One of the best things about the short story form is how much room it gives you to experiment. Unlike a novel, a short story lets you take big creative swings without the significant time investment; if it doesn’t work, you can just try something else next week.
This is one of the things I love about judging Reedsy’s weekly short story contest. Every week, I see writers try things they probably wouldn’t attempt in a longer piece—whether it’s a quirky perspective or a playful structural choice—and many of them pull it off brilliantly. Of course, we also try to facilitate this creativity with “out-of-the-box” prompts that not only allow for unusual approaches, but outright encourage them.
So if you’re looking for a fresh approach for your next short story, here are five creative strategies worth exploring—each one illustrated by a story from our contest.
1. Tell a story through letters or emails
There’s something wonderfully intimate about the epistolary format, in which the reader becomes privy to “someone else’s” correspondence and has to read between the lines. It also solves one of the major structural problems of short fiction: how to convey the passage of time without burning through your word count.
The epistolary form is especially well-suited to relationship stories, in which what’s left unsaid often matters more than what’s articulated. For example, in the short story “Love.edu” by Eliza Levin, two English professors email about a shared academic interest—and what starts as a collegial conversation soon blossoms into something more. The details do a lot of heavy lifting here to show the transition from formality to familiarity: a shift from “Professor Laird” to “Fred,” a postscript that lingers longer than it should.
And indeed, the real magic of an epistolary story is imagining what’s happening off the page. What are these characters thinking? How deliberate are they being with their words? To what extent do we know things about them that they may not even know themselves?
If you want to try this approach, think about what kind of correspondence suits your characters and their circumstances. Text messages, for example, can capture urgency or casual intimacy. Old-fashioned letters might suggest distance and longing. And don’t underestimate the power of one-sided correspondence—a series of missives that never receive a reply (or where we don’t see the replies) can be devastatingly potent.
2. Let a character argue with their author
This is one of the most daring creative approaches for a short story, but when it works, it really works. Writing a character who is “self-aware,” pushing back against the decisions their author makes, opens up a rich vein of metafiction that can be hilarious, moving, or both.
The key to pulling this off is to create a conflict between character and author that doesn’t feel too gimmicky. The best metafictional stories use author-character relationships to pick apart legitimate creative tensions: the gap between intention and execution, the limits we impose on our characters (consciously or unconsciously), and the fear that so often holds writers back from reaching their full potential.
A fantastic example of this is “Track Changes” by Ali Venosa, a shortlisted story from a recent Reedsy contest. In this piece, a woman narrates her own frustrated existence inside a Word document, watching as her author creates—and then deletes—version after version of her.
The narrator’s voice is sharp and self-aware, and the story becomes a biting critique of how audiences respond to “unlikable” women. We feel the character’s exasperation as she’s written into a gambling addiction, then a drug-dealing arc, then something so dark that the details are actually withheld from the reader… only for the author to lose her nerve each time, hitting backspace until the slate is wiped clean again.
The idea is obviously clever, and each new twist keeps us intrigued—but the true genius of this story is how much it resonates beyond the page. After all, the tension of what is “acceptable” for men vs women is arguably even stronger in real life than in fiction.
So if you want to try something in this space, remember: the “character knows they’re in a story” concept needs stakes. What does the character want that their author won’t give them? What does their conflict reveal about storytelling and/or society? Address these questions and your story will be more than a one-trick pony; it will have staying power.
3. Retell a familiar story from an unusual perspective
Retelling a fairytale, myth, or similar story is one of the oldest creative tricks in the book—and one of the most reliably effective. There’s a reason that tales like Wicked are so popular; we love to see the “other side” of narratives we thought we already knew. And in a short story, this approach works for a similar reason to the epistolary format: you don’t need to spend much time on worldbuilding, because readers already know the source material.
The secret here is to give your reimagined character a specific, grounded perspective that reframes the original story in a surprising way. A great example is “The Bear Necessities of Contract Law” by Troy Phillips. This story recounts the Goldilocks tale as a transcript from small claims court, in which Goldilocks—a licensed house-sitter in this tale—presents her defense against the Bear family's complaints.
