What Is a Short Story?

There is something quietly powerful about a short story. It asks very little of your time and yet, if it is written well, it leaves you thinking for days. A single image. A line of dialogue. A character making one choice in one moment. And somehow, all of that adds up to something that stays with you longer than a novel three times its length.

For writers across Switzerland, whether you are drafting your first piece in Zurich, working through a bilingual manuscript in Geneva, or exploring fiction for the first time as a student in Lugano, the short story is one of the most accessible and rewarding forms you can begin with. It demands precision. It rewards restraint. And it fits naturally into a literary tradition that Switzerland has quietly shaped for generations.

But what actually is a short story? What makes it different from a novel, a flash fiction piece, or a novella? What goes into one, and how do you write something that actually works? These are the questions this guide is here to answer, from the basics of the form all the way through to where you can read, share, and publish your work as a writer based in Switzerland.

What Exactly Is a Short Story?

A short story is a work of prose fiction that is complete in itself, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it typically runs between 1,000 and 7,500 words, though some literary magazines accept up to 10,000. Within that range, a huge amount of creative variation is possible, but the defining quality of a short story is not its length. It is compression.

Every element of a short story has to work harder than it would in a novel. Characters cannot be introduced gradually over several chapters. Settings do not get long, atmospheric build-ups. There is no time for subplots or digressions or extended backstory. Everything on the page needs to be doing something, and doing it efficiently.

That is both the challenge and the beauty of the form. A well-written short story achieves in fifteen pages what many novels struggle to achieve in three hundred. It captures a moment, a shift, a realisation, a small human truth, and it does it with nothing to spare.

This is also why the short story sits so comfortably within Swiss literary culture. Switzerland's literary tradition, from Gottfried Keller's Novellen in the nineteenth century to Friedrich Dürrenmatt's compressed prose fiction in the twentieth, has long valued economy of language, philosophical depth, and a certain kind of controlled understatement. When you read Dürrenmatt writing in German, Ramuz in French, or Fleur Jaeggy in Italian, you see writers who understood that less, when precisely chosen, means more. That understanding is at the heart of every successful short story.

Where Short Fiction Sits Among Other Forms

One of the most common sources of confusion for new writers is understanding exactly where the short story sits among other forms of fiction. The boundaries are not always rigid, but having a rough map helps, especially if you are thinking about where to submit your work.

Flash fiction typically runs under 1,000 words. Some flash pieces are as short as fifty or a hundred words. The form is increasingly popular online and in short fiction competitions, and it rewards extremely tight construction, every sentence matters, every word choice is load-bearing. It is a distinct form from the short story, though the skills required overlap significantly.

The short story proper runs from around 1,000 words up to about 7,500, though most literary magazines and competitions set their upper limit somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Within this range sits the bulk of published short fiction, from the stripped-back minimalism of Raymond Carver to the expansive, detail-rich stories of Alice Munro.

Above 7,500 words, you move into novelette territory (7,500 to 17,500 words), and then into the novella (17,500 to 40,000 words). Both of these forms allow more development, more room for character, more narrative complexity, but they are less commonly published in literary magazines and more typically released as standalone titles.

The novel, of course, begins at around 40,000 words and goes as far as a writer wants to take it.

Understanding these distinctions matters practically, because when you submit your work for publication, you will often be submitting to markets that specify exactly the word range they accept. A story that comes in at 18,000 words is not a short story for most purposes; it is a novella, and knowing that saves you from submitting to the wrong places.

Writers submitting across Europe should treat these word counts as general guidance rather than fixed rules. Literary magazines, publishers and competitions often set their own limits. A work of 18,000 words, for example, may be considered too long for a short story submission and may need to be presented as a novella.

The History and Tradition of the Short Story

The short story as a literary form is relatively modern, but its roots stretch much further back. Oral traditions, fables, parables and folktales were all forms of compressed narrative that existed long before the printing press. They served real social and cultural purposes: transmitting values, making sense of the world, entertaining communities who gathered together to share stories.

The literary short story as we know it today emerged in the nineteenth century, shaped significantly by writers like Edgar Allan Poe, who not only wrote them but theorised about the form, arguing that a short story should be readable in a single sitting and that every element should contribute to a single unified effect. That idea of unity, of a story pursuing one central purpose without distraction, remains one of the most useful guiding principles for writing short fiction today.

