How to Read Short Stories as a Writer
Perhaps the best and maybe only advice one can give someone trying to learn to write short stories is to read a lot of them. Eventually, if you read enough of them, you begin to get the picture. You begin to get a felt-sense for what a short story is like, what the form can do, what other people are accomplishing. But getting beyond admiration or intimidation, to see why and how good stories work, and even better, to learn from them, is not something most people have a lot of instruction in. They read as consumers, not as writers. But reading as a writer is a different deal. It’s the kind of analytical reading that can move one along in terms of developing one’s own skills and talent. I’m not talking academic reading here. You don’t need to write a term paper. But as a writer, it does help to know what to look for in stories, to see how certain common denominators are handled. Then hopefully you absorb those elements to the point where you don’t have to think about them (at least not until revision time). They’re available to you, integrated into the self out of which you write. But first you have to be aware of them.