Phillips amusingly grounds his fairytale in the language of real-life technology and law:
My rating on Acorn Exchange was 4.9 stars. Was. After I submitted my invoice, the Bears posted a retaliatory review within one hour. One hour, Your Honor. They called me ‘destructive, greedy, and potentially criminal.’ My rating dropped to 4.7.
This juxtaposition transforms a classic fairytale into a sharp, funny, and (dare I say?) relatable piece of adult fiction. The author manages to make us sympathize with Goldilocks—not because she tells a sob story, but because we can actually imagine being in her (too small? too big? just right?) shoes.
If you’re interested in this tactic, pick a story where you can explore the “other side” with depth and intrigue, not just provocation. The best retellings add complexity, humor, or pathos in a way that makes us rethink the original. And don’t be afraid to transplant the story into a different genre, setting, or time period—sometimes that’s where things really get cooking.
4. Write from the POV of a pet or inanimate object
Now for a prompt that sounds deceptively simple: tell your story from the POV of something that isn’t human. The challenge lies in how this character’s perception is markedly different from that of a human. For example, a dog doesn’t understand why its owner is crying, but it notices the tears. By depicting human drama through a non-human lens, you can achieve a kind of indirect emotionality that often hits harder than a straight-on approach.
In the short story “Crowsong” by Sarah Combs, the narrator is—surprise, surprise—a crow. The bird soars over a small town, observing its residents with a well-trained eye, leading us to a man named Ryan who has unearthed a third-grade time capsule. From the crow’s perspective, we see Ryan’s buried grief, his painful childhood memories, and his decision to return each classmate’s treasure to them—all filtered through the bird’s own instinct for “re-caching.”
What makes this POV so interesting is that the crow doesn’t sentimentalize; it simply notes, with an animal’s impartiality, the patterns of human mourning and love. While the narration does dip into Ryan’s thoughts for extra context, it then switches back to the mind of the crow so we don’t get too deep into the past—and the story is all the more effective for it.
If you want to try this, think about what your non-human narrator would notice that a human character might miss or take for granted. Conversely, think about how an animal or object might lack an important frame of reference for human life. What’s their version of the world? How does their understanding create dramatic irony? The power of this technique lies in the gap between their perspective and ours.
5. Set your story over just a few seconds or minutes
Short stories are inherently an exercise in concision, and this final approach takes that principle to the extreme. To some, it might sound restrictive, but the constraint can actually be quite liberating; when you eliminate the need for exposition, scene descriptions, and transitions, all that’s left is pure, concentrated feeling.
Ironically, the writer then has room to slow time down—to zoom in on every sensation and thought, to let the character’s mind spiral through memories and associations in a Proustian fashion. As you might imagine, this tactic works particularly well for moments of crisis, grief, or high stakes in a story: something like a car crash, a phone call, or the moment when someone has to make a life-changing decision.
An excellent example of this is “Forgiveness” by Harry Stuart. The story follows our narrator as she drives to the hospital to say goodbye to her dying sister. The prose mirrors her shaky mental state: short, scattered sentences as she scrambles to piece together something that’s too big to process. Her rushed driving, blurred vision, and overwhelming emotions all come together for a striking sensory experience—and the story ends in a wrenching climax.
To try this yourself, choose a moment already loaded with tension or significance. Then slow it down. Let your character think, remember, feel. The external event might last thirty seconds, but the internal story could span a lifetime.
Remember, as I said earlier, one of the best things about the short story form is that you have little to lose—and everything to gain—from a bit of experimentation. So the next time you sit down to write a short story, give yourself permission to try something new. At worst, you might “waste” a few hours on something unorthodox; at best, you’ll create something totally innovative that readers will absolutely love.
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Savannah Cordova is a writer with Reedsy, a publishing platform that connects authors with editors, designers, and marketers to help them publish a book. Savannah has also written for Kirkus, BookTrib, and Litreactor and has been published in the Owl Canyon Press anthology, No Bars and a Dead Battery. Her non-writing interests include cooking, watching rom-coms, and visiting various art museums around London, where she is currently based.
