A Short Story is Assembled like a Toyota Camry: Reading Tips for First Time Fiction Writers

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.
- Stephen King

If you are embarking on a semi-serious mission to write short stories, your reading becomes less about pleasure reading and more about understanding how the fiction writer manufactured a particular story.

I’m using the word manufactured on purpose, as opposed to wrote, composed or created. We seem to think that really good authors just conjure up a memorable story. They don’t. They fabricate them just like Toyota makes a Camry and Samsung makes a refrigerator, or an artisan assembles tin wind chimes.

Immersion in Short Fiction
There is a reading list below with 25 short story collections for you to dive into, collections by authors who have inspired my stories. The books listed are story collections, often a debut work. If you want to read more, I would suggest finding a Collected Stories edition of that author’s work.

Another way to immerse yourself in short stories is to pick up a copy of The New Yorker; every week there’s a new story published in there. A friend of a friend, the former fiction editor at Esquire, runs an online site called Narrative that is always publishing short stories. Of you can search the NewPages “Big List” of Literary Magazines.

Dissecting Stories like Earthworms
Pretend you are back in high school biology. Dissect the earthworm or the frog. Take a short story apart like a car engine and see how it works.

Summarize the short story in a 150-word paragraph, as if you were a reviewer.

On a blank piece of paper, draw the story as a map. Map the plotting points: the beginning, middle and end, plus any other inflection points where a story turns or opens up to you.

Take the names of main characters in the story and write them out as columns on a blank page. Now list out their names, nicknames, descriptive elements, facial features, emotions and internal motivations down the page in list form.

You should now have 100 or more details (maybe more) which you have extracted. Examine how those myriad and disparate individual elements were woven into the sentences so subtly, so they would detonate like an explosive when read.

The Tracing Technique
Here’s another way to learn how short stories are made. Take a story you really like, and write out the first page (or more) by hand, or type it up as if you were writing it. This will really give you a terrific feel for a writer’s voice and how they build sentences and the opening to a story.

And don’t just read short stories. Read plays to understand dialogue, novels for setting, structure and character development, and poetry for language, rhythm, imagery and compression.

If you are going to write short stories, you better be reading short stories and learning how they are assembled.

Jon’s Reading List — 25 Short Story Collections

Bausch, Richard, The Fireman’s Wife, 1984

Canin, Ethan, Emperor of the Air, 1999

Capote, Truman, Music for Chameleons, 1980, (posthumous)

Carver, Raymond, Cathedral, 1983

Carver, Raymond, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, 1976

Cheever, John, The Stories of John Cheever, 1978

Dufresne, John, Louisiana Power & Light, 1994

Ford, Richard Rock Springs, 1987

Hadley, Tess, Married Love, 2012

Hemingway, Ernest, In Our Time, 1924

Hemingway, Ernest, Nick Adams Stories, 1972 (posthumous)

Helprin, Mark, Ellis Island, 1981

Helprin, Mark, The Pacific, 2004

Joyce, James, Dubliners 1914

Munro, Alice Lives of Girls and Women, 1971

Munro, Alice The Moons of Jupiter, 1982

Munro, Alice Open Secrets, 1994

O’Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find, 1955

O’Connor, Flannery, Good Country People, 1955

Pancake, Breece D’J, Stories, 1981 (posthumous)

Taylor, Peter, In the Miro District, 1977

Taylor, Peter, The Old Forest, 1985

Tower, Wells, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, 2009

Trevor, William The News from Ireland, 1986

Trevor. William, The Hill Bachelors, 1997

Updike, John, Pigeon Feathers, 1962

Updike, John, Olinger Stories, 1964

Updike, John Museums and Women, 1972

Note: this post is an excerpt from a forthcoming guide (Nov, 2018) for first-time fiction writers.

Photo Credit: Hernan Pinera