Our attention spans are being whittled to nonexistence by an increasingly impatient feedback loop, with social media, the internet, and AI competing to devour our attentional capacity. Yet when leafing through recent editions of the annual Best American Short Stories anthology, you’ll notice that a lot of those stories aren’t that short. In fact, they’re kind of long; the 2024 edition featured twenty stories, and only one was under four thousand words.
Like many of us, the MFA students I teach tend to be more comfortable writing stories under three thousand words, but many of my favorite short stories, by writers like Deborah Eisenberg and Adam Johnson, are far longer than that. My own recent stories, too, tend to be longer—six out of my last seven short stories clocked in at over six thousand words.
Still, writers who are new to the form understandably tend to avoid that larger canvas, which can feel daunting. Maybe for good reason, too. Longer stories can easily fall apart—they can end up feeling meandering, thematically incoherent, or confusing. But a few basic processes and craft suggestions can make longer stories easier to pull off. Also, they’re fun to write, accessing the most satisfying aspects of novel writing (deeper characters with real arcs, more complex relationships) without being burdened by a novel’s vastness.
Lorrie Moore, an accomplished practitioner of the art, said, “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage.” Not to bad-mouth marriages, which have their obvious advantages when they go well, but plenty end in divorce. Even those that don’t end in divorce are sometimes rather unpleasant, more work than reward.
So maybe let yourself have a thrilling tryst with some characters instead? If that appeals, here are some pointers, with perspectives from several of my favorite writers of longer stories.
Dial Up the Intensity and Drama
Longer stories tend to have higher stakes and are often quite eventful, with numerous scenes that unspool the narrative. Consider ZZ Packer’s story “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” from her 2003 collection of the same name, in which the narrator, a young Black woman from Baltimore, adamantly refuses to participate in the trust-fall portion of freshman orientation games at Yale. “No fucking way,” are her exact words, and then when asked during an icebreaker what object she would be, she chooses a “revolver,” and now she has to talk to the dean about her response and by page two she’s being assigned a year of counseling. And we’re just one-tenth of the way through a seventy-five-hundred-word story. The reader senses immediately that the story is long not because it is slow, meandering vaguely, but rather because it is eventful, each scene imbued with heat and purpose.
Many of the writers I teach, when they set out to write a longer short story, end up with the plot and scope of a shorter short story, and pages accrue simply because things happen more slowly. The story opens with a long description of the vacation house, and then the nearby town, and we gradually meet the important characters. We’re on page four, not much has happened yet, and we have another twelve pages to go, but we’re already getting antsy and maybe a little bored.
Similarly, when I started writing short stories, I worked with material that in retrospect feels kind of timid. Take for example one story of mine where a couple goes to the beach and argues subtextually about which of them is getting the better deal in their relationship. In the end, one of them pointedly does not remind the other to wear sunblock, a decidedly undramatic climax.
The very small scope of this story—its uneventfulness—might be fine if the story is just a few pages long, but it’s probably not enough to sustain a reader for twenty pages. Instead, consider “The Caregiver,” a long story by Anthony Doerr, in which a Liberian bookkeeper’s life is upended when civil war breaks out. He witnesses atrocities, his mother disappears, and he shoots a man at the insistence of an officer. Then he flees Liberia for the United States, where he takes a job as a caretaker of an Oregon coastal house. He’s depressed, doesn’t do his work, gets fired, and loses his place to stay. He camps nearby. Finally, using a wheelbarrow, he retrieves the giant hearts from deceased beached whales and buries the hearts near a garden he’s growing.
Yes, that’s an extreme example, but this is clearly a high-intensity, high-stakes story in which the main character has a number of major life-altering experiences.
Many longer stories have this vast, dramatic quality. Another super-famous longer story, Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” takes place over multiple decades; people die, get married, divorced; there’s betrayal, love, hatred, and devastating loss.
I’ve developed a kind of litmus test for these longer stories, which goes as follows: Consider your protagonist on their deathbed. When they look back on their life, the events of this particular story are what stand out to them as pivotal—even if it didn’t seem that important at the time, in retrospect it’s obvious how these are the defining experiences of their life. So if the character wants to steal some candy, that’s okay, but maybe let them get arrested for it, too—and that’s just what happens on the first page.
Follow Your Nose
I asked two exceptional writers of this form, Adam Johnson and Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, about their processes, and both were adamant that they never have a plan or an outline.
“If I figure out too early where a story is headed or what it’s about, I get bored and quit it,” says Johnson, whose collection of stories, Fortune Smiles (Random House, 2015), won the National Book Award and the Story Prize. “Contemporary fiction feels most in conversation with improvisational jazz—the jazz musician has an instrument, a tradition, a set of concerns, a feeling, and is in musical conversation with all those who came before. Then the jazz player goes [and plays], not knowing exactly what’s being made.”
Lunstrum, author of four short-story collections, including Outer Stars, forthcoming in November from Texas A&M Press and winner of the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize, starts with setting, then goes hunting for characters, and finally plot.
