If you can write this sentence, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” then you might have what it takes to become a famous, respected, and handsomely remunerated writer. Act now! Send for the Famous Writers Aptitude Test.

If you test well, or show other evidence of writing aptitude, you may enroll. Write in your spare time and in the comfort of your home! Writing today offers a life of financial reward, personal recognition, and the freedom to live as you please!

Let's assume that you've already read my ad for the Famous Writers School, Inc., scored remarkably well, in fact, on the rather grueling Aptitude Test, sent along the stunning opening sentence to a novel you've long dreamed of writing, and I've graciously accepted you as a matriculating student at FWS.

Well then, we're now ready for lesson one, the short story. First we need to know what a short story is. What do we mean by short, after all? Chekhov's story “The Duel” runs to seventy-something Internet pages. On the other hand, here's a complete short story (or so it is alleged) by me:

HONEYMOON

The wedding itself is so exciting, so dazzling, that it almost makes Tandra, our bride, forget that she has made a grievous mistake. When they arrive in Gatlinburg the next day, Tandra and Clell, Mr. and Mrs. Hollis, check into the Travelodge and then go out to see the sights. They take the tram to Õbergatlinburg. Clell pulls a muscle in his back trying to hit curveballs in the batting cage. He wonders did he somehow do that on purpose. They take the trolley to Dollywood, see a show called Hillbilly Hoedown. They nurse drinks and talk as long as they can in the Jacuzzi. Eventually they make love in the Honeymoon Suite (which the man at the desk pronounces suit–Honeymoon Suit, he says, otherwise it would be Honeymoon Sweet. And he spells it out.) As Clell grinds into her, Tandra imagines her future. She thinks of this new life as a career–wife, mother, social adjunct, companion. Beats working in an office. She'll get busy with PTA soon enough, and dinner parties, charity events. She'll take up tennis. When Clell is finished with his business, he rolls to his side of the bed. He puts Betty Shackleford, maid of honor, out of his mind. He puts the heating pad on his lower back. He wonders where his love for Tandra has gone, and is it gone for good? Somehow the realization that he has deceived his wife makes Clell feel closer to her. Protective. He is willing, he knows, to sacrifice his own happiness for hers. In deceit begins responsibility. Clell is surprised that he feels this benevolent way.

Here's what I've come up with as a definition of a short story (this based on reading lots of stories for a class on the form and theory of the short story): A short story is a fictional prose narrative meant to entertain, and it's about people. It has a beginning and an end. It's shorter than a novel, shorter than a novella (it's as short as the literary magazines tell us it is); it's either plot-driven or it's descriptive (like a sketch or an essay–-though here I am dancing on the narrow edge of narrative theory, and it may be best if we forget the plotless experiments just mentioned, at least for now*) and it may transgress traditional genre lines (just forget I ever said anything about either/or–for our immediate purposes, a story has a plot); it's economic, inferential, allusive, because it has to do so much in so brief a time and so stingy a space; it changes our lives somehow.

In The Fiction Dictionary, Laurie Henry offers a simpler, and perhaps more helpful definition of our slippery term: a short story is “A fictional work of up to 10,000 words (although anything less than about 1,500 words often is called a short-short story) that is complete in itself, without the complexity of a novel or novella . . . .“

"To be successful, a short story must seem complete no matter how short it is. . . . usually there will be only a single major conflict; only one—or at most a few—fully developed characters; and not a lot of room for description or digression.” I should add that according to entries in the 2003 Novel and Short Story Writers Market most magazines and journals have a word limit for their fiction, and that limit is usually between 3000 and 5000 words. So stories of ten to fifteen manuscript pages would seem to be the norm. You might quibble with my definition or with Henry's; you might find them lacking in one way or another, and certainly they are, but let's accept them for now so that we can get on with the writing.

You'll need a pen and some paper or a keyboard and screen. Easy enough. You'll need words. Fortunately, you have all the words you'll ever need in the dictionary. You need a good dictionary, not one you can slip into your back pocket or drop into your purse. You want one that's too heavy to lug around. You want the OED, but you can't afford it. So you get The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which is my favorite, or you get the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, favored by my publisher, at least with reference to spelling. And you don't just need words, you need the precise words, the exact, accurate, correct, unerring words, and so you get yourself Rodale's The Synonym Finder, the best thesaurus, the finest treasury of like-minded words, now available. And you might also want Roget's Super Thesaurus because Rodale's does not provide antonyms. A synonym, by the way, is not another word with the same meaning. If that were the case we wouldn't need the other word, and we certainly wouldn't need a thesaurus. The meanings are similar, not the same. And that makes all the difference. The choice of the exact word is all about nuance, connotation, music, and rhythm. Why "valiant" in this sentence and not "heroic?" Why "dish" and not "plate?" Why "crimson" here instead of "scarlet?"

