I've written a couple of short stories but allways run into the same problem, the story is going fine untill i realise that im running out of space and end up squashing the ending in at the end which means that the story dosnt flow. is there any way to get around it? thanks J
Well, there are a couple of possibilities. Maybe you need to edit more throughout and not just at the end. Write the story to completion and then see where you can go back and cut out extraneous things. Another possibility is that you're not a short-story writer, but a novel writer. Maybe you've got too much to say. Although short stories and novels are related, they are different animals. My philosophy, which I've stated over and over, is that you need to write the story that's in you, regardless of how long it is. However long it turns out to be is how long it is, whether that makes it a short story, novella or novel. Word limits are an artificial barrier to your writing. Unless you're submitting something to a journal or magazine, or entering a contest, or completing an assignment for a class or something, and therefore you must comply with a particular word limit, don't worry about it. Write until you feel the story is resolved.
What do you mean "running out of space"? Are you working to someone's designation what constitutes a short story? My suggestion would be to forget about word count whilst you're writing the first draft. Forget about everything, actually, apart from the story that you're writing. Don't worry about what kind of story it is, what genre, what category, or anything like that. Just get the story down on the page/screen. Afterwards, in editing, you can deal with all the orbital grittiness like where it fits in, and edit it down if need be.
