Short story writing is one of literature’s most rewarding art forms. Whether you’re just starting to write short stories, or you have a few that you’re working on polishing up for publication, understanding the value of word counts is essential.

Word count ranges aren’t one-size-fits-all, and you may want a longer or shorter short story depending on what you want to accomplish with it. We’ll look at the average lengths for different kinds of short stories, with some helpful examples.

How long is a short story?

A typical short story is anywhere from 1,000 to 7,500 words. Short stories that are published in magazines and anthologies typically range from about 1,000 to 5,000 words. Within the short story there are specific forms like microfiction, drabbles, or flash fiction, all with their own word counts.

What are the different short story word counts?

Short stories can be broken down from teeny tiny story fragments to narratives that are broader in scope. Here are the common short story forms, with their typical word counts.

The six-word short story is, as you might expect, only six words! The shortest short story form, this is often used as a challenge in writing groups or workshops, or by individual writers as a warmup.

The “dribble” is a story that’s exactly 50 words—no more, no less. Like the six-word short story, this is a great exercise in concision.

The “drabble” is a short story of exactly 100 words (in fact, the drabble came first; the “dribble” was a play on the name and developed later). This is a very popular kind of short story. There are online literary journals devoted to this form, and you’ll sometimes see drabble writing contests too.

Short stories can be as long as 7,500 words, and as short as 6!

Microfiction is less standardized than any of the above terms, but it’s generally understood to mean any story under 300 words.

Flash fiction, sometimes called sudden fiction, is usually any story under 1,000 words, although some publications will class flash fiction as a story under 1,500 words. If you’re interested in learning about literary techniques, you might also explore what a flashback is and how to use them in your writing.

The short story is typically between 1,000 and 7,500 words, although this can vary a bit between publications. Some magazines will list their upper limit as 8,000 or even 10,000 words.

A novelette is between 7,500 and 20,000 words. Although this technically isn’t a short story anymore, you’ll sometimes see them in literary journals and anthologies alongside short stories.

Why does word count matter in a short story?

Word count conventions have to do with two things: the reader’s experience, and the story’s marketability.

Short stories are designed to be consumed in a single sitting: before bed, on a lunch break, or, as the flash fiction magazine SmokeLong Quarterly defined it, in the space of a cigarette break. This doesn’t mean a short story is better or worse than a full-length novel; it means that they’re two different experiences with two different sets of expectations.

Another element of word counts for short fiction is consistency. In a short story collection or anthology, the stories should flow into each other and form a cohesive whole. It can be jarring for a reader to read a short piece of flash fiction followed by a novelette; instead, they generally prefer stories around roughly the same length.

Publishers can be quite particular about lengths, whether that’s a literary magazine or an indie press putting together a themed collection. If you submit a story that’s outside their specified word count range, it will be rejected immediately—sometimes without even being read! This is why it’s so important to be aware of your own story’s word count.

When submitting short fiction, always follow the submission guidelines.

Characteristics of a short story

So now that we know a bit more about how long a short story should be, let’s look at why these lengths are best suited to this kind of storytelling. Here are the elements that make up this literary form.

A beginning, middle, and end

It might surprise you to know that a short story has a beginning, middle, and end just like a novel. In fact, you can even say that a short story has an Act One, Two, and Three. The difference is that the beginning and end, or the first and third acts, are largely implied rather than stated overtly on the page.

A useful aphorism for short story writing is “arrive late, leave early.” It means you hit the ground running a little ways into the journey of your characters, and cut off shortly after the main body of the story (ie. the second act). The rest is left to the reader’s imagination, conveyed through subtle context clues.

A smaller cast

While novels can have sprawling ensembles and multigenerational family dramas, short stories tend to focus on just a few people. Most short stories will have between two and five characters.

Short stories can feel more intimate in this way, as if you’re in the room with these characters rather than watching from afar. It also means that short stories will unusually follow just one core plot thread; it’s rare for a short story to have subplots (and when they do, they’re usually straying into novelette territory).

