How to Structure Your Short Story (Write Better Stories)

we love structure on this channel and today we're going to talk about mapping out your short stories what's up guys my name is brandon mcnulty i'm a writer i'm the author of bad parts and welcome to my writing channel about two years ago i did a video on the subject of novels versus short stories and a lot of people enjoyed that video and to this day i still get comments on it and people ask me from time to time about doing another video on short stories and i got to be honest i have abandoned short

stories on this channel for far too long so today i wanted to devote an entire video to the idea of how you can get the right plot structure for your short stories now i'm going to be sharing with you a couple different outlining methods and i'm going to give you an example from indiana jones to really hammer it home but before we get into any of this before we really delve into the material today i want to say right up front that short stories have the same basic storytelling structure as novels and screenplays and other

larger works they all follow the basic concept of a beginning a middle and an end now the key difference here is that while a novel might have a beginning that makes up 25 of the story a middle that makes up 50 of the story and an ending that makes up another 25 of the story a short story will differ in terms of how much of the story is distributed to the beginning middle and end for instance you might have a short story with a very short beginning it might only be a paragraph that just introduces

the character and their problem and their situation and then you jump right into the middle of the story where you get all the different obstacles that the character has to overcome and the choices that the character has to make along the way before they get to that final confrontation which might only be a page or half a page or whatever it is and in that final confrontation the hero will face off against the villain and the hero will have to make a choice that will have impact in their future and i think another key thing

to remember with short stories is that they typically end rather abruptly at least abruptly compared to what we see in movies and novels uh whereas novels and movies you might have a situation where we have that that climactic moment the hero defeats the villain and then we get to see the aftermath we get to see do they live happily ever after do they get to rebuild their city or whatever it is in short stories it's gonna be a little different in short stories with the ending you're not gonna have that aftermath you're just gonna basically

have that choice that the character makes and then the readers are gonna have to fill in the blanks afterward now because short stories are flexible in terms of structure you can take risks with them you can get experimental you can get wild you can do a lot of different things and you don't necessarily have to adhere to any particular story structure with them however if you are someone who's more comfortable with a more conventional story structure i have two different ways that you can plot out your stories i'm going to talk about them today now

the first of these methods is the seven step method and this is a very simple to remember easy to follow method for writing short stories and the best part about it is that it allows for a lot of flexibility and you can start right at the top with a person who is in a place with a problem and they want to solve that problem and they try to solve that problem but fail and then they try again and fail and then they try again and finally get a resolution and that resolution can be either good

or bad and as i mentioned this is super easy to commit to memory you have a lot of flexibility in how you go about trying and failing with these characters so i mean it's something that if you want to really let loose and you don't want to be bogged down with all kinds of structures and different you know points that you have to hit along the way this might be the best structural outline for you now on the other hand you might say brandon i need something a little more specific all that trying and failing

it's not specific enough for me i want some actual points that i can hit along the way that i could strive to go after is there anything else out there that's more specific and yes there is there's actually a really great storytelling structure out there called dan harmon's story circle dan harmon is a screenwriter he writes for rick and morty and this is a show that has a lot of short episodes where you have characters in these quick situations where things are changing by the end of it now the story circle has eight different steps

and they're very specific at least specific compared to the seven step method that i just gave you so here's how it works you have first off you have a character who is in a comfort zone but they want something so what they do is they enter into an unfamiliar situation they adapt to it they get what they wanted but they pay a heavy price for it and then they return to their familiar situation having changed and that change is important because you want to read stories where either the situation changes or the character changes or

how we perceive the character changes change is the reason why we write these stories we need to see that something changes now i don't think it's enough to just rattle off those eight different steps to it i want to give you an example i decided to take an example from the first indiana jones movie raiders of the lost ark i settled on this because i don't think there's a short story out there that everyone is familiar with i mean there's no like super popular short story that everyone has read in their lives so i thought

it would be best to just go with a movie and particularly a movie that opens up with a sequence that can actually work as a short story because if you've seen the opening to indiana jones you know that it's pretty much this self-contained event that really shows us who india is as a character and what he goes through and it it follows these different steps and i'm going to show you how it follows these steps right now so the story opens up with a character who is in a comfort zone this is indiana jones he's

an adventurer going on an adventure that's a comfort zone for him but he wants something and we know this because he takes out his map he's looking for treasure he needs to find that golden idol that's what he wants and in order to get it he has to enter an unfamiliar situation specifically a tomb that he's never been in before and once he gets in there he has to adapt to it there's a lot of traps and there's tarantulas and there's a chasm he has to jump over and he has to dodge arrows and he

has to figure out how he's going to get that golden idol off its pedestal eventually he does get what he wants he gets that golden idol but he pays a heavy price for it as soon as he takes it the tomb begins to collapse he has to run out of there he has to dodge arrows he has to deal with the fact that he's being betrayed by his friend he has to outrun a rolling boulder and then finally when he does escape the idol is taken away from him by his rival bellock who's threatening to

kill indy and then at the end here he has to return to his familiar situation specifically he has to return to the life of being an adventurer who does not have the treasure and he of course runs for his life he decides he wants to live the fight another day so he hurries back to the plane having changed now in this example indiana jones doesn't undergo a significant character change and that's because this is the beginning of a movie it's not a standalone short story so his change isn't that significant i guess you could argue

that our perception of him has changed because early on we see him as this cool collected guy he knows what he's doing he knows how to get into the tomb and get the treasure but by the end of it we we see that he can be rattled he can't have things taken away from him and things aren't always going to go perfect for this guy even though he is super resourceful now you can also apply the seven step method to indiana jones as well in this intro we have a person indiana jones in a place

south america 1936 with a problem he wants the idol and he has to try and solve that problem he tries and fails he tries and fails again and then he finally tries again and gets a resolution that is both good and bad in this case it's good because he escapes with his life but it's bad because he doesn't get the treasure and instead his rival bellock has it so as you can see you can build a short story from either one of these plotting methods whether you're more comfortable with the seven step method which allows

for more freedom or the story circle method which allows for more specificity within the steps either one of these is fine and whichever one you are more comfortable with just run with it take risks enjoy yourself and tell the story that you want to tell so i hope this helps question of the day have you ever written a short story that you were happy with let us know in the comments section below thank you guys for watching if you want to support the channel please pick up a copy of bad parts if you haven't already

also be sure to check out my other videos hit the like and subscribe buttons for me share this video with a friend and as always remember to keep on writing