First, I'm about to give writing advice. Anytime I do that from now on, I'm going to start out with this quote, because this is what you need to know about writing advice:

Nobody teaches a writer anything.
You tell'em what you know.
You tell'em to find their voice and stay with it.
You tell the ones that have it to keep at it.
You tell the ones that don't have it to keep at it too... because that's the only way they're gonna get to where they're going.
- Wonder Boys

So this is just me telling you what I know. Or what I think I know.

Let's talk about short stories. There aren't enough of them on this site.

Some of you are seriously side-eyeing me. Have I looked at the feature box? Have I scanned the front page? All people write are dumb two thousand word stories!

Be that as it may, that's not the kind of short story I'm talking about.

There are two kinds of short stories. One tries to take you deep into a moment. The plot might be thin, or non-existent, there doesn't have to be character development. This doesn't make it bad, if the scene is touching or scary or tells you something new and interesting about the characters. This is the kind of story that's all over fanfiction, since we already have the history of the characters, and we already know the setting, and we do love reading about some ponies, whatever they happen to be doing.

The second kind is rare, it's what I'd like to see more of. It has a plot. It has character development. And it manages to get it all across in less than 7500 words. (That being the Nebula awards definition of a short story, so length may vary.) This is a totally valid, but difficult, kind of story to write. Not every story that has a plot, even a complex plot, has to be a novel. (As proof, I offer a song:, Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts by Bob Dylan introduces four characters with complex relationships, and tells the story of how and why they're involved in a murder, with a bank heist subplot, in 888 words. Here are the lyrics on a google doc, if you'd rather just read them.)

If anyone ever told you that your story felt rushed, you were writing this kind of story, but you messed up. (Or they're idiots who don't understand/like short fiction. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.)

So how do you make a story like that not feel rushed? I've been analyzing that for the past day or so. Here's what i came up with:

It's in the details.

What a story like the the ones I'm talking about does is takes the climax of a larger story, and condenses the rest of the story into details. Take my story “How to do a Sonic Rainboom” as an example (one of the few times I feel like I did this successfully, I should add.) That story could have been a novel. I could have told about Dash missing out on the Wonderbolts auditions and finally giving up, about Scoot becoming a Wonderbolt and Dash training her, about Scoot losing touch with her friends and not really making new ones, about Scoot's attempts to learn to do a Sonic Rainboom, her fight with Dash, the aftermath of her fight with Dash, how Dash died, and the final lesson that's the title of the story.

But I didn't have to. I showed you those things, but not by saying them. Just telling the reader what happened is what makes a story feel rushed, because the reader feels like the author is just trying to get something out of the way. Instead I added those pieces of plot as details. Dash not becoming a Wonderbolt is a few lines of narration at first, relating to Scoot's obsession with learning to do a sonic rainboom, then a few pieces of dialogue, and another piece of narration at the end when Scoot realizes why Dash never became a Wonderbolt. Scoot training Dash is another few lines through out the story, with Dash's refusal to give up her greatest trick driving the plot. Scoot losing touch with her friends is a quick piece of dialogue, and the narration telling us that she doesn't have time for a special somepony. The pieces of the story are woven in, so you have that longer plot by the end, but you put it together yourself.

I think I'm making sense here. It's what I see in the story, at least, and what I see missing from a lot of short stories I see on the website. It makes me disappointed when people say that you can't tell a story with character development, or a story that develops a relationship, in two thousand words. Of course you can, you just have to realize what you're writing and how to do it.

If you guys know some really good short stories on the site, ones that manage to tell a whole story, feel free to link me!