13 Ways To Lengthen Your Short Story

Need to increase your short story’s word count? Discover 13 ways to lengthen your story by adding depth, detail, tension, and stronger characters.

In a previous post, we discussed shortening your story. Today, I’m going to talk about lengthening your story.

How do I make my short story longer?

Most writers tend to overwrite and then cut back, but some writers under-write. This is often the case with writers who write for a living, like journalist and copywriters. Their entire story will be told in 750 words when they need 2 500 words.

My first draft of a short story is usually very short, around 250-500 words. I need to get the idea on the page first. Once that is done I must figure out if I can lengthen it. Sometimes a scene is simply that, just one scene, but I need to increase my word count. What can I do?

First I need to figure out what I have left out. I know I tend to skip setting and description in my first drafts so I look there first.

13 Ways To Lengthen Your Short Story

You can increase your word count in two ways:

Your Writing

You can make structural changes to your writing that will increase your word count:

1. Pacing: Slow down the story.
2. Tension: Add to the tension, by dragging it out and writing slow motion moments you will be able to add value. A time constraint, like a ticking bomb or the imminent arrival of guests, is a handy device as well.
3. Sentence length: You need variety when it comes to sentence length, but longer sentences will help you up the word count.
4. Add adjectives and adverbs: I’d rather say, make your descriptions stronger, by using strong nouns and verbs, but a few adjectives and adverbs will certainly add to your word count.

Your Story

And then, you need to make changes to your stories to increase your word count:

1. Scenes: If your story is very short you will probably only have one scene. Figure out what scene came before and what happened after. This will help you add two scenes.
2. Backstory: This may be an opportunity to hint at backstory. You can even use a flashback.
3. Add characters: Is your character alone? Perhaps he needs to phone a friend, to help him carry the corpse.
4. Add setting description: This is what I tend to leave out, but don’t go writing travel brochure. Make sure the details you are integral to the story.
5. Add character description: This may be an opportunity to add layers to your characters and flesh them out.
6. Add a subplot: If you are writing a longer short story, as in 4000 or even 7500 words you can consider a subplot.
7. Dialogue: Use dialogue to add backstory and strengthen motivation
8. Dramatise events: This may be where you can delve in to the events that shaped your characters or the events that upset them. Write it out.
9. Emphasis, symbolism, and foreshadowing: Experiment and add some layers.

The Last Word

Sometimes a short story needs more words to give the characters and story room to grow. These 13 tips will help you add scenes, dialogue, detail, tension, and depth without adding filler. The aim is not to write more just for the sake of it, but to make your story stronger and more satisfying. Happy writing.

P.S. Remember to join the 12 Short Stories challenge, and if you want to learn how to write a short story, sign up for our online course.

by Mia Botha

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