Anton Chekhov, writing in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, pushed the form further still. His stories are famously inconclusive by conventional standards, they end without resolution, without moral lessons, without tidy closure. What they offer instead is something far more true to life: a sense of having been present at a moment that mattered, without quite being able to say why. His influence on the short story is enormous and ongoing.

In Switzerland, the tradition runs parallel to these international developments while retaining its own character. Gottfried Keller wrote Novellen, a German literary tradition closely related to the modern novella, typically built around a single striking event or turning point, with a sharp social and moral intelligence that made him one of the most important Swiss writers of his era. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, best known as a playwright and novelist, also worked in compressed prose forms such as the short story 'The Tunnel' and the short crime novel The Pledge, exploring guilt, justice, and institutional power with an ironic precision that felt uniquely Swiss. Ramuz wrote in French about the lives of people in the Vaud countryside with a physicality and simplicity that was revolutionary in its own way. These writers did not simply absorb international trends in short fiction, they contributed to them.

For writers in Switzerland today, this is a tradition worth knowing. Not because you need to write like Dürrenmatt or Keller, but because understanding where the form has come from, including within your own cultural context, gives you a richer sense of what is possible.

The Core Elements of a Short Story

Every short story, regardless of genre or style, is built from the same fundamental components. Understanding these components does not mean mechanically applying them, the best stories never feel mechanical, but they give you a structural foundation to build from.

Character

In a short story, you almost never have room for more than one central character, maybe two. Every additional character you introduce takes up space that might otherwise go to depth, nuance, and specificity in your protagonist. The most effective short story characters are not necessarily complex in the sense of having elaborate backstories, they are specific. They have a particular way of seeing the world, a particular want, a particular flaw or tendency that the story will put under pressure.

The reader does not need to know everything about your character. They need to know enough to care about what happens to them.

Conflict and Stakes

Something needs to be at stake. This is true of all fiction, but in a short story, the stakes do not need to be enormous. What matters is that they feel real to the character experiencing them. A decision about whether to tell a difficult truth to a friend can carry as much weight in a short story as a battle for survival, if the writing makes us feel what that decision costs.

Conflict in short fiction often operates on multiple levels simultaneously. There is the external conflict, what is happening in the plot, and the internal conflict, what the character is struggling with emotionally or psychologically. The best short stories keep both in play, even within a compressed space.

Setting

Setting in a short story is not background decoration. It is active. The place where a story happens shapes the mood, reflects the character's inner state, and can do significant narrative work on its own. A few precise, well-chosen details create a world far more effectively than paragraphs of description.

For Swiss writers, this is worth thinking about carefully. Switzerland's landscapes, the Alps, the lake towns, the ordered urban streets of Zurich and Geneva, are distinctive and specific. They are also underrepresented in English-language fiction. A story set on the shores of Lake Geneva or in the narrow old quarter of Bern brings a particularity and vividness that generic settings simply cannot match. Your location is an asset.

Plot and Structure

The traditional short story structure follows a familiar arc: an inciting incident (something happens that disrupts the status quo), rising action (the conflict develops and intensifies), a climax (the moment of highest tension or decision), and a resolution (not necessarily a happy ending, but a sense of completion or shift).

This structure is not a formula to be followed rigidly. Plenty of exceptional short stories subvert or ignore parts of it. But knowing the structure helps you understand what your story might be missing when something feels off. If your story has rising action but no clear inciting incident, the reader might feel they have arrived late, unsure why they should care. If it has a climax but no real resolution, it might feel frustratingly unfinished. The structure gives you a diagnostic tool, not a prescription.

The Ending

This is arguably the most important single element of any short story, and the one that most new writers struggle with.

A short story ending should not simply stop. It should arrive. The best endings feel both surprising and inevitable, you did not see it coming, but once you are there, it feels like the only place the story could have gone. A short story ending does not need to resolve everything. It does not need to explain everything. But it needs to leave the reader with something, an image, a feeling, a realisation, that resonates beyond the final line.

