Ryan M. Patrick

There’s a lot of different story lengths for fiction. There’s flash fiction – generally anything under 1500 words, novellas at 15,000 to roughly 45-50,000, and novels above 50k. Short stories – those generally between 1,500 words and 7,500 words, but sometimes can go up to 10,000 – are an area that I am actively trying to improve in, with some limited success.

Short stories are hard, especially as a guy who generally reads and writes novels. There’s so little space to get your main plot across and the word count limits for most magazines seem overwhelming for someone who writes 90-120k word novels, let alone for a writer who writes epic fantasy at twice that length!

I’ve had some success recently really focusing on the medium. I read short stories that are actively being published in magazines, rather than in short story collections from my favorite authors (hat tip to Rick Danforth on that one!). I also make sure that I start my shorts by jumping right into the story. I preach in late, out early to my writing partners but with shorts it’s almost impossible to be too late. One core theme or concept is probably good enough, more than that and you’ll drift into novella territory.

Short stories also give you a chance to try out ideas that might not warrant a longer novel. I read a story about monitoring pizza restaurants around the Pentagon to see if you could predict when the U.S. would become involved in a conflict and I wanted to see if you could apply it to a fantasy or sci-fi setting. Choosing the former, I wrote a 3,000 word story which I’ve been submitting (unsuccessfully) to different magazines.

Once you’ve written a short, where to send it? The Submission Grinder lets you search by genre and word length to find magazines open for submissions. Word-of-mouth is also great – if your ear is to the ground, you’ll hear about open submission periods from your friends on Twitter/Bluesky/etc or in Discord groups.

I only have one short out – “Low Frequency” – which is supposed to be a freebie on Amazon but I have a long-running battle with them where they won’t match the price on the other stores. Go check it out on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Smashwords – it’s free on those sites!