With the deadline for the Thornton Wilder short story competition, I figured it would be a good time to write an article with some advice. I have written many short stories, and I wrote a cosmetic horror short story for this competition. It is a subgenre of body horror that interacts with gendered beauty standards, consumerism, and societal pressures to be perfect. A basic synopsis is that an overwhelmed journalist, Mia, discovers a beauty serum and it leads her to become apathetic and superficial. 

I follow David Baldacci’s method for finding an idea; he calls it “Writer’s Prism.” It is observation-based and requires one to twist overheard conversations and mundane experiences into elaborate tales. He uses it to concoct deep and complex, almost Machiavellian, conflicts and stories. My favorite places to do this are coffee shops and art museums, but anywhere works. Take any person, and use one action or how they’re dressed and create a backstory for them. Then try to come up with a conflict, and maybe a supporting character. This can work for many genres, Baldacci primarily uses it for thriller and mystery, but one could use it to find horror or sci-fi ideas if one took a situation and leaned more into creating a “dark side” of it.

Two middle-aged men, with strong European accents, walking on the street are talking about what they are going to cook for dinner. Could both be prestigious chefs asked to cater for some high-class event? Their father could have died recently, causing them to come to the States, but the father was indebted to organized crime. Thus, the debt has been inherited by both sons and the mob has asked them to poison a politician at the dinner. Maybe a person who one runs into on a stairwell is running late for a meeting about selling their startup, but during the meeting, one of the investors falls dead. It gives the classic dinner party whodunit a more modern and fresh twist. Seeing a sign that a nice and quaint cafe is changing management, and the new reviews are bad, could inspire a story where the new manager is actually working for a real estate company and is drugging the food in order for people to leave the town so the company can make a new mall. The protagonist could be a regular or an old barista, leading to a nice cozy mystery.

I usually have a little notepad that I carry around, on which I write my basic premise in. Once I have a story idea, I transcribe it into a different notebook and try to flesh it out. When I am fleshing out the idea, I try not to look at the notepad while I am doing it. This lets me refine the idea, as I have to both remember and think critically about it. Then I transcribe it from a notebook to my computer, again trying not to look at the notebook as I am doing it. By this point, I have a central conflict and an almost fully characterized protagonist. I don’t usually do very much research for writing a short story, with the only caveat being if it would be a historical fiction story or something sci-fi that requires a lot of world-building. If I do need to research, I try to only spend a week doing it and not get too bogged down.

I then create a little mini-outline, just using bullet points to have a sense of a general plot arc and some things that need to happen, like one character meeting another or a character learns something. I find that outlining completely leads me to waffle around. For my most recent short story, it looked something like this.

• Scene one is Mia, very tired yet devoted to her job. Portray her desire to become “more”
• Next scene is something for her to start thinking about getting the mask, maybe workplace interactions
• Purchases it, vivid sensory details, feels the ‘high’ after getting it
• Social interactions to show her gradual descent into superficiality, and a negative review of one of her articles as her worldview becomes shallow
• Climax, she gets angry during a panel meeting and yells at her intern. Coworkers push her away and feels depressed for a couple of weeks
• Resolution, she realizes that she has changed for the worse, moment of lucidity, end on an uplifting note

Then I try to write it. I am certainly a binge writer so I just wrote out everything for a couple of days. I try not to edit myself as I am writing my first draft. Once I am finished, I don’t look at it for as long as I can, usually about a week depending on when I need to finish it. Then I start editing and revising, just cleaning up certain details and editing it using Chekhov’s gun, which is a principle developed by Anton Chekhov that postulates that every detail should have a later relevance. Iif a gun is placed on stage in Act 1 then it should be fired by Act 3. I both try to eliminate irrelevant sentences, but also add scenes that would make the story stronger. Every word counts in a short story, and even more so for flash fiction. Mentioning that the intern is from Uzbekistan is extraneous unless when Mia gets angry she insults his immigrant status or if when she is feeling regretful she thinks about how eager he was to share his culture with her and how she let him down. Mentioning that Mia began running is useless unless there is a scene where she is ostracized from her running group because she has turned vain. In this stage, I also try to cut out most of the exposition and write in scenes that show rather than tell. I removed the climax, and the scene where Mia reads the scathing review as well as the introductory paragraph, and replaced them with three of her coworkers. Her descent into vanity would be illustrated by her deteriorating relationships and through progressively more strained social interactions. Then I gave it to someone to read and leave comments. I gave this short story to Mrs. Alexander and my English teacher, Ms. Cambisaca, and incorporated their feedback. Just remember to stick with it and trust the process.