I was having a chat about this earlier with someone who mentioned they're accustomed to writing stories in a 3000-5000 word range. I thought about that for a minute and decided that I seem to write best within the 2000-2500 word range. What's your "sweet spot" for short stories? Does genre make a difference, or your intended audience? For context, I mostly write sci-fi/spec and dabble in horror.
My stories vary in length. I put in as many words as are required by the story. Sometimes I add or remove length during revision. I think you should have as many words as the story needs.
I agree with this so much! Sometimes a story ends up being 500 words because thats how much it takes for that story and it cant be stretched longer because there is nothing left to stretch the story ... some end up being 15k and cant be cut down without losing the characters and/or story. But, I'd say for me, no matter what genre, i think my average is between 1-2,500. Of course i have stories that are shorter (my shortest being 530 words) and some that are long (longest being almost 20k)
I average about 5000-20ish K for shorts. Though I think 2-3 K is doable, but you kinda have to have words that really do the heavy lifting, or the story is only covering 1-3 scenes. Although there are no hard and fast rules, so anything under 45-50k counts as a short and just outside a novella.
My shortest short story I think was 390 words, give or take a dozen. And the longest was 23k. I don't really have much practice in shorter pieces, which is something I'd like to change about myself. I think short stories are an art form because the words are so much more important. There's less room to be lackadaisical with sentence structure and actual word choice. I guess that doesn't really answer your main question, since I don't have a catalogue to refer to. But I do think genre plays a part in it. I think for me, the more open ended a genre, like fantasy, sci-fi, horror, it tends to be on the longer side because description plays a big part in that. If it's general fiction, or commentary/observations on human behavior, it tends to be shorter because it's more introspective, and those thoughts tend to take less words. In my case, anyway.
I guess I don't have a sweet spot. I don't write a ton of shorts, anyway, but what I have so far varies. Thanks to a couple of flash fiction contests, I have several in the 500-1000 area, but they range from 370 to 3200. I totally agree that they should end up the length that's best for the story.
I saw this post days ago and I've been thinking about this since then. Now I'm reminded of the horrors with a story I had written, where I tried my hardest to tell it in 5k words when it really needed about 7k to be told effectively. Long story short (pun intended), it went very horribly. I spent days compressing each individual scene but all I really managed to do was damage the story's quality because this compromised the story beats. I'm sure there was a way to reduce the word count in a way that doesn't do this sort of damage, but the story still wouldn't have been as effective, I'm sure. So, in summary, I don't really have a sweet spot. I just write what I have to write. As long as I stay within a reasonable range, it's fine anyway. But I do tend to stay in the longer side (3.2k-5k). 5k is on the longer side, though as I often say, word count is almost irrelevant if the story is really good.
For short stories, I noticed most publications ask that the story length is between 1k and 5k with some even stating that 2500 is the limit. So I’ve started dappling with ideas that would make a good 1k-3k word short story. Still, it’s a pain in the ass getting accepted anywhere worthwhile.