Limited settings

When developing a story, it can be tempting to craft ambitious sets with multiple locations. But while this can work in a short novel, in a short story, this can start to feel chaotic and unfocused. Using a clear story structure can help maintain focus and direction.

Short stories usually play out in just one place. Maybe two—for example, a home and a workplace—with the primary focus being in the most important one. By focusing on a limited number of places, you can spend more time really digging out what’s happening in the moment.

Short stories have fewer characters and settings than a novella or novel.

Which brings us to our next and final element—!

A concise period of time

Short stories, as the name suggests, only cover a short space of time in which something important happens. Unlike a novel, a short story won’t follow the main character over a long hero’s journey or watch a character’s development grow from start to finish.

Depending on your structure and writing style, you might show the story happening in real time over a single scene, or in a series of linked scenes across a limited period of time like a few days. But these scenes should all connect to a singular moment or event, rather than creating new experiences and challenges for your characters (leave that for the novel!).

So you can see that short stories are really a snapshot of a single episode in someone’s life. This is why they’re best suited to the conventional >7,500 word count, rather than something more verbose. If they were longer, they’d lose the concision and immediacy that makes them so powerful.

Some useful examples of short story lengths

Short stories are the glittering gems of classic literature, and readers return to them again and again. Looking through some of these famous short stories is a masterclass in implication and concision, the traits we looked at above.

So you can see that while there is some variation in length as well as in content and theme, each writer uses this limited established space in their own way. This illustrates how much you can accomplish in less than 7,000 words—even in extremely short forms such as the 100-word memoir!

Where to publish your short stories

Maybe you’ve written a few short stories already, or maybe you have some ideas you want to explore on the page. But how do you get them into the world?

There are a few approaches you can take to publishing your short stories. We’ll look at them below.

How to publish a short story: Submit individual stories to magazines; Self publish online; Assemble a full collection

Literary journals and anthologies

The most popular way to publish short stories is to submit them to literary magazines and anthologies, or multi-author collections.

There are hundreds—hundreds!—of literary magazines both in print and online. The vast majority of famous authors got their start by submitting to these magazines. The key is to follow each publication’s specific guidelines, since they can vary widely from one to the next.

Some literary journals will specify how many words they want to see in a short story, while others will specify how many pages. Also look at what genre each magazine is looking for; there are publications for literary fiction, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, romance, and every other kind of story under the sun. You just need to find the one that’s right for you.

Pay rates can vary across publications too. You can make good money from some of the more established journals, while others are volunteer-run and can only pay in affection and gratitude. All of them are good for your writer’s resumé.

Publish on social media

Another option is to share your story directly with your readers. Substack is a very popular platform for this, though you can use other platforms as well. If you’re writing flash fiction or micro fiction, Instagram can be an effective way to share these bite-sized stories. If you have a reader following already, you might share short stories through your author newsletter.

The benefit of this is that it helps build your readership and gets your name out into the publishing world. Note that once you’ve self-published these stories, they won’t be eligible to submit to most literary journals.

Submit a full-length collection

If you’ve assembled a group of short stories, you can also seek out traditional publication through a book-length collection. These usually start around 40,000 words, or about five to ten stories (though there can be more if your stories are quite short).

Most publishers like to see that you’ve published at least a few stories in magazines before submitting a full collection. Your collection can include a mix of previously published and previously unpublished work.

When compiling a collection, it’s important that the stories have a sense of cohesive unity about them. They might share a common theme, common characters or settings, or even just a strong voice. It’s a bit like putting together a musical album; all the songs should work on their own and fit together to create a complete whole.

Make sure your story hits the right length

Short stories are a great way to develop your writing skills and start getting some publishing credits to your name. Many writers start with short stories before moving on to more complex novels.

Understanding length and word count is important because it affects marketability, reading time, publishing opportunities, and challenges you to tell a complete story in a controlled space. If you can master the short story, you can master any kind of story form.