This guide to writing compelling, memorable short stories gives you all the essentials without wasted words. It tells you how and where to get ideas, how to establish and sustain excitement, how to create live, colorful characters, and how to plot, develop and bring home your story. It even includes exercises to help you perfect your story-telling skills. Full of tips and techniques that work, it makes an indispensable, reliable collaborator. You'll find it ideal whether you're studying alone or supplementing a creative or fiction writing course, conference or workshop.

Table of Contents

Introduction - what is a short story and where does a writer find one?; Characters - how to create people who live and breathe on the page; conflict - how to devise a story that readers wonAt want to put down; plot and structure - how to devise a story and keep it moving forward; setting and atmosphere - how to bring readers into a vivid fictional world; narrative voice - how to develop an individual voice as a writer.