Opening the wound: How to Write your Short Story

The moment when I started publishing my short stories was when I started writing stories about what I felt and thought. These aren’t things I just kept under wraps, but ideas and feelings I didn’t even like admitting to myself I had.

In this post, I'll tell you how to write your own authentic short stories sharing how I published the first story I sold. Here are the parts of my experience writing my first award-winning story you can copy to make your short stories more authentic.

You can find the story I’m talking about here.

1. Have (Emotional) Experiences

I guarantee you already have a few experiences you can draw on to write authentic short stories, but in case you don’t, I’ll recommend this: go have an experience with some emotional risk.

Fall in love with someone. Get a job you aren’t qualified for. Travel. Learn a skill you’ve never used before.

Then come back and tell us about it in a short story. Write it realistically or add speculative elements. Do whatever you see fit.

When writing The Uberman Sleep Schedule, the narrator of my story practiced the self-help exercises I used to practice, and some I still do. The journaling, the quoting, the Benjamin Franklin virtues’ chart, the rigorous scheduling and obsession with optimizing performance.

I wasn’t coming to this topic with a vague disdain for hustle culture or so wrapped up in it I was praising it unthinkingly. I was able to reflect on my experiences and use them to add to my story’s theme.

It also helped I had spent some time in Rome around Basilica Santa Croce, where there was a lot of history I could weave into my story for historical allusions. When I wrote the story in that setting, I could draw on that trip to make it feel real.

2. Engage, then Disassociate

When you write the first draft of your story, give yourself permission to say what you really think and feel. Tell yourself no one will read it but you.

When I started The Uberman Sleep Schedule, I already knew it was going to be weirdly formatted, including blacked out texts and footnotes. I never dreamed of publishing it. I was just having fun, writing what I wanted to write.

I only sent it to a contest at my university because it accepted stories in PDF format. That contest was my first big win.

If you do want to write fiction professionally, though, then you do have to eventually edit with other people reading your work in mind. You have to see your exposed self the way others will see you and not pull back.

There are a few ways to deal with this.

First, remember this is fiction. No matter how much of yourself or of people you know you put into the characters of your story, those people are not real.

So long as you do not support or do any of the immoral acts that might happen in your story, they are also not a representation of who you are and what you believe.

There will always be people who think otherwise. I had no shortage of fellow students in my creative writing classes who expressed their disapproval with some troubling material in my stories, for no other reason than the material was there.

For one class, I wrote a poem told from the perspective of a man who was very possessive of a woman he loved. While talking with the professor about it, I described the process of writing the poem as letting the words come from my mind to the page without too much self-censoring, and I was horrified by what I wrote. In subsequent drafts, I tried to bring out the elements that scared me.

“But,” the professor said, “you did write those words.”

I’m still not sure what she meant. I sheepishly agreed and left the room.

Yes, I did physically put the words on the page. Yes, the result was a disturbing story.

If she was suggesting I was somehow responsible for those words or the actions described in the story, that their primary meaning is the same as my intentions when I wrote them, that by writing them I am speaking the words with the same intention as the speaker of the poem, then I disagree.

To take every obscene act we see in fiction as literal goes against the concept of imagination and the concept of truth. It would be pretending people don’t talk or think or act in these ways, and to say we aren’t allowed to even think about what these things mean.

I’m not saying people have to read troubling short stories. I’m not here to force anyone out of their comfort zone.

But, to say I just can’t do it is a bad idea. It’s lying. It’s denying someone’s experience as valid.

I don’t believe that. People who want to face the horrors of life, to feel like they’re not monsters for having a stray thought, and to see evil for what it is, should be able to so in the realm of short fiction.

Your responsibility should be to look at what you are showing in your short story and reflect on it. Not to hide it. You can look at this part of yourself and condemn it without denying it is there.

In my story, while I did recognize a part of my narrator’s beliefs come from my own, he still paid for them. He paid for being unable to change, and that is the key difference between him and me.

3. Say What You Really Think

One of the great joys of writing for me is to write out the ideas I could never bring up with anyone else. As Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “Paper is more patient than man.”

In The Uberman Sleep Schedule, part of why the narrator is struggling to write his stories is because he feels like the deck is stacked against him. The demands of life make it impossible for him to do serious work, which is why he takes on this odd sleep schedule. He also believes he would have an easier time getting his work published if only he was non-white, or a woman, or gay.

These are problematic beliefs, but I would be lying if I said that at the time of writing this story, there wasn’t some part of me that felt the same way.

I wrote The Uberman Sleep Schedule while attending university full time and working three days a week as a blog editor, all while spending about three hours a day to work on my writing.

The crammed schedule definitely felt unfair as I turned down the social lives my friends and brothers got to enjoy, just to write another story that was going to get rejected by everyone I sent it to.

As I read and frowned at what was being published and praised, I assumed the work was only being published because the author was part of a historically unrepresented group.

Would I say any of this to my peers and teachers at my university? No way, José.

There was a lot wrong with what I believed, and it wasn’t until I wrote those into a story and saw them for the excuses they were that I was able to move on.

When my story came out, I got a few messages from people saying I had expressed in words a feeling they could never articulate. The feeling that if they just had a little more time, if there wasn't this thing or the other that they had to deal with, if they were someone other than who they were, then they could be great.

And, at least one person told me they saw the story for what it was. A warning that by pursuing greatness while neglecting your life and who you are, you destroy yourself.

This is what great storytelling can do. You reach out to the people who secretly think like you, and you whisper, You are not alone.

That brings a smile to someone’s face. If that isn’t a worthwhile pursuit, I don’t know what is.