I generally start with a character in a very difficult spot. The title story of my collection Detonator, published by Four Way Books in September, opens with a guy who is in the hospital for a possible brain bleed because of “coital migraines” (i.e., orgasm-induced headaches). While the doctors are deciding whether he needs brain surgery, his wife and his mistress (who was present for the orgasms in question) meet at his bedside. Writing this story, I had no idea where it was headed, or that it’d follow this character over the next seven years of his life—across irreparable brain damage, two divorces, and the death of one of his ex-wives.
Johnson’s stories often evolve naturally out of his deep research interests and habits. His story “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” tells of a former East German Stasi prison guard who, many years later, remains in profound denial of his crimes. Johnson says he simply became obsessed with this Stasi prison and couldn’t find any account of an officer who’d worked there. “I realized that to understand how German men became swept up in a system of interrogation and torture, I was going to have to write it,” he says.
Crucially, while you’re improvising through the story, you want to remain alert to the story’s potential theme or wisdom. You’re looking to intensify the drama, yes, but in the process of intensifying and complicating, you’re looking for the story’s “aboutness,” or conceptual purpose, which presents itself naturally from that drama. Once the theme is clear, the story can go anywhere. As long as it’s still working on that theme, it won’t feel baggy or aimless. To build on Johnson’s jazz metaphor, the story might be riffing, but it’s always in key, working off the original chord structure, so the relevance is never in doubt.
Use Physical and Conceptual Space Breaks
As a basic structural matter, longer stories are constructed out of sections, separated by a little white space. Looking at the longer stories in Best American Short Stories 2024 (Mariner Books), I discovered most sections were one to three pages long (some were a half page, some were as long as five pages).
These breaks are there in theory for your reader’s benefit—but actually it’s a lot easier to write longer stories this way too. You’re working in bite-size chunks of narrative—a mini sequence, or a scene or two—rather than something that continuously sprawls. One way to make this structure feel intentional, however, is to make sure that the section ends at the conclusion of one idea or scene.
“It has to be like the edge of the bowl that, when struck, will ring and reverberate backward into the section it’s closing and forward into the section it precedes,” says Lunstrum, explaining how it’s important to have the last line of a section feel intentional. And while her earlier stories tended to be composed in a straightforward A-B-A-B structure—with A being the “main” storyline and B being a storyline in the past, or backstory, she resists that kind of orderly shape now. “The older I get, the less I think the past offers a neat and tidy reason for the present,” she says. “I want to more accurately capture something about living that is messier than all that.”
While I echo Lunstrum’s suspicion of an A-B-A-B structure, a lot of longer stories do have multiple “storylines” happening at once. It might be that one of them is in the past, or the story might look at different aspects of one character’s life within the same storyline, as in “The Climber Room,” by Sam Lipsyte.
Lipsyte’s story follows the protagonist Tovah in her dating life, her professional life, and her struggles to find self-respect as a thirty-six-year-old single, childless, failed poet. The story depicts various simultaneously-held relationships—friendships, dates, colleagues—in distinct but connected spheres of her life. Lipsyte’s structure might not be A-B-A-B, but something more like A-B-C-B-C-C-A-D-A-B. You write to a space break, and then pause and think: What would be a surprising, interesting, or particularly apt place for this to go now?
Let the Story Surprise You
Often these longer short stories—“The Point” by Charles D’Ambrosio, or “Snakes” by Danielle Evans, for example—reach a dramatic conclusion (though it’s rarely a tidy resolution) quite early, two-thirds of the way through the story, and then they spend many pages in their denouement, finding deeper thematic lessons. But the terrain past the “climax” is often uncertain to the writer—you have to feel your way through.
Lunstrum, describing perhaps why longer stories are easier for writers who’ve been at it a while, says, “I’m more willing as a writer in midlife and at midcareer to experiment with a little disorder, a little chaos in my stories’ structures. I’m more willing to loosen my own need for control over the story than I was as a younger writer, and so I’m looking to break or upset those patterns in the structuring of my stories. Long stories are great for this, as there’s so much more room for relinquishing control.”
Johnson, echoing a concept that is often evoked to describe the end of a great short story, says, “For me the great pleasure of reading and writing is the combination of surprise and inevitability.” Often this requires experimentation and play. What if we jumped ahead a few years? What if we jumped back? What if, as in the end of Matthew Klam’s glorious and strange “The Other Party,” the narrator describes how after he dies he’ll be haunting the neighborhood where he lives, because he never wants to leave. It’s certainly surprising, but also at last we understand how much of the story is a love letter to the block where the character lives, a place of such comfort it might seem a bit like a trap, but what a wonderful place to be trapped.
Peter Mountford, a writing coach and teacher, is the author of two novels and a new collection of short stories, Detonator, published by Four Way Books in September. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Times Modern Love column, the Atlantic, the Sun, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Nevada in the low-residency MFA program at Lake Tahoe and through Mountford Writing Services.
Author photo: Sarah Samudre