The subject of the short story has been selected, the initial incident described, and now you have to decide what to actually include, what level of description of the characters you need to include, and what you need to leave out.
You’re
not going to write a short story in the style of Charles Dickens. You are
looking to get your message across in 1000 to 5000 words, probably no more than
that. So, pictorially rich descriptions of places and people are going to slow
the pace. However, you’d still need to include enough information to keep
the reader interested and for the story to make sense, and as I’ve said many
times before, that is the dilemma for the writer.
Writing
is very much about decision-making, and in this case of short stories, continual
decision-making. Putting in essential information to maintain a strong
atmosphere is something you’ve to keep up with throughout the length of the tale itself, so probably more than in a full-length novel you’re going
to be re-reading section by section as you actually proceed. My
own experience is to be rather too succinct; I’ve written many tiny little
stories of between 750 and 1000 words, which may seem too little but actually
still works. I’m currently reading a book whose chapters are about
that length, and the actual story itself feels a little jerky as a
result. When you're writing a short story, that is all you have: you've just got that little space, that little collection of words through which to
transmit your message. To allow yourself to fall into the trap of wordy
descriptions is to change the pace of what you're writing. The important thing is to be interesting and keep the
structure tight.
One way of ensuring a tight structure is to limit the scope of the story; for example, I wrote a story about a teddy bear in the night and stuck very much to a few short hours of darkness and some rather creepy action, but it was limited to the teddy bear that developed a life of its own and the little boy who was the teddy bear's owner. A second example would be a slightly longer short story which is about an assassin, and it was very much about him and limited to his immediate experiences; very few significant others were introduced into that story again to keep the actual structure as tight as I possibly could within the time available.
Keep the balance.
God Bless
