Mary Rosenblum, your web editor, has published three SF novels, four mysteries as Mary Freeman, and more than 50 short stories in multiple genres, as well as nonfiction! She also teaches writing, and over the years, has created many short stories from novel plots…and then went on to write the novel version, too!

As a Long Ridge instructor, I see it all the time. An assignment arrives, maybe six pages of story. And in that six pages, the author has managed to cover a plot the size of Gone With the Wind! Alas, what we get is pretty much an six page plot synopsis, with no sense of real characters, only the superficial description of sweeping events. I can’t write short! How many times have I heard these words – not only from Long Ridge students, but also from some well published novelists of my acquaintance! So is there a genetic ability to write the short story? How do we know if our wonderful plot idea is going to take three thousand words or a hundred thousand to write?

There’s no better way to court a serious case of writer’s block than to sit down in front of the blank screen and tell yourself that you must come up with a short story idea. Instantly, the mind goes as blank as the screen. Instead, put that word limit out of your mind and come up with an interesting idea for a story, period. Okay, let’s see. We have this girl who has nice parents, but she always feels that she doesn’t fit in as she grows up. Very early in her life, she realizes that she has the ability to make things happen with her mind, but when she first tells her parents about this, they are terribly upset. So she learns to hide it, to feel that there is something wrong with her. But as a senior in high school, she meets a strange boy who is visiting over the Thanksgiving holiday and discovers that he, too, has unusual abilities. And he tells her about the community he lives in, where everyone has unusual abilities, and suggests that maybe her parents aren’t her real parents. And when she confronts them, sure enough, they admit that she was adopted, an abandoned child. She goes with the boy to visit the community and discovers the story of her birth parents, how she came to be abandoned, and where her unusual abilities come from. Okay, that’s the story idea. Is it a short story idea? Nah. This is a 70,000 – 100,000 word novel, depending on how many subplots you include. Well, yes, I can manage to squeeze all this into 3000 words, but none of the characters will be real people and we’ll rush from scene to scene. So. How do I turn this into a short story?

This is simply too large a picture. We need time to build intimacy between our main character and the reader. If we’re going to create intimacy, we need to focus on the small details, the interactions between characters that allow us get to know our main character and to care about her. We need to share her need to find out where she came from and why she is different, or this story will leave us cold. But we can’t include it all, we’ve already decided that. How do we decide what to include?

Think about using binoculars. You are searching for a bird in the trees across the road. You see lots of tree branches and leaves, but can’t spot the bird. You grab a pair of binoculars and focus on that tree where you think our feathered friend is hiding. Bingo! There he is, a nice Stellar Jay, gleaming blue and black and you can see every tuft of feathers in his crest. The tree trunks are no longer visible, although we know they’re holding up the branches. Instead of a lot of branches and leaves, we see the branch that the Jay is sitting on and maybe a six or eight leaves in vivid individual detail. That’s what we do with our huge story. We pick up binoculars and focus on….our main character!

Start with the critical point of this story. What is the climax here? Well, we have more than one possibility. One climax point is our main character’s discovery that the visiting boy can use his mind, just like her. Another is the moment when her parents confirm she is adopted, a third is her meeting with the people of the boy’s community and her discovery that she came from there. Which one do we pick? The first is definitely a climax, but it may not be strong enough to support the story. The reader will be left with questions: What happens now? Why is he different? The third climax point depends on our knowledge of the first two climax points…so we’re going to have to do a lot of flashback to fill the reader in. However, the middle climax point – her discovery of her adopted status depends only on her having met the boy and realizing that they share similar abilities. Let’s focus on that!

Now, we simply put it all together. But beware of trying to include everything we covered in our original story idea, or you’ll still end up with a sprawling 10,000 word manuscript! Since our story depends on our main character meeting the boy, discovering their similar abilities, and discovering her adopted status, let’s begin with that meeting. We can fill the reader in on the where, when, howcome details as she stumbles on the boy in the woods, during one of her solitary hikes, and watches him move a stone onto a dam he’s building across a creek…without using his hands! She gasps, and he discovers her, and during their ensuing confrontation and conversation, we can find out that she has always lived in this town, he’s visiting a relative, and she, like him, can do things with her mind. We’ll also find out that her parents punished her for doing it, and get to know him as he is outraged for her, and offers his sympathy. We move on to the final climax as she finds out that she is adopted and might be related to the people the boy lives with, struggles with her feelings, and finally makes a decision to go find them.

Once she has made her decision and actually sets off…either with our boy or on her own…the story is over. The conflict here has been her need to find a reason for her strange ability, and by setting out on her trip to find that community, she has taken the first step to do that. Don’t yield to the temptation to take her there and find everything out about her origins. The boy will have given us enough hints for us to make a guess about that (they are from another planet or another universe, and they somehow were stranded in our here and now). We know she’ll find all this out. We know that she will have found her true home when she gets there. We trust you. So you can end it strongly with her on her way, perhaps feeling that she is stepping across a divide from her old life to a new one. Because you are using a positive tone when you end here, we’ll believe in a positive outcome, and each of us will imagine her arrival, her reunion with her new friend, and her discovery of where her real parents came from, in our own way. All those details appear in the novel version, but they shouldn’t be included here, in the short story.

So next time you need a short story and the idea you have threatens to take off and run for 15,000 words or so…list your climax points. Then decide which one would work best as the climax of a short story. Use flashback and dialogue to tell the reader the necessary backstory and end the story quickly after that climax has been reached. Remember, you only need to resolve the immediate problem. You don’t need to prove that our character will live happily ever after! If you do that, your sprawling monster will become a compelling short story that really hooks an editor’s attention.

Happy short story writing!