Details, People. Details.

Image by Devanath from Pixabay

Hemingway wrote short stories so tightly he expected the reader to fill in the gaps. While many things were taking place, he focused on one thing making his writing stand out for its reliance on action and silence.

Yet, he left enough on the page to give the reader a full picture through staccato sentences of subject-verb-noun. A picture comes to life as many of these snapshots tell the story.

This is not an essay on Ernest Hemingway. It is an essay focused on making sure we build a short story through images, hints, clues, and reflection. How we do that as a writer engages the reader to make our story worth reading.

The art is leaving in just enough details to make a complete story. If you see the details of the story, your job is to sprinkle them around. If you do not know the details, your short story is not worth much because it leaves holes in the full picture. Full elements draw us to stories that build upon themselves — fast or slowly — to a satisfying end.

Small Images Build the Tale

Television stresses writing to the video. The images power the story. In a short story, we must build enough images so they come together like a puzzle. Stand back and you can see everything. So pick those details needed to build the full story and leave out any distractions.

Yet, spread these smaller pictures throughout the story. Avoid writing metaphoric sentences that try to cram everything happening in one breath. The urge may exist to craft a literary bombastic sentence. Ignore it. You are a stylist, not a writer who throws up words to show off your smarts.

In defense of this view, I write genre fiction; short detective stories, speculative fiction, flash snapshots of real people trying to make sense of their world. I use lots of images to tell a fast, engaging story. I have yet to tackle a literary novel like E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News full of metaphoric writing.

Images Serve as Beats

Beats move the plot forward. Use images, metaphors, and other showing language to write the story. Image leads to image leads to image. Avoid worthless showing of parts of the story. Throwing out facts about the story that does not build the full picture, waste words and disappoint the reader.

There is no reason to build a picture of a character if you do not bring her back. Or worse, just kill her off because you never placed her puzzle piece. Every image of the short story must do its part to help you reach a conclusion.

Short fiction does not give you the luxury of building the milieu through trivial facts. Short stories need images do a job, and often that job is to serve as a story beat.

Build a short story through a sequence of images, engage your reader, and make your story worth reading.

Copyright © 2019 Michael Shawn Sommermeyer

_{Click on the image to join the fun!}