In an article for Writer’s Digest, Lisa Cupolo offers advice for creating trouble for your characters within the confines of a short story. “Stories are a window into a life, not the whole enchilada,” she says. “These five tips for making sure you’re creating enough conflict to keep your reader turning the pages may seem like basics, but I still use them as good reminders about what’s crucial to writing an engaging short story.”
- Have your character want something. “Your character needs to be presented in a way that they desire something, but they do not have it yet,” Cupolo says. “To know a character is to know what they want, and the story follows that pursuit.”
- Create a situation that involves danger. This can be serious, life-threatening danger, or something that threatens to upset your protagonist’s status quo.
- Conjure up complications. “Whatever the situation you create, add some complication to it,” Cupolo advises. “Be on the lookout for plots that surprise you. It’s usually a good thing.”
- Hide the real problem. Whatever goes wrong for your character, the surface problem isn’t usually the real issue.
- Present the trouble early. “It’s almost a cliché to say write a story and then delete the first two pages to get to the ‘heat’ or ‘pulse’ of it,” Cupolo notes.
