Supercharge Your Writing with Short Stories

Incorporate deliberate practice into your writing 

How can you get better at writing?

That’s what we want, as writers. We want our next book to be better than our last. We want to reach greatness — whatever that might mean to us (awards, sales, readership).

The path isn’t always clear. 

To begin with, people disagree on what “good” writing is. If you ask a dozen people to name a great writer, you’ll get a dozen different answers—and each answer will likely meet with vehement disagreement from someone else in the group.

Even if you can identify a target skill level—your own favorite writer, say—it can be hard to know how to get there. What can you do besides writing one book after another and hoping one hits? 

There’s another way. Athletes and musicians practice in a specific way that is engineered to get real results. We writers can do the same.

Deliberate practice improves your craft.

The advice to write every day is common, but ultimately not very helpful if you want to become a better writer. Putting in more practice time is important, but aimless practice won’t get you too far. Frequent writing sessions are necessary—but not sufficient!—for improving your craft. There’s a missing ingredient. 

The type of writing practice that you engage in is critical.

“[I]t may appear that excellence is simply the result of practicing daily for years or even decades. However, living in a cave does not make you a geologist. Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice—deliberate practice—to develop expertise.” - K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely (source)

What is deliberate practice?

When you engage in deliberate practice, you concentrate on specific skills that you want to work on instead of just putting time into the activity.

“Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.” - Ericsson, Prietula, and Cokely

In practice, this means that you choose a skill to work on, devise a small project in which you’ll focus on that skill, receive measurable feedback on how you did, and incorporate the feedback into your next project.

Let’s explore what this looks like in real life.

Identify what you need to work on: write a short story.

Before you can improve, you need to know what to improve. We tend to evaluate someone’s ability as a writer overall, but writing is an activity that’s made up of many micro-skills. You might be great at characterization but have a poor sense of pacing, or have brilliant plot lines but clunky descriptions.

It can be hard to find our own weaknesses, especially in art. You get so close to the project that you can’t see it objectively anymore.

This is where your initial round of feedback comes in. Write a short story and share it with someone who will give you feedback on what to improve. It’s important that you seek opinions from people who have studied writing craft and can break down your work into its component skills instead of just telling you whether they liked it or not. Consider asking fellow writers or a story coach.

A short story is a great vehicle to ask for this content because, as a complete story, it showcases all of your writing skills in miniature. It’s relatively easy to complete — you can invest a little time in creating a short story and discover where you need to improve without spending years on a novel.

Short stories are the perfect way to incorporate deliberate practice principles into your writing.

The short story is also a great form to improve in the areas where you find that you need work. The confines of a short piece give you a playground to practice a particular skill without being overwhelmed by the demands of a longer work.

This is similar to the way that athletes practice in dedicated sessions instead of playing full games. Consider the example of playing a game of golf: 

“You don’t improve because when you are playing a game, you get only a single chance to make a shot from any given location. You don’t get to figure out how you can correct mistakes. If you were allowed to take five to ten shots from the exact same location on the course, you would get more feedback on your technique and start to adjust your playing style to improve your control.” - Ericsson, Prietula, and Cokely

Writing a book is the game. It’s a massive undertaking that combines all of your skills. You might be trying to focus on improving your descriptions, but you have to split your attention across all of your story skills to make the novel work.

Small projects focus on one skill at a time. You might write a story working on description, and construct a lighter plot to carry your story. You still need to use all of your skills, but with a small investment that lets you narrow your focus on what you’re trying to improve.

They also allow for repetition — writing five drafts of a 1,500-word short story using different description techniques is doable. Writing five drafts of a full novel would be overwhelming, and if you wrote five drafts of one scene or chapter, it might be hard to see how the variations would apply to the story as a whole. You can read your five story variations independently and see how each stands on its own.

Writing short stories maintains the skills you’re not actively working on.

While each story may focus on a particular skill, you still need to exercise all of your writing skills to create a complete unit of story. 

This is a benefit that other approaches don’t have. For example, if you want to work on description, you could look around your house, pick an object, and write a short descriptive passage. After repeating that several times, you might get better at description (especially if you’re in the first stage of practice).

But you won’t get better at anything else.

If you write a short story focusing on description, you’ll get better at description. You’ll also get better at adjacent skills that help you use description effectively: how to integrate description into narrative, description in narration vs. dialogue, describing from different points of view, etc. This will help you to build a more robust understanding of the main skill.

And, because the short story is a complete unit, you’ll maintain or improve the rest of your story skills. 

Share your stories to get feedback to help you improve.

Short stories are an art form in themselves as well as being effective for practice. The second part is great for you, but the first part is great for your audience. They can experience a finished product. A full story.

That means that they’ll be more excited about reading your practice pieces and offering feedback—because they’re not just for practice, they’re real stories!

People don’t want to read ten descriptions of last night’s pizza box. But they probably want to read ten stories filled with beautiful descriptions. 

What’s more, the people that read the kind of stories you’ll write are the ones whose feedback you really want. They are the ones who will be reading your novels when you release them.

Bonus: Short stories give you a glimpse into the author life.

You build up more than just writing skills when you make short stories part of your writing practice. You take an idea from start to finished product, and along the way you can experience, in miniature, what it’s like to publish a book. You might work with an editor on your story to understand what the revision process is like, or get commissioned artwork to get the experience of working with designers.

By sharing short stories with an audience, you learn how to publish and promote your work. You can even self-publish and sell your short stories on their own or in collections, getting experience going through the whole process. If you want to go a more traditional route, you can submit your stories for publication and get an idea of what it is like to work with publishers.

As you put more of your work into the world, you can build up a readership based on your short stories.

Become a better writer today.

Start writing a short story today, whether it’s a diagnostic story to pinpoint what you need to work on or a story focusing on a particular skill that you’re trying to build.

If you have an idea that’s been simmering on the back burner, try putting it into a short story. If you need inspiration, there’s plenty out there. Check out the following sources for story ideas.

Reedsy has a weekly short story contest where you can share your story with readers.

The First Line is a quarterly contest where you can write a story using the provided first line to kick off your tale.

The Writer Igniter randomizes four story components to spark ideas.

Share your thoughts — and your stories! — in the comments. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.