by Savannah Cordova @Reedsy

Whether for a contest, a creative writing class, or simply as an individual exercise, most writers will have tried writing short fiction at one time or another. It’s a popular tactic among those hoping to improve their craft — the idea being that short stories are the perfect canvas for experimentation before a writer moves onto bigger projects.

And while there’s definitely truth to this, I wish that we in the writing world would talk a little less about writing short stories, and much more about reading them. Yes, we’ve all heard that we should read more in order to sharpen our skills, but I believe there are particularly useful lessons to glean from short pieces — and as a judge for a weekly short story contest, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned from poring over so many myself!

Here’s why reading short stories is the best thing you can do for your writing, along with some excellent stories to get you started.

You learn the value of concision

To begin on a personal note, before I was reading stories all the time, I genuinely believed that the longer and more elaborate the piece, the better. Looking back at my own old stories, this mindset is painfully obvious: every other word is a 50-cent adverb, every description inflated to a paragraph or more. And from the stories I read now, countless other writers have also fallen victim to this fallacy, many of their stories stopping just short of our 3,000-word limit.

In truth, almost every story I read of this length could lose a third, if not half, of its words without losing its essence — and likely become better in the process. Not only does brevity require writers to choose their words carefully, it also encourages omissions (Hemingway-style) and allows readers the much more satisfying experience of putting things together themselves. Plus if you’re submitting to a contest or publication, you can be sure the judge or editor will love you for keeping things short and sweet!

I’m not saying that a good story can’t have beautiful, eloquent language, only that it must be used wisely. Take “mie goreng”, a recent winner of the Reedsy contest: it’s less than 1,500 words, but every last one of them contributes to our understanding of the characters, the setting, and the mouthwatering appeal of the titular dish. The writing is descriptive yet not overwrought, each line telling us something new, and the narration doesn’t go on any longer than it needs to: the ideal balance to strike in a short story.

It hones your sense of substance

On a separate but related note, reading short stories also seriously hones your BS radar, helping you differentiate between works of substance and works that are just prettily written. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve read that were full of verbose ponderings and metaphors, but ultimately had nothing meaningful to say.

Indeed, the more short stories you read, the more you’ll see it’s impossible to construct a good story without a strong idea to prop it up. However, this needn’t translate into a complex plot — far from it! The best stories I’ve read focus less on events and more on emotions, often taking place just before or after something big has happened, or narrated by someone on the periphery. Substance in a story comes not from events, after all, but from how characters respond to them; nowhere is this clearer than in short fiction.

I could name a hundred examples here, but two especially good ones are “Autumn Rain” and “Moira’s Day Off”, a couple more contest winners that demonstrate how many ways there are to achieve narrative substance. The first is a poignant series of vignettes about the narrator’s brother, poetically interwoven with other aspects of her life. The second is a lighthearted bit of low sci-fi about a woman whose decision-making AI is out for repair. You could hardly imagine two more different plots, and yet both effectively tap into the thoughts and feelings of their characters, creating compelling personal narratives that also touch on universal themes.

You see how wildly different styles can succeed

While not everyone shares my former (again, woefully misguided) belief about elaborate writing, we all have our preconceived notions about which writing style is “best.” Ironically, this is often to the detriment of our work; we end up locking ourselves in creative boxes, trying to be “literary” rather than letting the words come naturally.

As a result, one of the most liberating things about reading tons of short stories is having these preconceptions broken down. Because, as a regular short story reader, you’ll not only see a wide range of plots, but also of styles — from Rooneyan sparseness to Nabokovian floridity. And you’ll soon find it’s not about the style itself so much as how well it’s applied.

To invoke another couple of disparate examples, this time in terms of style, let’s look at “On the Origin of Shadows” and “The Men and the Lake”. The first is firmly on the Nabokovian side, with an ornate extended metaphor about a house as a human body (“The hall like intestines, dark and humid… The bathroom like a liver, maroon and old-fashioned, an old bonsai fig ruling over the windowsill.”) and plenty more evocative language throughout. The second story diverges not only in style, but also in presentation; it’s presented in straightforward free verse rather than paragraphs, and begins with powerful anaphora.

Stylistically speaking, these stories have almost nothing in common, yet both managed to clinch first place in the contest — simply because the authors had mastered their respective styles and didn’t worry about sounding like anyone else. A priceless lesson to learn as a writer!

The less-intimidating form may encourage you

I’ll leave you with one last point that might seem self-evident, but is worth spelling out anyway: reading short stories is great for your writing because you realize that you can do this, too! Not that you couldn’t write a novel — for all I know, you already have — but it’s pretty undeniable that a short story of 1,000-,3000 words is easier to write than a book of 50,000+ words.

So if you’re in a writing slump or have never tried your hand at fiction before, a story could be just the thing to get you on (or back on) that creative horse. You can start with a prompt, any prompt, whether it’s a specific statement designed to inspire a story or just something interesting that happened in your day.

And you don’t have to write very much to get it done — or, as we’ve established, to win a contest. As a final example, one of my favorite recent Reedsy winners was “No More Happy Endings”, a meta story about a writer and his daughter that packs a real emotional punch in just 1,100 words. Indeed, when uncertain of a subject, one can always turn to strong emotions; you’ll likely find that you can write more clearly and concisely about them than if you were circling a subject, trying to figure out what you want to say.

But honestly, if you’re able to carve out the time to read short stories, you’re bound to find yourself inspired one way or another — by the prose itself, or the intricacies of the characters, or the sheer manageability of the length. Whether you’re reading as a contest judge or straight from the polished pages of the New Yorker, you’ll certainly gain knowledge and confidence in the form… and with any luck, you’ll be copiously reading and writing in no time.

Savannah Cordova is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. In her spare time, Savannah enjoys reading contemporary fiction and writing short stories.