Hidden Secret to Rapidly Improve Your Writing

Back in November 2020, I was sitting at DragonSteel Nexus, wondering what my writing career was going to look like. My publisher had just officially collapsed due to business complications from Covid, and my first two books had flopped. To make things worse, I was suffering from some severe medical complications that would likely kill me if a miracle didn't happen.

That conference proved to be the pivotal moment in my writing career, where little comments from people I held in high esteem. I've talked about a few of them in other blog posts, on panels, or in reviews, but this one hasn't been detailed before.

As I sat waiting for the next writing class to start, only four people sat waiting as the panelists (Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Janci Patterson) came in early and started talking to us. This conversation led to some basic advice that shaped me and this story. In short, writing short stories helps improve writing faster than any other way possible, and submitting that story to contests helps you discover where you stand as an author long before novel reviews will. Along with other advice about what “Write what you know” actually means, it pushed me to try writing my first short story. 

How to Improve Your Writing with Short Stories

For many future authors and those who have published a few books, the drive to finish that first novel may pull their focus. Endless revisions and book ideas blend with dreams of the New York Times Best Sellers list. But the thing authors need to do most is hone and refine their skills in order to really land with their readers. 

This was something that I hadn’t understood at the time, and this revelation at DragonSteel Nexus gave me something to try. I quickly discovered that there were multiple advantages to writing short stories. Now that I’ve discovered them, I want to share this with all of you.

The first thing writing short stories does for your writing is to expose the flaws in your plotting and the foundations of writing. Short stories don’t have room for fluff that fills in the gaps of a novel and hides these issues in novels. It forces the author to either embrace the issues or change them.

Writing short stories also offers a few more advantages. It helps an author test out different writing styles and work on issues in their writing. This lets an author find and hone their style and find new genres that they might be skilled at writing.

Targeting Problems and Styles

After writing my first short story, a few things became very clear to me. First, my base plotting was in good shape. But despite that, my stories lacked the emotional grip that I would have liked. Because of this, I decided to target the two weak points by writing in different genres.

First, I wrote a horror satire, trying to milk every bit of humor while honing my ability to create drama and fear. This story took multiple revisions, but in the end, I managed to get a good story. I submitted it to a contest and managed to place as a published finalist, making this my first published short story.

I then repeated this process with a romance story that didn’t go as well. I was sure that I could write anything while I was on the high of the success of my last story, and the next story fell apart. I learned a lot from the experience, and I’ve since repeated the process a few times with mixed results, but my romance writing has improved a little.

What It Did For Me

 As the process started, I sat down and mapped out an amazing story that was going to be a lot of work to get right. So I let my lack of confidence take control and put that story aside to try a different short story. The first story was terrible, but it showed me a major issue I have with how I plot things as well as some dialogue issues. I was amazed at how obvious the problems were, and it inspired me to write more. I kicked around several ideas before finally deciding to commit to the story I’d developed at DragonSteel Nexus.

I dug in and worked my tail off on this story, revising it several times and forcing myself to keep it short. It took a few months of work, but in the end, I’d learned a lot about how to properly handle tropes and what details are actually important. I sent the story off to the Writers of the Future Contest and went to work on a few more contests with prompts.

“Salvaging Heaven” received an honorable mention from Writers of the Future (Get it free on www.tylertarter.com). This was the first time someone officially told me that my writing was good, and this started a cascade of success. Other short stories began to win prizes and get published, and the exposure opened doors for me as an author. 

With every story that followed, I picked a genre or technique that I wanted to improve. I've seen a marked increase in my skill and the reception of my stories. I’ve tried different tropes and story types to improve. I’ve since sold several of these stories to anthologies and had some places in contests, making a little extra money through my training as well.

This isn’t a story that has to be unique to me. I’ve seen dozens of authors do the same thing and see similar results. Turning writing short stories into the gym for your writing skills is one of the dirty little secrets that not many big authors suggest when giving advice. These little writing exercises help you try new things and get those little stories that aren’t big enough to be a novel out of the way.

The Challenge

To end this article, I want to give you, the reader, a challenge. Look into a short story writing contest that you could get involved in. Whether that’s a small contest run by a writing guild or one of the major global contests like Writers of the Future. You can pick one because of the prompt or by getting your writers group to join you on the deadline that works for everyone, or for many other reasons.

Once you have one, put your WIP aside for a month and attack the story. This first one should just be a fun story that might not be long enough to become a novel. As you write and revise, keep notes of the issues that stand out to you, somewhere that you’ll be able to find easily. After you have a few drafts, share them with your writers group and pay attention to their notes as well.

Don’t feel like you need to submit this first one, unless you really like it and want to send it in. After that, go back to your WIP and write a chapter. You’ll see the little things you’ve learned kick in, and the chapter will be one of the best you’ve written in a while.

This is something that has worked for me and for a lot of authors that have done this by my suggestion or the suggestion of authors like Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells. I’m confident this will be something that you’ll enjoy because you’ll get a bunch of those ideas out of your system so that you can properly attack your WIP.