Do You Want to Write a Story?
Welcome to the 500 Ironic Stories Website
You have found the website for 500 Ironic Stories. This writing project is for people who love to read short stories and write short stories. This page provides some tips on how to write a short story. Hopefully you will learn something and enjoy reading or listening to some of the short stories in our current collection. To find a table listing all of those stories return to the Homepage. And please be sure to Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for story updates or follow us on your favorite social media platform, Podcast provider or on YouTube. For more information on the author of these stories, you can visit our About page.
What is a short story?
Two features distinguish a short story from other types of literature: first it should be short and second it should be a story. How short is short? A good rule of thumb for a short story is something between 300 and 5000 words. The stories in this website’s collection are all close to 2500 words. Anything longer than 5000 words is closer to a novella. After 15,000 words, you are looking at a novel.
What elements does a story need? Any good story should have characters and a plot. The characters should do something and there should be a conflict that needs resolution. A short story should also be self contained. Whatever conflict or problem raised by the story needs to have an ending. Maybe that ending is a cliffhanger in which readers do not quite know what happens in the future, but the reader should not need to wait to read your next story to find a resolution. If you string stories together and they rely on each other to continue or resolve the plot, you have figured out how to write a short story series.
Reasons to write a story
There are many reasons to write a short story. Some people think it is fun. They like to write a short story every day. Other people want to practice their writing skills. They might have aspirations for becoming a bestselling author and writing the next Harry Potter series of books. Future novelists often start out by writing short stories. Without a doubt, the number one reason you might write a short story is because a teacher makes you do it. English teachers love to assign students to write stories for homework. Approximately 99.9% of short stories are written for this reason. Do not quote that statistic. It was entirely made up.
Seven Steps for writing a short story
Whether you want to write or short story for fun or you have to write a short story for school, congratulations on doing some research. You may have come to the internet with the question, “How do you write a short story?” Since you are dedicated to doing it, you might as well ask the internet how to write a great short story.
This page provides you with seven steps for writing a great short story. Are these the universally accepted steps everyone should use to write a short story? Not necessarily. Will all people agree that these seven steps are necessary? No. Although these seven steps are not found in every English textbook, they have been tested in the writing laboratory. They have been used to produce every story found in the 500 Ironic Stories collection. These steps provide real and practical advice for how you should construct an interesting story people will want to read.
1. Pick your characters
The first step to short story writing is picking your characters. Interesting characters will rub off on the entire story. You do not want to use generic characters that can simply be described as “man” or “girl”. Your readers need to visualize these characters in their heads. If you give your characters unique features, they become easier to visualize and remember. A person walking into a room with a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder makes for a much more interesting story than someone described as an “old man.”
Not only should characters have a distinctive look in your head and in your readers’ heads, they should act in unexpected and peculiar ways. You may be writing a story in which you want totally “normal” people reacting to extraordinary circumstances, but usually the story will be better if a character’s actions are unpredictable. When the person with a pegleg walks into a room and then twirls in circles when he sees a ceiling fan, readers will be more intrigued than if an old man walks into a room and sits in a chair.
The easiest way to pick your characters is to think of people you know. The better you know them, the more you can predict how they will act in a given situation. The great part about being a writer is that you can borrow the most interesting parts from several people you know and create a mega-interesting composite character. If one of your friends sleepwalks and a second friend sings in an ultra-high pitch voice and a third friend eats peanut butter for every meal, why not invent a sleepwalking, peanut-butter eating, squeaky-singing super friend?
Some examples from the 500 Ironic Stories collection which include interesting characters are Exotic Pet Store and A Star is Hatched and Being Patrick Mahomes.
2. Picture a setting
Once you have chosen your characters, your next step is choosing a setting for your story. When you are writing your story, a great way to make it memorable for your readers is to add shiny details about the places occupied by your characters. Providing shiny details is easiest if you can easily picture those places in your mind. The more creative a place you create, the shinier those details will glow in your readers’ heads.
If you are imagining or describing a room, do not simply think about the ordinary details. The color of the walls is usually not very important, unless they are fluorescent green. Is there something unusual hanging on the walls? Maybe a dinosaur skull? A couch is boring unless it has a motor and wheels. And why are your characters in a room to begin with? Could they be inside a cave surrounded by glowing rubies? How about on a cruise ship headed to Mars?
Before you go too overboard with your creative settings, remember that your settings need to add to the appeal of the story but not be too distracting. If your readers cannot stop wondering why your characters are having breakfast in a rainbow colored, underwater monkey cage, you have probably gone too far.
Some examples from the 500 Ironic Stories collection which include interesting settings are Saltwater Starlight Dog and Museum of Fakes and Pumpkin Patch Skills.
3. Create a conflict
Now that you have characters and a place for them, you need a conflict. The conflict is the point of the story. No matter how fascinating your characters and how creative your setting, no one wants to read a story that can be summarized as “Some strange people were in an weird place and nothing happened. The end.” Readers need a reason to care about the people and what they are doing. Most of the time, readers want to root for your characters to succeed at accomplishing some impossible task or overcoming a challenge or defeating an enemy.
Choose your enemy. This could be a character in the story (antagonist) or it could be an unseen force battling your characters. You should be able to describe your enemy. If the enemy is a person, give that person some bad qualities. A lot of the time, your enemy is a situation instead of a person. Your enemy might be the threat of failing a test or the feeling of being lost and alone. Your enemy might be nature and your characters are struggling for survival. An enemy might be a bad attitude or a perception that needs to change.
