7 First Short Story Mistakes Every New Writer Makes

The opening line of your story is perfect. You’ve spent three weeks on it. It’s atmospheric, it’s clever, and it sets up a mystery you aren't entirely sure how to solve yet.

Then you hit paragraph two, and the whole thing falls apart.

I’ve been there. I’ve read thousands of first stories—both as a slush pile reader for a small literary magazine and as a writing mentor—and I’ve made most of these mistakes myself. When I started, I thought I had a novel in me, but I could only write six pages that went nowhere. The problem wasn't my ideas. It was the craft errors I kept repeating, mostly because I didn't know I was making them.

Here’s the good news: these errors are predictable, and they’re fixable. Here’s what I actually see writers do wrong when they tackle their first short story, and how to avoid the same trap.

The Portrait of a First Story: Why It Fails

A first short story usually fails for a specific reason: it’s not a story yet; it’s a character sketch with a timeline. When I read submissions, I see well-written sentences that describe a protagonist walking from their car to a café. That’s it. That’s the plot. Nothing changes except the character’s physical location.

The core issue is a misunderstanding of scope. You can’t compress a novel-length character arc into 2,000 words. When you try, you end up summarizing events instead of dramatizing them.

A short story isn't a miniature novel. It’s a slice of life where the pressure is already on the boil. You get one moment of crisis, or one decision. That’s it.

The Backstory Dump

Look, your character’s childhood trauma is fascinating to you. I get it. But when you spend the first 500 words explaining why your protagonist is afraid of commitment because of what happened in 1997, you are killing the suspense.

Start the story where the action starts. Trust that the reader will figure out the history through the character’s reactions. I used to write these long prologues about my characters' genealogies. Nobody cared. The best advice I ever got was to delete my first two pages—every single time. The story almost always begins where I initially put the "Chapter 1" marker.

Telling Instead of Showing: The Emotional Label

We’ve all heard "show, don't tell." But I think the rule is more specific for beginners. The error is naming the emotion instead of making the reader feel it.

• Telling: "John felt angry."
• Showing: "John’s fingers curled into fists, his knuckles turning white around the coffee cup."

The first one is a police report. The second one is cinema. If you have to write "he felt," "she thought," or "they were sad," stop and re-write the sentence. What does sad look like on your specific character? Does she smile too wide, or does she go silent?

The Scope Creep Problem: One Story, Three Novels

This is the one I struggle with the most. You get a great idea for a character, and then you get another idea, and then you realize you need a B-plot and a villain from the past to make it work. Suddenly, your 5,000-word story feels like it needs to be 100,000 words just to breathe.

Here’s the thing: you don't need a villain in a short story. You need an obstacle. You don't need a "character arc" where the caterpillar becomes a butterfly; you need a decision where the character reveals who they already are.

When I teach, I force writers to write the "elevator pitch" of their story in one sentence. If that pitch requires multiple clauses with "and then" and "meanwhile," the story is too big. You have to zoom in.

The Iceberg vs. The Mudslide

I once wrote a story about a woman losing her job. It was 40 pages long. It covered the layoff, the fight with her husband, the drinking, the job hunt, the reconciliation. It was a mudslide. It just went down and down.

I cut it to 8 pages. I only wrote the scene at the office where she gets the news—and then walks out to her car. The entire story happened in the space of a parking lot. That’s the iceberg. You show the tip (the walk to the car) and imply the 90% underwater (the collapse of her life). That tension is what makes short stories addictive.

Dialogue: The Art of Missing the Point

Dialogue is where new writers either become playwrights or court reporters. The court reporter error is writing dialogue that repeats what we already know.

• Bad: "Hi, John, it’s a sunny day today."
• Why it’s bad: Why is this character telling John about the weather? John is standing right there. He can see it. He doesn't need to be updated on the meteorology.

Dialogue has to do one of two things: advance the action or reveal character. It should never just fill space. When I write dialogue, I read it out loud. If it sounds like small talk I wouldn't listen to in real life, I cut it.

The Elephant in the Room: Subtext

Your characters should rarely say exactly what they mean. If a husband is angry at his wife for cheating, he won't say "I am angry that you cheated." He will say, "I saw the car outside last night. Who does that belong to?"

