Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story

When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” And, in a master’s thesis rejected by The University of Chicago, he made the tantalizing argument that “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight essential tips on how to write a short story:

1.  Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2.  Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3.  Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4.  Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.
5.  Start as close to the end as possible.
6.  Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7.  Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8.  Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut put down his advice in the introduction to his 1999 collection of magazine stories, Bagombo Snuff Box. But for every rule (well, almost every rule) there is an exception. “The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor,” writes Vonnegut. “She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”

As found at:  http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/kurt-vonneguts-8-tips-on-how-to-write-a-good-short-story.html

Something I find to be helpful is to be aware of your character's surroundings. In real life, you always seem to focus on one or two things in your surroundings. Well, you actually notice a lot, but putting too much in could make the reader bored.

Example: Your character is walking through the mall. You could say that they "drifted through the crowd." But maybe your character sees a few things that put more of a touch on it too. Like, maybe a woman is pushing her child in a stroller, and she can barely move without wondering who's feet she's about to run over. Or, your character sees a man at the fountain holding his child's hand, waiting for someone to move from the bench so he can sit as well.

I don't know if this is something you would do, but it's something I like to do, because it adds more focus to the character's surroundings, and also - like in the above example - it adds a showing effect rather than a "telling" effect.