If you can define the enemy in your story, the conflict should be clear. Usually, you will focus on the characters who will be the heroes of the story. Conflict involves how your heroes are suffering and struggling to overcome an enemy. Conflict continues until the end of the story. When the heroes have overcome the conflict, the story is resolved.
An obvious example of a conflict is a knight battling a fire breathing dragon. They fight until the dragon is killed. A less obvious example of a conflict is a group of friends who start a new job and realize they hate it. Their enemy is the job (and maybe their new boss) and conflict will continue until they leave the job or change their attitude about it.
Some examples from the 500 Ironic Stories collection which have notable conflicts are Green Thumb Tomato Killer and By the Dawn’s Early Light and Christmas Cookie Exchange.
4. Stick to a timeline
In this case a timeline does not refer to how long it takes you to write a story. A timeline describes the amount of time it takes for your story to happen. Since short stories are supposed to be short, it is very challenging for them to have timelines that stretch across a long time period. Novels and books can take place over many years because they have enough space to describe many scenes that can be stitched together to provide a reader a view over a long time. Short stories timelines only have room to include one or two scenes.
The action in a short story needs to occur in the same day or in a couple of days which are close together. If a short story tries to spread out the action over too long of a period, you end up with uninteresting descriptions that sound something like, “and then five years went by and the characters grew farther apart.” These kinds of connecting phrases are okay as long as they are linking two very descriptive scenes, but you do not want your story to be made up of generic phrases trying to explain what happened over a hundred years.
So stick to a strict timeline. If you need to add some background to explain the characters and the conflict, you can use flashbacks. There is no need to go back to the very beginning, when all of your characters were born, and describe what happened every year until they reach the real point of the story. Condense your timeline into scenes that take place over a short period of time. Your timeline should stretch between the day and time the conflict starts and the day and time the conflict ends.
Some examples from the 500 Ironic Stories collection which have very short timelines are Siri Don’t Take the Wheel and Strong Armed Date and Top Gun Dad.
5. Learn how to write a short story outline
After step four, you have collected characters, a setting, a conflict, and a timeline. Is it time to write some sentences? No! Very few people have the ability to write a coherent story without a map. They tend to concentrate too much on one aspect of the story while neglecting the rest. Usually this means lots of description at the beginning and then a rush to wrap things up at the end. Freeform writing can also head off in directions you did not intend to go with your story. Maybe this will lead to amazing places. For most of us, it will lead to a frustrating jungle of words.
You need an outline. Before you write the first sentence of your story, create a simple map showing where you are going and how you are going to get there. This outline can be a simple list describing the order you will introduce characters, settings, and conflicts. A simple outline might look like this: 1. Describe main character walking into the library. 2. Character’s friend walks into the library. 3. Library shelves unexpectedly collapse. 4. Characters hear and react to a cry for help. Etcetera. The simplest map should have 10 points on it. Use it to set the pace of your story and ensure nothing is too short or too long.
Story outlines can be very long and detailed if you need them to be. The more detailed the story map, the more it will keep you on track. Some may argue that story outlines will restrict your creative freedom. That might be true, if you don’t know how to write a short story outline. You can be very creative in your outlines. They can be where you first envision your story without the burden of worrying about sentence structure and choosing specific words. In your outline, you are telling your story to yourself before you tell it to anyone else.
6. Grab your audience with something exciting
Your outline is done. Now for your first sentence. Where do you start? Do not make the mistake of providing too much background information and scene setting. Imagine the most important action and get there as soon as possible. A good place to start might be the middle of a conversation between two characters. Do not worry if your readers do not yet know what the characters look like or exactly where they are. Readers will figure it out and you can add some of those details later. Your biggest worry should be catching reader attention so they want to finish your story.
If you cannot decide on a starting point, ask yourself, “Where is the conflict?” Get there as soon as possible. If the beginning of your story sounds like “Once upon a time, in a land far away,” you are writing a picture book for little kids and you better have a great illustrator. A short story needs to begin more like this: Jack Turniphead’s horse reared up as soon as the drums pounded. Jack landed hard on the wet forest floor, his sword clanging at his side and barely missing his belly.
Some examples from the 500 Ironic Stories collection which have interesting introductions are Dear Facebook and Weekend Smugglers Run and Too Fast and Just Enough Furious.
7. Follow your map
You’re off. You have hit the ground, hopefully running instead of falling. Do not panic after you get through your first few sentences. Consult your map. You already know where you are going. Construct words and sentences to get you to the next point. Then keep moving.
Your map probably does not have obstacles and pitfalls marked on it, but here are a few you should watch for: 1. Do not try to cram too many characters into a short story. Readers will lose track of them. Stick with five or less. 2. Do not overuse flashbacks and flashforwards. These interrupt the flow of your timeline and confuse readers. Try to stick with flashbacks only to tell necessary background information about characters. 3. Make sure it is clear who you are referring to when using pronouns. If you have three females in a scene and you use “her”, your readers better know which her you mean.
Favorite Stories for Inspiration
If you have been assigned to write a short story for a class, your teacher has probably asked you to read some short stories. This is not by accident. One of the best ways to learn short story writing is by reading examples. This page provides examples from the 500 Ironic Stories collection. Three other classic short stories which you may be interested in reading and which are not part of this website are Jack London’s To Build a Fire, James Hurst’s The Scarlet Ibis, and Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game.