And as long as we're on the subject of books, know that you'll need not only the words, but their attendant punctuation as well, and you'll need to know how to arrange those words comprehensibly, efficiently, elegantly. So, you'll need a style book of some kind, and the best for the fiction writer is The Chicago Manual of Style. Writing is like carpentry—it's a craft. You learn it through a long—in this case never-ending—apprenticeship. You begin your journey to accomplishment by first learning how to use your tools. Your reference books are some of your basic tools. Don't go to work without them. You can't build a house without a hammer. You can't build a story without a dictionary.

Okay, we were talking about what you'll need. The pen, the paper, the books about words. You'll need a quiet place to write. A place where you will not be interrupted. Not by visitors, not by the phone. No distractions. You'll need lots of time. Writing a story isn't built in a day. Don't think you're going to finish any time soon. Blaise Pascal wrote in one of his provincial letters, “I have made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” Brevity takes time. Less is more time-consuming. You're going to need at least one, preferably two or more characters. You're going to need a plot, as we have agreed. You're going to use the tools of narrative, and you'll need to know what they are: point of view, voice, scene, place, and so on.

Before we get started, however, a couple of things you should know. You have to have read a lot of stories in order to write good stories–and if you aren't in the habit of reading stories, why on earth would you want to write one–why would you want to do something that doesn't interest you? If you haven't read a lot of stories, but still want to write one, then start reading stories today. You'll learn more about writing stories from reading the great writers than you will in a semester's creative writing class. (And start with the greats like Chekhov, like Tolstoy, like Flannery O'Connor and J. D. Salinger, like Alice Munro and William Trevor.) Let me amend my statement a bit. Maybe you don't read stories, but you do like to hear them and like to tell them. And now you want to write them down. That's a legitimate desire, certainly. We make sense of the world and of our lives by telling stories. Just know that anecdotes are not stories, jokes are not stories, chronology is not story. Your life is not a story.** There is an architecture to short stories. They have plots. They get below the surface, which anecdotes do not. They explore the human condition, examine values and motivation.

Character is the heart of stories. We want to know why the people do what they do. I usually begin a story with a character, someone I'm intrigued with for whatever reason. And you might start there as well. (Where do you find this character? you may well ask. Patience, we'll get there.) And then I give this character some trouble–every story is about trouble–and I muddle ahead and see what happens. I don't need to know where the story is going–I don't want to know. Part of the joy of writing is discovery. I do know that characters must act, must do something, must struggle. And that's where plot comes in. I trust in the plot to carry me to the resolution. And every plot boils down to this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite obstacles, and as a result of a struggle, comes to a win or a lose.

Let's say my central character, then, is a sixty-year-old man, let's call him Donny, whose only child has just died. That's trouble enough. How will Donny manage? What does he want? How can he deal with his sorrow? Well, what he wants is to talk about his son. Doing so will help him make sense of the senseless and unnatural death, put it into perspective. And it will immortalize his son a bit. Someone else will know the boy's story. That sounds easy enough to do, doesn't it? Talk. Talk is how we find our solace, after all. But to whom does he tell his grief? Let's say our man Donny lives alone– has no wife, and now no family. He keeps to himself. If he were a church-going man, he'd tell his priest. Does he tell the people at work then? None of them are what he would call “close.”

On the ride to work, he takes a seat on the bus by a woman who is reading her newspaper. Her face is blank and calm as a pond. Women, he thinks, are easier to talk to. He smiles, coughs, rustles his body until he gets her attention. She smiles. He tells her that his son has died. She looks up, says she's sorry to hear that, stares ahead a few moments, and then goes back to reading her newspaper. The man considers how best to tell her the story. He' ll show her Gregory's photo. Words are a clumsy way to capture real people. With a picture, you see the nature of the person in an instant. He leans to his left, reaches for the wallet in his back pocket. His shoulder touches her shoulder and she stiffens. My son Gregory, he says. The woman pulls the bell chord and excuses herself. He stands and lets her out to the aisle. A missed opportunity.

Our man wonders where his story, Gregory's story really, should begin. When the boy collapses at the kitchen table, dead, they say, before his head hit the plate? Or earlier? Should he begin way back when, with his own unbounded joy at the birth of his son? He shivers when he sees the full span of his son's life played out in this instant–born and dead in the same moment. Over with. Gone. He looks around at the other passengers on the bus, all of them quiet and uneasy, it seems like. All of are ill-prepared for the day. And he realizes that everyone here has secrets and all have left their authentic selves at home. He reads the advertising card for a church above his seat. “Spirit on empty? Learn how to fill up.” And there's an 800 number to call that ends in UNITY.