The impulse to over-explain at the end, to tidy things up or spell out the theme, is one of the most common mistakes in short fiction. Trust your reader. Trust the work. If you have written well, the ending does not need a paragraph of commentary after it.

How to Write a Short Story: A Step-by-Step Approach

Writing a short story is not simply a matter of having an idea and typing until you reach the end. The best stories come from a combination of instinct and intention, and approaching the process with some structure, particularly for first drafts, makes a real difference.

Start With an Image or a Moment, Not a Plot

Many writers make the mistake of starting with a plot. They know what they want to happen and they work towards making it happen on the page. The problem is that plot-driven fiction often feels mechanical, you can sense the writer moving the pieces into place.

Better to start with something more specific and more alive: an image, a detail, a moment, a voice. A woman waiting at a train station in Lausanne, watching a man she does not recognise who seems to recognise her. Two brothers having an argument about something trivial that is clearly about something much larger. The particular quality of light on an Alpine lake at dusk. Start there and see what the story needs to become.

Write In the Direction of Tension

Once you have your opening, your job is to move toward tension rather than away from it. New writers often have an instinct to release pressure, to give the character a way out, to explain away the conflict. Resist this. A short story lives or dies on the quality of its tension. Keep your character in difficulty. Make the problem harder, not easier. Stay with the discomfort until the story has earned its resolution.

Draft Fast and Revise Slowly

Your first draft is not the story. It is the raw material for the story. Write it without stopping to second-guess yourself. Get to the end before you start revising. Then put it away for at least a day, preferably longer.

When you come back to revise, read it as if you have never seen it before. Where do you lose interest? Where does the pace slow? Where are you explaining things that the reader would already have understood? Cut ruthlessly. Short stories almost always improve when they get shorter.

Read Your Work Aloud

This is one of the most practical and under-used revision tools available. Reading your story aloud forces you to encounter every sentence as a physical experience, its rhythm, its pacing, the way sentences follow from one another. Awkward transitions, clunky dialogue, and rhythmic stagnation show up immediately when you read aloud in a way they rarely do on a silent re-read.

Trust Subtext

One of the most distinctive qualities of effective short fiction is its reliance on subtext, what is not said, what is implied, what the reader understands without being told. In a short story, you do not have room to over-explain. You have to trust the reader to pick up what you are putting down.

This is particularly worth noting for writers coming from an academic background, which is common in Switzerland given the country's strong university culture. Academic writing is explicit by necessity, you make your argument, you support it, you conclude it. Fiction works differently. A character's emotional state is conveyed through action, through dialogue, through the objects they notice and the things they say instead of what they mean. Not through a sentence that tells the reader what the character is feeling.

This is also, incidentally, an area where Switzerland's cultural tendency toward understatement can work in your favour. The restraint that Swiss culture values socially translates beautifully into the kind of precise, understated prose that characterises the best short fiction.

Genre-Specific Conventions in Short Fiction

Short fiction does not exist in a single form. Literary short stories, genre short fiction, and experimental stories all operate under different expectations, and understanding the conventions of the specific territory you are writing in matters, both for craft reasons and for submission purposes.

Literary Short Fiction

Literary short fiction prioritises character interiority, language, and psychological complexity over plot. The story's events are often small or internal, a conversation, a realisation, a memory surfacing, but the way those events are rendered is richly precise. Literary fiction tends to have ambiguous endings and resists easy moral conclusions. Magazines like Granta, The Stinging Fly, and Das Magazin represent this kind of literary ambition in the English-language and German-language markets respectively.

Speculative Short Fiction

Science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories have a long and distinguished tradition, and the form is particularly well-suited to speculative fiction because the tight narrative space forces economy in world-building. The classic advice, show don't tell, applies especially here, because you do not have pages to explain how your world works. You show the reader the world through the story's action and let them construct the rules from the evidence. Ted Chiang, one of the most celebrated short story writers working today, is a masterclass in how to make this work.

Crime and Thriller Short Fiction

Crime short fiction is built around revelation, around what is not known at the start of the story and what is discovered by the end. The short form suits crime well because the tight structure creates natural momentum toward the solution or twist. Switzerland has a notably strong crime fiction tradition, with writers like Hansjörg Schneider demonstrating how local specificity, the streets of Basel, the rhythms of Swiss institutional life, can ground a crime narrative in vivid, believable detail.

