I’ve published over 70 short stories. Some of them are pretty good. A few are great. And at least three should probably never have seen the light of day, but the deadline was Tuesday and I had a dentist appointment on Monday so there you go.
The number one question I get from other writers is some version of “how do you keep people reading?” Which is really just a polite way of asking “why would anyone finish a story when they could be watching TikTok instead?”
Fair question. Here’s what I’ve figured out after three decades of writing short fiction.
Start With Someone in Trouble
Not big trouble necessarily. Small trouble works fine. A guy who lost his car keys. A woman who said yes to hosting Passover dinner before she realized her kitchen is the size of a closet. A rabbi who accidentally double booked two funerals.
The mistake most new writers make is starting with description. “The autumn leaves fell gently on the cobblestone path as Sarah reflected on her childhood.” Nobody cares about the leaves. Get Sarah into trouble on the first page and then I’ll stick around to see how she gets out.
My story The Mushuginah Minyan starts with a problem: we need ten men for a minyan and we only have nine. Thats it. Thats the engine for the whole story. Everything else, the characters, the comedy, the observations about synagogue life, all of that hangs on the simple question of whether we’re going to find a tenth guy.
Write Like You Talk
This one took me years to learn. I used to write like I was trying to impress my English professor. Long sentences. Big vocabulary. Paragraphs that went on for half a page because I thought that was what “real writers” did.
Then I started doing standup comedy and I realized something. When I talked to an audience, they laughed. When I read them my prose, they checked their phones. Same material. Different delivery.
So I started writing the way I talked. Short sentences mixed with long ones. Contractions. Incomplete thoughts sometimes. The kind of rhythm that sounds like a person telling you something interesting over coffee, not a textbook explaining something boring in a library.
End Before You Think You Should
This is the hardest part. Every writer wants to tie everything up. Explain the theme. Make sure the reader “gets it.” But readers are smart. They get it. And the stories that stay with people are usually the ones that stop a beat early and let the reader fill in the gap themselves.
One of my inspirational stories, the one about Max the wonder dog, ends right at the moment when you know what’s going to happen but you havent seen it yet. Thats where the emotion lives. Not in the event itself, but in the anticipation of it.
If you’re writing short stories and nobody’s finishing them, it’s probably not your ideas. Its your pacing. Speed up, cut the description, get to the trouble faster. And then stop before you run out of things to say.
The worst thing a story can do is overstay its welcome. Kind of like a Shabbos dinner guest who’s still talking at midnight when you’ve already started washing dishes around him.
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