If you want to write a good (and publishable) short story, start by writing a balanced one. There are five elements of storytelling, and if you focus on one element too much your story can get off-kilter and topple.
These five elements are the building blocks of story, and they are:
To find your voice, you have to take on the voices of others.
For example, here’s a brief history lesson on copying.
Steven Pressfield, when he was first starting out, typed out pages and pages of Hemingway just to get a sense of his pacing, his storytelling, and his voice. He copied him to get into his head and understand how he constructed sentences, and how each sentence related to the ones around it.
I’ve noticed the following two problems in my own writng and in the writers I edit:
1. Too much inner monologue.
2. Not enough setting and description.
This is a problem because the more inner monologue you use, the yonger your writing sounds. I don’t know why this is, but inner-monologue-heavy novels feel younger and more fit for teenagers than novels that give less access to their characters’ heads.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Hunger Games is selling millions of copies while Cormac McCarthy is winning awards and living in relative obscurity. We like our inner-monologue-rich novels. But they also feel less like art. Decide whether you want to use it accordingly.
As I was riding across the steppes of Outer Mongolia (it hurt to sit down for a year afterwards), beneath horizons that appeared to be of limitless blue, I thought this was a country that called for an elemental style.
I’ve always loved Cormac McCarthy and amongst his many talents is the nature of his prose. “Clean and hard as pebbles,” says the Independent on Sunday; “language as subtly beautiful as its desert setting,” the Sunday Times. His style has been likened to The Old Testament and described as, “formidable,” “overpowering,” “transcendent.” To me his writing is beautiful and direct, naked and almost pagan in its connection to the landscape and base human nature.
