How To Conjure Up A Short Story

How to conjure up a short story is not unlike writing down a recipe for baking a cake. First, you need to list the ingredients, and then you write the process of mixing and baking those ingredients to produce a mouth-watering cake. It's just like magic.

However, it is not quite as easy as I am suggesting. Some cakes will end up in the bin, and some will have people crying out for more. So, I'm going to explain how I came to write a short story of just 200 words, not a word less, nor one word more.

What I wrote was my entry for a writing challenge on Vocal Media. The fictional subject was a heist. I have to be honest, I wasn't too sure that I could write a story in so few words. Some of my stories and articles here on Vocal Media stretch to five or six thousand words. I think this goes back to my days as a professional copywriter when I was known as Ralph 'Why use fifty words when you can write five thousand?' Emerson.

So I mulled the idea over a little. I did a little research on Wiki on what exactly is a heist. And then an idea started to form in my imagination.

The only problem with my idea was it was extremely convoluted and for sure would require a lot more than 200 words spot on. However, at least I had the bare bones of a story and simply needed to scale it down somewhat.

The story involved the theft of a work of modern art from an art gallery. What was a little helpful was that I studied art and design history for my degree at university. This gave me some idea of how the art world works.

The next thing I did was read another writer's submission to get a visual idea of what 200 words looked like on the page. I do believe that that is a very useful visual exercise to carry out, to get a concrete visual idea of the size of what you are proposing to deal with.

Then I made a start on my own interpretation of the brief. First I came up with the headline. Then I chose the subhead and then an image on Unsplash. And so to the story itself.

Now at this point, I still had no idea how this was going to work out word-wise. This is the point at which you have to trust your instinct for writing a story. I simply made it up as I went along until I got to the end.

One thing I wanted to do was introduce an element of mystery, about who, what, when and how. And I wanted to give a surprise ending, one that would make the reader re-think somewhat all that had gone before. This is where my tv viewing habits and choices come into play.

In the evenings, after a hard day at work for both me and my lovely wife, we like to watch certain types of tv series. For example, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, along with 'The Great British Bake Off', are amongst our current favourites.

Finally, the story was written, but it was a tad over 200 words. This is where having a very wide vocabulary comes into play. I parred the storey down to the bare essentials, sometimes replacing three words with one word, meaning exactly the same thing as the three it replaced.

In terms of actual writing time, I would say it took about an hour max. That of course was due to all of the preparation I had done beforehand. And watching Sherlock and Hercule was a great help too.

The thing about writing a piece of micro-fiction is that it concentrates the mind. Having to arrive at exactly 200 words is a test of your editing skills. It is a hugely enjoyable thing to do and it really doesn't require any prolonged periods sitting at your pc.

Some may feel compelled to comment that this way of working, following a well-used recipe, is like writing by numbers. All I can say to that is that there are a great many very successful authors making absolute fortunes out of writing by numbers. If it works, that is all that matters.

Have I baked a cake that will set mouths watering? Who knows? I will just have to wait and see. I make no claims to have written any sort of masterpiece, but it was a hugely fun thing to do, and hopefully, it will find an audience.

The story I am referring to is called 'The Heist That Never Was', which is published in Fiction. It's only a one-minute read, so you've not got much to lose, and perhaps a thing or two to gain, by running your eyes over it.