I've never written a Short Story

I'd say, just write it and see what you come up with. As far as requirements and such, I'm not sure. I just write them.

But here's a guideline on length:
Classification Word count
Novel over 40,000 words
Novella 17,500 to 40,000 words
Novelette 7,500 to 17,500 words
Short story under 7,500 words

Heh, I just watched this today on YouTube,

Writing Fiction & Poetry : How to Write a Short Story

The first snippet of advice he gives is a wise one!

-Derek

Go read short stories in your genre and see how they are put together. There are many amazing markets that are online these days.

Take a look at the submission guidelines for the magazine/site you want to submit your story to - they will specify what length stories they are looking for. In SF/F I mostly see 2.5k-6k preferred.

There is also Flash Fiction, generally defined as stories under 1000 words (though again, different markets vary between 500 and 1200 word max).

Alex

dpaterso said:

Heh, I just watched this today on YouTube,

Writing Fiction & Poetry : How to Write a Short Story

The first snippet of advice he gives is a wise one!

-Derek

Click to expand...

That is pretty good.

And to study the short story form, you can't do better than reading the short works of:

Ray Bradbury
Frederic Brown
John Collier
Roald Dahl
Saki
O Henry

There are different philosophical ideals for the short story. One writer's ideal might be to take every essential element of a novel and compress it into 5,000 words. Another ideal might be to have a self-contained story that also reads like a chapter from a novel.

I started writing as a seventh grader, before I'd really built up the mental muscle to manage a 40,000+ word story. So the stories I wrote were 'short' even though I thought of them as book-length in my head. Perhaps for that reason, to this day I don't treat my short stories and my novels as different as I write them. The short stories have less detail, often smaller conflicts, and fewer characters, but I still start with an opening sentence and go on from there, guided by notes scribbled in the margins of my notebook. Trying to picture Short Stories as some different, mystical form didn't help me. Sitting down to write did.

There's also flash fiction, which is usually less than 1000 words. I just put one on my web site/blog. Feel free to check it out and post any comments you might have.