Horror is a genre of literature or film that wants to evoke fear, shock, and suspense. Characters battle for their life versus a fate worse than death.
What makes a good horror story is the ability to tap into our deepest fears and deliver them in a captivating way. Even if you don’t consider yourself a horror writer, practicing a few short stories in this genre can help you understand human fear and the way it motivates action.
Whether you’re self publishing or you have a traditional publisher, it’s up to you to sell your books. Email marketing is the number one way to sell books. But in order to use email marketing effectively, you first have to gather a list of email addresses, a group of readers who want to hear from you.
Struggling to build your list? Try this.
If you’re new to short story writing, it can be intimidating to think of fitting everything you need in a story into a small word count. Do you need to apply certain elements of a short story in order for it to be great?
Writers like you struggle with this all the time.
You might want to develop deep character backgrounds with a huge cast of characters, amazing settings, and have at least two subplots. And that’s great. But that wouldn’t be writing a short story.
You might try to cut some of these things, and then all the sudden you don’t have a character arc or a climax or an ending.
Every story has basic elements; a short story’s basic elements are just more focused than a novel’s. But all those elements must be there, and yes, they need to fit into a short word count.
In this article, you’ll learn what you need to make sure your short story is a complete story—with three famous short story examples. These story elements are what you should focus on when writing a short piece of fiction.
Do you want to learn how to write a short story? Maybe you’d like to try writing a short story instead of a novel, or maybe you’re hoping to get more writing practice without the lengthy time commitment that a novel requires.
The reality of writing stories? Not every short story writer wants to write a novel, but every novelist can benefit from writing short stories. However, shorts stories and novels are different—so how you write them has, naturally, their differences, too.
Short stories are often a fiction writer’s first introduction to writing, but they can be frustrating to write and difficult to master. How do you fit everything that makes a great story into something so short?
And then, once you do finish a short story you’re proud of, what do you do with it?
That’s what will cover in this article—and additionally resources which I will link.
There’s no shortage of writing prompts out there. We even do them with every post here on the Write Practice blog.
Prompts have a place in writing, whether it’s overcoming writer’s block or simply as a warmup to get your brain moving. Writing prompts are awesome.
Until they’re not.
What do you do if you hate the writing prompt you’re given?
