Writing a short story is hard. There’s no two ways around it. You have to be able to keep things short and
sweet while keeping them interesting.
You have to be able to cut and trim away everything, including parts
that you may have fallen madly in love with.
Everything has to be neat and orderly and everything has to be there for
a reason.
I'll say it again: It’s hard.
One thing that helps is to know the entire story. Not just the story you’re telling, but the
whole of everything. If someone were to
write a short story where you were the main character, it might be a story that’s
explicitly about that one night you had to fight zombies summoned when you
rolled a set of novelty dice the wrong way, but you existed before that time in
your life and will exist past that time in your life.
What matters the most for the short story is the you up
until you rolled the dice. All the
choices you made, all the things that happened to you will color how you react
to the impending doom. Think about
cloned animals. They all look the same
and are genetically pretty much the same, but they all act differently because
they all have been shaped by vastly different life experiences.
As a writer, you need to know your character’s story at
least up until the timeline of the story you’re writing. It could be useful to know what happens after
if you want to ever write more so that you can weave in some of that tasty foreshadowing,
but it’s not necessary. You need to have
a pretty good idea of how the world your character lives in works and how those
workings will affect the choices the people of that world make.
Knowing all of this will also give you more to draw
from. If you keep the scope of your
short story to just figuring out the immediate story, when an editor tells you
to change something or elaborate on something or the like, you’re going to be
facing a huge and very blank brick wall.
You might get mad and try to impotently fight for keeping what you have
because it will become “the only way”.
You might give up because you don’t think you can get any more
creativity out of yourself. You might
hastily create stuff that makes no sense and will have to start over. All of those scenarios create strife and more
work for yourself when all you had to do was spend a few minutes fleshing out
the universe a little on the backend.
tl;dr: Don’t be lazy.
Know your world and your characters or you’ll find yourself having to do even more work
with unsympathetic editors breathing down your neck.