If Gregory had died in Iraq, then people would be interested. Donny'd be interviewed in the newspaper, he'd get to tell the story properly. But Gregory died of a congenital heart defect that no one even knew he had. People don't want to hear about what might be at work in their own bodies.

Later, on lunch break at the factory, Donny sits beside a group of men playing kitty whist in the canteen. He chews his bologna sandwich, watches the game. Sips his milk. The men seem happy, slapping trump cards on the table, happy not to be out at the extruding machines, happy to be off their feet for a few minutes. He tells the men that his son has died. Someone asks him how old the boy was, and he tells them Gregory was thirty-one. The dealer, shuffles, says we all die. The four men nod, talk about how they would like to die, one in the arms of a sweet young thing, another in his sleep, and the remarks lead to talk about some raucus party they all attended on Saturday, and soon they are laughing and talking about immortality, and ascending to heaven at the Rapture, and then the lunch bell rings, and it's back to work. Our man, we see is trying, is struggling, albeit unsuccessfully, to get what he wants. He wants sympathy, too, he now understands. He wants recognition. He wants the world to know that he has suffered, is suffering still. There's dignity in suffering. Imagine that.

He stops off at a luncheonette for coffee on the way home as he does every day. Home is such a quiet place. He comes here every day. Ray's behind the counter. Donny tells Ray his boy is dead. Ray says that's a bitch, sorry, Donny. I didn't know you had a kid. Heart went, just like that. Ray mentions the score of the Sox game. It's not right. Ray would like to listen, but he 's in the weeds here. Got a rush.

Donny buys a paper and walks home. He slides a TV dinner into the oven, collapses in his easy chair. He taps his pocket for a smoke, realizes he quit smoking three years ago. His cat leaps to the arm of the chair. He strokes the cat, says, Ah, Molly, Gregory . . . he 's dead. His heart. Like that. The cat purrs and runs her length against Donny's arm. She sits. And he tells the little cat the whole story. He gets what he wants, but maybe not all that he wants. He gets to tell the story, but doesn't get a human response, doesn't tell it to someone who will remember it, consider it, sympathize with him.

So that's how to begin a story with a character who has trouble and follow him to the conclusion. What I've done there, actually, in case you didn't notice, is I've stolen a plot. And that's the second way you can acquire one. Theft. I stole mine from Chekhov. I've taken his story, “Misery,” set in Russia at the turn of the last century and set it in contemporary urban America. You can steal plots, too, of course. That's what Shakespeare did. Take a favorite story and use its structure as a model for your own story. Or you can find the seeds of plots and characters in the newspaper and use them. Take a look at today's headlines. Today with the Internet, every hometown newspaper is your hometown newspaper. Delivered electronically to your door. You don't even have to put on your robe to fetch it. All of the following situations (not plots yet) came from recent newspaper stories:

–a man kills his wife and takes up with another woman

–an elderly woman dies; her son and daughter-in-law toss her body in a roadside ditch

–a man has been missing for three years; his brother finds his body stuffed in a kitchen freezer

–a baby is found buried alive in a dump

–a six-year-old boy lives for a month alone in his house with the corpse of his mother

–a bride gets drunk, busts up the reception hall, and gets arrested.

Often the situations we find in newspapers present us with climactic events, suggest the culmination of a struggle, an inappropriate, perhaps, resolution to earlier trouble. We see an elderly woman holding a 7-Eleven clerk at gunpoint. What does she think she's doing? What led her to perform such a desperate act? We ask ourselves what could have led up to this moment, and we work our way back to the beginning of the story. Let's take our inebriated and tempestuous bride as an example. Here she is– let's give her a name–here's Brenda on what should be the happiest day of her life thus far. She has married the man of her dreams. (Or she hasn't, and that's the problem.) She has invited all of her friends and her family out to the Olde Mill restaurant to witness her commitment, to celebrate her sunny future, to share in her happiness. What went wrong? Why did she do what she did? And what exactly did she do? (Well, let's say she argued with her new husband in the parking lot, then came back to the reception, threw the wedding cake to the floor, and smashed the vases of flowers. She stormed out of the club and walked down the highway, ignoring the friends that had come to calm her down. We'll say that because that's what we read in the newspaper article. Maybe we'll change some of the details as we write. But this gets us going.) What led up to this ruinous and humiliating business? This is what fiction writers do–they ask questions.

* Cesar Pavese: “If immoral works of literature exist, they are works in which there is no plot.”

** Fran Liebowitz quipped, “Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.”