Romance Short Fiction

Romance in short form often focuses on a single pivotal moment in a relationship: a first meeting, a crisis, a reconciliation. Because the romantic arc cannot unfold fully in a short story, the emotional texture of a single moment has to carry a significant weight. The best romance short fiction makes you feel the stakes of that moment intensely, even within a very compressed space.

Writing Short Fiction as a Swiss Author: What the Local Context Offers You

Switzerland is an unusual country for a writer to be working in, and that unusualness is an opportunity if you choose to use it.

You are almost certainly navigating more than one language. German, French, Italian, Romansh, Switzerland's four national languages are not just administrative categories, they are distinct literary cultures with their own traditions, styles, and readerships. Writing in English adds a fifth dimension. This multilingual context means you have access to narrative strategies and tonal registers that monolingual writers simply do not have. You might write a story where a character shifts between languages in ways that carry emotional meaning. You might draw on the specific resonance of certain French words that do not translate cleanly into English. You might explore the experience of living between linguistic worlds, which is a distinctly Swiss experience and also a deeply human one.

The landscape is also yours to use. The Alps, the lakes, the long summer light in the Valais, the particular grey of a Basel winter, these are details that are physically specific and internationally recognisable, but underused in literary fiction. A story set on the Gornergrat or along the Rhine in Schaffhausen brings a vividness and particularity that is difficult to manufacture.

And Switzerland's social and political context, its famous neutrality, its consensus culture, its banking heritage, its relationship to European integration, provides a rich backdrop for stories that engage with questions of identity, complicity, belonging, and moral ambiguity. These are exactly the kinds of tensions that short fiction handles well.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Even experienced writers run into the same problems in short fiction. Knowing what to watch for saves time and frustration in revision.

Starting too slowly is probably the most common issue. A short story cannot afford a slow warm-up. The first paragraph needs to create a reason to keep reading, a specific detail, a tension, a voice that draws you in. Begin as close to the centre of the story as you can.

Over-explaining is the second most common problem. This usually comes from a lack of trust in the reader, which is understandable for new writers. But explaining what a character feels, what a scene means, what the reader should take from a moment kills the story's effect. Let the scene do the work.

Weak endings often come from knowing how you want the story to feel without knowing exactly where it should land. If your ending feels vague or anticlimactic, go back to the story's core tension and ask what the truest possible resolution to that tension would look like. Not the tidiest, not the most comfortable, the truest.

Underdeveloped conflict is the quiet killer of many otherwise decent stories. If the stakes feel low or unclear, the reader has no reason to stay invested. Raise the pressure. Make the situation harder. Give your character something real to lose.

Finally, too many characters. Short fiction needs focus. A cast of five or six named characters is almost always too many for a story under 5,000 words. Consolidate. Give the essential roles to one or two people and develop them fully rather than spreading your attention across a crowd.

If you plan to develop your manuscript further and need professional support, working with skilled book editing specialists can make a significant difference to the final quality of your work, particularly if you are aiming for publication in competitive literary markets.

Where to Read Short Stories in Switzerland and Beyond

Reading short fiction is essential if you want to write it. Not just for inspiration, but for craft, to understand how experienced writers solve the problems you are facing, to internalise the rhythms and structures that make the form work.

In Switzerland and the broader German-language literary world, Das Magazin publishes thoughtful literary fiction and essays with a readership that values both intellectual substance and strong writing. Viceversa Literatur is the essential platform for Swiss literature in all four national languages and is an invaluable resource for writers seeking to understand the contemporary Swiss literary scene.

For English-language short fiction, The New Yorker remains the most consistently excellent showcase of literary short fiction in the world, the stories published there are worth studying with close attention. Granta publishes longer-form literary fiction and essays of exceptional quality. Zoetrope: All-Story and One Story are both excellent, focused purely on fiction.

Globally, the Bachmann-Preis, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, is one of the most prestigious German-language literary awards, structured around live readings of unpublished short prose at the Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur in Klagenfurt. The competition readings are freely available online and represent a genuine cross-section of contemporary German-language literary ambition. Attending or watching these as a Swiss writer interested in literary short fiction is enormously valuable.

