It is almost impossible to define just one way to write a short story. One of the most beautiful and frustrating aspects of deciding to write short stories is the freedom it brings to the process.

You can see from the image below, which looks at the average short story length from different short story writers, that the length of their short stories differs from writer to writer. The thing is, even short story writers produce stories of different lengths. Perhaps the most famous example of micro-fiction is Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Stories less than 500 words are considered to be micro-fiction. Stories that range from 500 to 1,00 words are classed as flash fiction ( here’s a great example). The creative writing landscape contains several types of fiction.Ī story around 40.000 words is considered a novella, and one between 7,000 and 17,000 is a novelette.Ī short story length is typically around 5,000 words in length but maybe as long as 7000 words. It is easy to assume that any work of fiction that is shorter than a novel (about 80,000 words) can be classed as a short story, but this is not the case. One of the first questions short story writers often ask when they start to write a short story is 'how long should my short story be?'

Examples of short stories to write