A Kiss in the Dark....

....from a stranger. What an intense, terrifying, exciting thought. It's how Stephen King describes a short story: a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

There are two things that strike me about this extraordinary image. One is its transience – think how fleeting even the longest kiss can be. The other is the sense of mystery, of the unknown, contained in the description. I am also conscious that although a kiss can be the most sought-after, longed for embrace, a kiss from a stranger, in the dark, might be nothing short of an assault.

So what is King's phase suggesting to us? That a short story is something fleeting, unknown and open to different interpretations.

Without the roomy expanse of a novel, a short story must be, by definition, brief. As a writer you don't have the time or space to paint a complete picture, you have to content yourself with conveying  just enough information to suggest everything you haven't been able to include. It's the art of inference. Yet even within the limited scope of a short story, it's still possible to cover a big subject, you just have to be more selective about how you tackle it. In Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary Tolstoy and Flaubert take hundreds of pages to describe the downfall of their heroines, in a short story you might focus on one pivotal scene, making it resonate with what has come before and what might follow. I suspect resonance is an important quality when writing in miniature.

All good fiction – short or long – should have something of the unknown at its heart, an essential mystery that the plot sets out to resolve – or not: unanswered questions pack a lot of narrative power, giving an extra bang for their buck, which might be particularly appropriate in shorter fiction when space for answers is in short supply. Don't necessarily play safe and write about what you know – write about what you don't know, instead

In a longer piece of writing, you have the luxury of exploring different themes at different points of the narrative. With fewer words, sometimes these themes have to be dealt with concurrently rather than consecutively, with several different layers operating at the same time. Although this happens in large-scale works as well, in short stories everything is a little more dense and concentrated. If you  have different themes or different notes, sounding at the same time, perhaps there is more scope for interpretation. Think of it like shot silk: if you hold the material up to the light one way it is duck egg blue, but tilt it another way and it looks crimson. The fabric is woven in such a way that both are true at the same time.

Why not take Stephen King's phrase – a kiss in the dark from a stranger  – as the starting point for a short story of your own?

Help from Your Favourite Heroines

What is it that makes a character in a novel memorable? Perhaps it would help to answer this question by asking it in a different way: who are the characters you most remember? If you can come up with the who, it might lead you to the why and that in turn might be of help when you are conjuring your own protagonists out of that thin, thin air.

In terms of heroines, my younger self would probably say Scarlet O'Hara from Gone with the Wind, but more mature contenders would be Anna Karenina, Nana, the heroine from the Zola's book of the same name, and Tess of the D'Urbevilles 

 Why Scarlett O'Hara? Because she is so flawed and so beautiful– she behaves badly, has no moral compass and no self-knowledge. Because she is punished for all of these things and remains indomitable.

Why Anna Karenina? Why Nana? Both of them find themselves on the outside of society, one as an adulteress, the other as a prostitute. They're not conventional, nor are they seen as ideals of womanhood. They are compromised and unhappy and the dilemmas they face seem real. Anna ends by hitting the self-destruct button, Nana ruins every man she comes into contact with. The terrible workings of cause and effect in both their lives are plain to see. The same is true of Tess, whose unfortunate seduction by Alec is her social and moral and doing. She is both victim and avenger.

Perhaps there's a bit of the theme emerging here. The women I have chosen all have tragic stature because their fall from grace is so vertiginous. With the exception of Anna,  these women fight back, they show resilience. Their behaviour is extreme and in some ways subversive, and three out of four of them end by dying, something which makes the stakes of their respective stories extremely high. They are passionate, risk-taking and rebellious, and yet beneath this we glimpse their vulnerability, qualities which form a combustible mix.

When you are thinking about your next project, it might be helpful to conduct a brief survey of the heroines you admire. If you can work out what it is that attracts you to them, you are halfway to being able to endow your own protagonist with their feistiness, or their fragile glamour, or whatever it was that drew you to them in the first place.