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A lot of people treat short stories like mini-novels, but I will argue until the day I die that they are their own genre of writing and we should treat them as such. If you’re writing short stories the same way you approach novels, it’s time to mix things up. That’s why today we’re talking about how to write characters in a short story.

When writing characters, someone has probably told you to know anything and everything about them before you start. What do they look like? Where did they grow up? What kind of relationship did they have with their parents?

These kinds of questions can greatly affect the way your characters move through the world of your story. But it’s also important to know how these characters show up on the page. Today, I’ve got 5 points for you that will affect how you write characters in a short story.

We’ll talk about how many characters you should have in a short story, what point of view to portray your story in, learning what your characters want, and what roadblocks they need to overcome. Lastly, we’ll figure out how all of this plays into the larger character arc.

Few characters is better

When learning how to write characters in a short story, it’s best to keep the number of characters you have to a minimum. We want a focused story that uses every word on the page intentionally. That includes the descriptions and interactions of characters. We want to see what really matters. We only have so many pages to get to know your character, to root for them, and see their transitions.

With limited space, it can be hard to fully develop a cast of characters to the degree a quality story needs. If you introduce too many characters so close together on the page, which is inevitable in a short story with a large cast, readers will start to confuse characters for one another or not remember important details. Rather than having a complex plot that involves six or seven half-baked characters, short stories often work better with 2 or 3 really thought-out characters.

When you have too many characters all fighting for room on the page, we aren’t able to fully invest in any of them. They all become sketches of a character rather than fully rendered people. As I said, we want every word to count on the page. That means every word you spend describing a new character takes away words that could be used developing a main character fully.

That being said, that doesn’t mean you can’t include characters like the shop clerk who has a few lines. It’s okay to include the minor characters that make the story feel real. We just want to hone in on about 2 or 3 to give the story a purpose and a focus.

First person vs third person

You’ll need to decide if your story is going to be in first or third person. Of course, as you’re editing and revising, you can go back and play with this. But, we need somewhere to start.

First person

If you need the refresher, first person is telling your story from the point of view of a character. You’ll use words like ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, ‘we’, and ‘us’ in the narrative. This can be a great way to quickly connect your reader and your characters. Your reader sees things through the eyes of your narrator, so giving a main character the role of narrator automatically puts your reader into the story at a personal level. You can easily dig into the thoughts of your main character and give your story a level of first-hand introspection that isn’t as easily achieved with other points of view.

Third person

In the third person, you’re telling the story from an outsider’s perspective. You’re using words like ‘she’, ‘he’, ‘they’ and ‘them’. In general, the 3rd person narrator tells the story as if looking from above the action. They can see everything going on and aren’t limited by being a character involved in the action.

Writing a short story in first person is a great choice with the limited word count compared to a novel. This way you don’t have to spend space on the page transitioning between points of view or explaining the inner workings of multiple characters. Switching between character points of view in a longer work like a novel is a great way to keep things interesting, but in a short story it can get clunky and confusing without the room to expand and dive into each character fully. The first person approach is really honed in, which is exactly what we’re going for in a short story.

What do they want?

When you’re thinking specifically about how to write characters in a short story, there should be at least one thing that each character wants. This might be a bigger idea, something they’re yearning for. It could be a specific feeling or a larger goal, something that can drive your story.

Romances are often driven by the fact that a character wants true love. They want a partner. Crime novels are driven by the desire to solve a crime, or maybe by the murderer’s desire to commit a heinous act. Revenge stories are driven by a character’s need to settle the score. They think that if they get the revenge they’re seeking it’ll make them feel better about the situation.

As people we always have an objective whether we notice it or not. We always want something. Sometimes that something is a feeling. We want happiness, we want calm, we want excitement in life. Sometimes there’s a more specific want in us. We want to reconnect with our family, we want to find a fulfilling career, we want to get in shape. These desires can define who we are at different points in our lives.

When we want to reconnect with family, we might be learning to be nicer people or more forgiving people. If we want to get in shape, we might become more disciplined people. Think about where your character is at the beginning of the story, and then where they need to end up to achieve their goal. This can be a road map for your character’s journey. How do they get from Point A to Point B?

Now you have an idea of what your character is striving for, but we don’t want our story to get predictable.

What gets in the way?

Now that you know what your character wants, it’s your job to make them work for it. A story where everyone gets exactly what they want and no one has to work for it is not a realistic story, or even an interesting one quite frankly.

Everyday we face setbacks in our goals. We go through rough patches in life like breakups, job changes, or other big forms of rejection. But we also hit roadblocks that are much smaller. Maybe your car doesn’t start one cold winter morning. It’s all part of the human experience and our characters have to face these setbacks and disappointments as well. This is a big part of learning how to write characters in a short story.

Let’s use that example of your main character trying to bring their family together. So they want to get together for dinner with everyone, but their brother is having a hard time committing. That right there is an obstacle that prevents your character from achieving their main goal of reconnecting with the family. It’s not a huge, life-changing setback, but it’s annoying.

It’s now up to you as the author to decide whether or not your character convinces their brother to come to dinner. And, how does this help move them from Point A to Point B? How do they grow from this experience toward that main goal?

There are lots of little things you can throw into your story to give it some tension and to really show off your characters’ personalities in new ways, giving them chances to grow. You could even plot an entire story this way by mapping out each roadblock they run into then connecting the dots.

Character arcs

With these wants and roadblocks, your characters might learn a few things as the story goes on. Your main characters will start to show their arc. In the most basic terms, a character arc describes the changes your character goes through during a story. It’s how they get from Point A to Point B. The shy boy becomes the hero. The school bully learns empathy.

We’ve talked a lot about change in the last two sections, and that’s because people love to read stories about change. We see emotional growth as one of the most valuable things someone can have in their life.

All of these things we talked about teach us how to write characters in a short story. We established that the wants and the roadblocks are how a character grows. That means the point of view you tell your story from and how your character interacts with other characters will be how the reader can make sense of the growth. Those aspects portray the story of the character arc in a way that is clear to the reader.

We see them start at Point A. They want something that will get them to Point B. We see each and every step along the way whether from their point of view or not. We see them moving closer to Point B as they interact with other characters, until finally at the end of the story they arrive there.

Practice it:

Take a moment to consider any works in progress you might have, and how these five concepts currently look in your story. How big is your cast of characters? Do you have a honed in point of view? And what do those character arcs look like?

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you!

Happy writing!

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