Where to Publish Your Short Stories

Getting your work published is a different skill from writing it, but it is learnable. The short fiction market rewards persistence and specificity, knowing which publications are right for your work, and submitting with care.

For English-language submissions, Duotrope is a comprehensive database of literary magazines and competitions that is worth the annual subscription fee. Most literary magazines have very clear submission guidelines on their websites, read them carefully and follow them exactly. Many accept simultaneous submissions (meaning you can submit the same story to multiple places at once), but some do not, and violating that policy is a quick way to burn bridges with editors.

In the Swiss and European market, Viceversa Literatur is a curated annual yearbook focused on cross-linguistic exchange between Switzerland's language regions; opportunities to be featured typically come through editorial commission and translation projects rather than open submission. Das Magazin occasionally publishes short fiction. The Schweizer Literaturpreise (Swiss Literature Awards) and the Literaturpreis des Kantons Bern both include categories that may be relevant depending on your work.

If you are thinking more broadly about the publishing landscape in Europe, resources on the leading book publishers in Europe can give you a useful contextual overview of how the industry operates across different markets.

Wherever you submit, make sure your manuscript is properly formatted. Standard manuscript format, double-spaced, Times New Roman or Courier 12pt, with your name and the story title in the header, is expected by most literary publications. Deviation from this is not just an aesthetic issue; it signals to editors that you are not familiar with professional norms, which affects how your work is received before they even begin reading.

For writers interested in collecting their short stories into a published volume, or preparing a manuscript for wider circulation, understanding the professional formatting process is an important step in presenting your work to its best advantage.

Building a Writing Practice Around Short Fiction

One of the practical advantages of short fiction for writers who are not yet writing full-time, which describes most writers in Switzerland and elsewhere, is that it fits into a normal life in a way that novels often do not. A short story can be drafted in a weekend and revised over a month. It gives you a complete creative experience within a manageable timeframe.

The discipline of writing short stories regularly also builds the craft skills that translate directly into longer work. The attention to sentence-level precision, the ability to establish character quickly, the structural awareness, all of these transfer. Many of the most accomplished novelists working today produced a substantial body of short fiction before they wrote their first novel, not because they were waiting to graduate to a longer form, but because the short story was the form that taught them to write.

Setting yourself a challenge, one completed short story per month, or one per quarter, creates a real creative practice and also builds a body of work. That body of work is what you will eventually draw from when you are ready to submit to publications, enter competitions, or think about putting a collection together.

If at any point you are thinking about getting professional writing or ghostwriting support for your short fiction projects, it is worth knowing that specialist support exists for writers at every stage of the process, from initial concept through to submission-ready manuscript.

The Short Story as a Form for Now

There is something particularly well-suited about the short story to the way we live and read now. Attention is fragmented. Time is scarce. Long-form reading, which requires sustained concentration over hours or days, is something many people struggle to maintain. The short story meets readers where they are, it asks for thirty minutes, maybe an hour, and it delivers a complete emotional and narrative experience within that window.

This is not a compromise. Some of the most profound literary experiences available in fiction come in short form. The stories of Alice Munro, of Junot Díaz, of Lucia Berlin, of Angela Carter, these are not minor works by writers waiting to write novels. They are complete achievements on their own terms, as significant as anything in the literary tradition.

For Swiss writers specifically, there is also a growing appetite among readers in Switzerland for fiction that reflects the actual texture of contemporary Swiss life, multilingual, multicultural, geographically specific, and engaged with the particular questions that come with living in one of the most prosperous and also one of the most quietly complex countries in the world. There are not yet enough Swiss writers producing short fiction in English that engages with this context. That is a gap, and it is also an opportunity.

If you are starting to think about what the publishing journey looks like beyond the writing itself, from professional book design to strategic book marketing, EU Publishing House works with authors across Europe at every stage of that journey.

And if you are at the very beginning, just trying to understand what a short story is and whether you might be the kind of person who writes one, the answer is probably yes. The form is open. It does not require a publishing deal or a literary agent or years of formal training. It requires a desk, some time, and a willingness to start.