Sound familiar? Good. That’s subtext. The error is having characters be too literal. They say "I love you" when they actually mean "I am terrified of being alone." They say "I quit" when they mean "Please stop me."

Plot, Prose, and the Space Between

You have the characters, the dialogue is biting, but the story still feels floppy. That’s usually a plot structure issue. Specifically, it’s the "and then" method.

• Bad Structure: This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.
• Good Structure: This happened, therefore this happened, but then this happened.

If you can remove any event from your story and the rest still works, that event doesn't belong. I remember writing a story where a character gets a phone call, then a letter, then a visitor. It was just a sequence of alerts. I realized the letter didn't matter. It was the visitor who pushed the button. I cut the letter. The story instantly became tighter.

The Rhythm of the Prose

Avoid the monotony of the same sentence length. If you write perfectly balanced compound sentences for 2,000 words, your reader will fall asleep.

Have you ever noticed how a punchline works? It’s because the sentence before it sets up a rhythm, and the punchline breaks it. You need that in your prose.

Look at the rhythm of a scene where a character is panicking:

> The room was spinning. She looked at the clock. It was 3:00 PM. The meeting was at 3:00 PM.

Short sentences. Panic.

> She could not remember where she had put the keys, despite the fact that she had been holding them only seconds ago before the phone rang with the news about her mother’s condition.

Long sentence. Rambling. Confusion.

Mix it up. I used to write everything in a 12-word sentence rhythm. It read like a robot wrote it. It wasn't until I started reading my work out loud that I heard how monotone it was.

What Editors Actually Hate (A Confession)

I used to think editors were looking for perfect grammar. They aren't. Grammar they can fix. They are looking for indifference to reject.

Here are the things that make me stop reading a submission:

• The weather report opening: "It was a dark and stormy night." Unless the weather directly causes the problem, delete it.
• Cliché descriptions: "Her eyes were like pools of emerald." I have never seen a pool made of emerald, and neither have you.
• Adverb abuse: "She ran quickly." How else do you run? "She sprinted" or "She bolted" is better.
• Dead verbs: "There was a chair." "The chair sat." Use action verbs.

When to Ignore the Rules

Real talk: rules are made to be broken, but only by people who know them. You can write a stream-of-consciousness story with no punctuation if you are James Joyce. You are not James Joyce. I am not James Joyce.

Before you break the rules of grammar, ask yourself: "Is this serving the story, or am I being lazy?"

Writing a 1,200-word sentence because you think it sounds "literary" is lazy. Writing a fragmented sentence to show a character’s shattered mental state is effective.

The Golden Hour of Revision

The first draft is the potter’s clay. The revision is the sculpting.

Most first-timers hit "The End" and think they are done. They are done with 30% of the work. The real writing is in the revision.

I follow a specific process now that has shortened my publication time by half. It took me a while to get here, and I mostly learned by trial and error what not to do. Here is my workflow:

1. Put the story in a drawer. Do not look at it for two weeks. You need to forget it to see it clearly.
2. Print it out. Read it on paper with a pen in hand. You will catch 50% more errors on paper than you will on a screen.
3. Cut the first two paragraphs. Trust me.
4. Read it out loud. If you stumble, the rhythm is off. If you get bored, the reader will get bored.
5. Check your verbs. Change every "was" and "were" to a specific action if possible.

A mistake I made early on was revising on the computer screen immediately after finishing a draft. I was too close to it. I thought every sentence was vital. It wasn't. The two-week cooling off period is the most effective tool I have.

A Final Thought on Beginnings

So, you have the perfect first line. You have the idea. You are ready to write.

The only way to avoid these errors is to write the bad version first. You cannot edit a blank page. You can only edit a draft.

Your first novel is going to be crap. Mine was. Your first short story might be too. But the second one has the potential to be okay, and the third one might actually be good. The process is the point.

The best advice I can give you is to finish the draft. Don't stop to fix the grammar. Don't stop to research the exact type of car your character drives. Just get to the end of the story to see if you have a story at all.

Then, and only then, can you start the real work of making it beautiful.