tell a good story with minimal word count, and improve the use of only the most important words
• Form skeleton of storyline, set the stage and then flesh out with dialogue and description that will take readers to higher dimensions
• Confine story word count 250 to 300 as exercise, and then write same story with 400 to 500 words. Read both and compare.
• Write every day and soon the best stories will float like cream on your body of literary work.