Common Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Your First Short Story

Every first short story is a bit of a mess, and that is not a problem. The problem is not knowing which parts are messy. Editors see the same handful of habits in early fiction over and over, and the useful news is that all of them can be fixed in a second draft. What they need is a little nerve and a willingness to cut.

Here are the mistakes worth catching, roughly in the order they appear on the page.

Opening Three Paragraphs Too Early

Most drafts begin before the story does. Someone wakes up, makes tea, thinks about their childhood, and by the time anything happens the reader has quietly left. Here is the sort of opening that turns up in a first draft:

Sarah woke at seven and made tea, thinking about the phone call she had to make.

And here is the same story, starting two minutes later:

The answerphone clicked on. Sarah's hand stayed flat on the table.

The fix is mechanical. Delete your first paragraph and read the story from the new opening. If it improves, delete the next one too. Keep going until the story loses something — that is where it starts. Something should be different by the end of the first page: a decision made, a visitor arrived, a lie told badly. Promise the reader a change and they will follow you.

Characters Who Are Only There to Serve the Plot

Flat characters are rarely flat because they lack description. They are flat because they want one thing, and only the thing the plot needs them to want. A character built from a single attribute — the kind boss, the jealous sister — has nowhere to go.

Give every character three things

• Something they want in this scene, not in the whole story.
• Something they are afraid of losing.
• One detail that does not fit their type.

A widow clearing out her husband's clothes who haggles hard at the charity shop. A teenage boy who wants the house to himself and still texts his mum every night. Contradiction is where character lives, and it costs you one sentence to add.

Try the function test on your supporting cast. If you could replace a character with a note reading "delivers bad news", they need work. Even the person behind the counter can want something that rubs gently against what your protagonist wants. Conflict does not have to be dramatic to be real.

Summarising the Moments That Matter

"They argued for an hour, and then he left" is a summary. Summaries are useful. They move time along, they cover the dull commute, they let you skip a month. What they cannot do is carry the moment your story turns on. If the argument is the point, the reader needs to be in the room for it.

A rough rule: summary for time passing, scene for time that matters. If you have written a page of someone thinking about an event, ask whether we should have been there while it happened. Nine times out of ten the answer is yes, and the scene will be shorter and sharper than the reflection it replaced.

Dialogue That Explains Itself

Early dialogue often carries information the reader needs rather than anything the characters would actually say. Nobody announces their own backstory. People hint, deflect, change the subject, and occasionally say precisely the wrong thing at the worst possible moment.

Let your characters be evasive. Let them interrupt. Let one of them answer a different question from the one asked. Then give them something to do with their hands — not as decoration, but as a way of showing what they will not say. A man who lines up the cutlery while he apologises tells us more than the apology does.

Rushing the Ending, or Refusing to End

Endings fail in two directions. The rushed version wraps everything up in a paragraph: the argument ends, the character understands something, the story stops. The endless version gives you five hundred words of someone driving home, thinking about what it all meant.

For the rushed ending, write the last line first, then work back towards it. Ask one question: what has changed? Not fixed or healed, necessarily — changed. If the answer is nothing, you have a scene rather than a story, and the ending needs to be earned earlier.

For the endless one, cut the final paragraph. Then cut the new final paragraph. Endings often land best on an image or a small action instead of a statement, and readers usually understand your theme two pages before you explain it. Trust them to get there.

Prose That Is Trying Too Hard

Three things to hunt down in a second draft:

• Adverbs in dialogue tags. "She said angrily" is doing work the line should be doing. If the anger is not in the words, fix the words.
• Doubled description. Tall, lanky, elongated. Pick the one that earns its place and drop the other two.
• Weather as mood lighting. Rain that arrives to make a scene sad is forgettable. Rain that gets in past a character's collar while they refuse to fix it is not.

Read the story aloud and cut wherever you stumble. A second draft should usually lose about a tenth of its words, and almost nothing improves by being longer.

Before You Call It Finished

Run these checks in order. They take half an hour and catch most of what a first reader would notice.

1. Read the opening page and the final page together. Do they feel like the same piece of work?
2. Find the moment your character's situation changes for good. Is it near the middle, rather than in the last two paragraphs?
3. Underline every sentence that explains rather than shows. Delete half of them.
4. Read the dialogue out loud and cut any line that exists only to inform the reader.
5. Give it to one honest reader and ask two questions: where did you get bored, and what did you think was going to happen?

Then leave it alone for a week. When you come back, the problems you could not see will be obvious — which is the entire point of a first draft. Write the second story before you perfect the first. Improvement comes from finishing things, and your fifth short story will be better than your first for reasons you will not be able to explain at the time.

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