How Short Stories Sharpen a Novelist’s Instincts

I first realised the value of short stories as a training ground while reading one of Jack London’s shorter pieces. A particular scene felt familiar. After a moment, I realised why: I’d read a version of it before in White Fang. What London seemed to be doing was working something out, testing the mechanics of a scene, before letting it grow into something larger.

Comedians do the same thing. They test material in small rooms before stepping onto bigger stages. Short stories, I think, serve a similar purpose for novelists.

The compactness of the form leaves very little room to hide. There’s no space for sprawling world-building, side plots, or indulgent dialogue. A short story forces the writer to concentrate on structure, on what actually makes a story work. Every element has to earn its place. That pressure sharpens instincts in a way that longer forms sometimes delay.

Reading short stories has been just as important for me as writing them. They’ve allowed me to encounter a wide range of authors without the commitment of a deep dive into each one. That exposure alone has made me a more rounded writer. But more than that, short stories have taught me how stories are built.

I once read an article by a writer who described how, in her early writing classes, she’d been taught to construct stories by stringing together scenes, much like a screenwriter. She later realised this was terrible advice, not because scenes don’t matter, but because she didn’t yet understand plot. It wasn’t until she grasped how stories are shaped at a structural level that her writing began to work.

Short stories make that structure visible. In a novel, plot can be harder to see because it’s spread across so many scenes and digressions. In a short story, the bones are exposed. You can see how tension is introduced, developed, and resolved, often in a way that’s harder to spot over 90,000 words.

They’re also incredibly useful for working the kinks out of storytelling. A short story can help you think through how a conversation might unfold, or clarify a character’s internal motivations and inner dialogue. They’re a safe place to explore backstory too. Even if that backstory never appears on the page, understanding it can profoundly shape how a character behaves in a larger work.

In that sense, short stories don’t compete with novels. They support them. They sharpen judgment, strengthen intuition, and train the writer to recognise when a moment is doing real work, or when it’s simply taking up space.

For novelists, short stories aren’t a detour. They’re a workshop.