When you begin by asking us not to give you the best possible resource, it's tough to know what to say. How many novels have you sold using all those how-to books about novels?
But I'll give you a somewhat different answer. The best recourse is a library. That's about the only place you can find every type of resource you're after, from, thousands of short stories to read, to help books in the .808 section.
The best way to learn how to write good short stories remains reading short story after short story after short story, writing short story after short story after short story, and submitting everything you write.
Short stories demand pretty fast writing, if you want to get really good. Write and submit one per week. Do this, along with constant reading, and it won't take long to determine whether you have the talent for writing them.
I just want to say that I did the story a week thing for over a year. It took me about three or four months to find my groove and start writing what I thought were good stories. My stories before that were okay, but it was pretty cool to go through such a big change in how I wrote so quickly. If I had only been writing one story a month or just when I felt like writing without clear goals, I think it would have taken me a year or more before I was writing decent stories.
I also submitted every story I wrote during that time. Eventually, you have so many stories out that when one gets rejected it doesn't seem like such a big deal.
Writing a story a week never felt like it was too hard or too much work to handle. I wasn't writing every day. It would usually take me three days to finish a story then I would take a day to let it sit, fix it up and send it out. Seriously, if you want the fastest way to get good at short story writing, this is it! It's called write 1/sub 1, and I think a lot of the short story writers here on AW have done it or some form of it. I would say to aim for the weekly goal. Some people give themselves more time with a story. But when you are starting out, the weekly quota really does wonderful things for your writing.
On top of the writing, I was reading a lot of short stories. I was actually reading quite a few literary journals I subscribe to before I started my short story writing mission. It's really good to read the publications you hope for your work to be published in.
I will say, I haven't published much fiction. I've been aiming pretty high with my submissions. After a few months of writing a story a week, those stories started getting personal rejections that said the editor hoped to see more work from me or that my submission was close or made it pretty far in their selection process. I also got into a fully funded MFA program. It doesn't really matter what you think of MFA programs. I know some people are not fans, but it is what I wanted to do. The writing sample I used to get in was a story I wrote after about six or seven months of writing a story every week. I honesty credit the story a week routine for me getting into the program. There is no way my earlier works were going to get me in.
I think after I graduate I will go back to writing a story a week. I've been exploring other types of writing while in school like novel, memoir and play writing. But I still write short stories fairly often. I agree with James that short stories want to be written quickly. I still finish most of my stories within a week. If I take longer than a week, the story seems to have more problems. I'm not sure why that is, but it has proven to me all too true for me.
