The ‘Competition Length’ Short Story and the ‘8 Cs’
Guest post by DAVID BUTLER
With the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025 being open for submissions until the end of June, I’ve invited some great proponents of the short story to offer their insights on the form.
Today’s guest post comes from David Butler, author of three celebrated short story collections. You can read his story Between Silences in Issue 1 of Frazzled Lit.
As the early Maupassant or Chekhov might well attest, tight word-counts dictated by the mechanics of publication have a long tradition. That said, short stories coming in under 2,000 (or occasionally 3,000) words, whether the limit is determined by a competition or journal, remain a small subset of the genre. Most of my favorite short stories, whether by the later Chekhov or Flannery O’Connor, J.D. Salinger or Alice Munro, Claire Keegan or Colin Barrett, George Saunders or Jhumpa Lahiri, fall somewhere between 3,000 and 12,000. Nevertheless, there are some brilliant ‘competition length’ short stories out there – look at the infinite riches of a gem like Tobias Wolff’s ‘Bullet in the Brain’; or the amount of the iceberg that remains beneath the surface in the classic Hemingway interaction.
It may be that the ‘scale of ambition’ of the ‘competition’ short story must needs be scaled back somewhat in terms of the number of characters and/or episodes that can be successfully developed within its few pages. That is not to say that the scope in terms of theme, character, surprise or emotional impact need be curtailed. Regardless of length, and indeed genre, it seems to me that several constants (here gathered as the “8 Cs”) are vital to successful story telling.
[A] CHANGE & CHALLENGE
Almost all stories begin with an abrupt change to the status quo encompassing a challenge (answering the reader’s hypothetical question ‘why today?’): someone has just died; a stranger arrives; there’s a letter or email - a proposal; or a dismissal; an ultimatum; or a threat, or a discovery; a gift comes; or there’s an accident; or the offer of a lift. This change constitutes the ‘problem’ or ‘question’ of the story. Efficiently told stories commonly begin abruptly with this change, often as early as the opening sentence. Only then do they introduce the protagonist specifically in relation to how they respond to the challenge. A corollary is that once the problem/question is answered/resolved (whether satisfactorily or not), a different status quo will be established, but interest in the story is over.
[B] CONFLICT & CONTEST
Conflict or Contest (ἀγών / ‘agon’) is the motor of story, so much so that I’d argue that without it, there is no story. Something has to be in play or at stake. As readers we are interested in competition, not consensus – no-one would watch a game of tennis with both players on the same side of the net! But the term ‘conflict’ is often misunderstood to suggest that stories require an open argument, row or struggle. Perhaps ‘conflict of interest’ or ‘competing interest’ is a better way of thinking about it. Often the prot-agon-ist - she whose progress or dilemma the story centres upon and follows - is pitched against one or more ‘ant-agon-ists’. But the agon may equally (or also) be internal.
[C] CHARACTER & CHANGE
If conflict is the motor of story, character is its soul. Heraclitus declared ‘ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων’, ‘character is destiny’ – interestingly the old Greek term for character is ‘ethos’. Because of [A] and [B], character here is character under pressure. It is frequently given by voice, whether the story be narrated in the first person, in close-third, or with passages of direct dialogue – think how character comes across in Hemingway’s ‘Killers’, or Joyce’s ‘Clay’. Readers resist having character summarised for them, preferring to interpret ‘character tells’; how character is revealed by action, or inaction; how it may be complex, even contradictory.
We’re used to the idea of a ‘character arc’ – the idea that the events of the story leave the protagonist altered, perhaps wiser. Conversely, the change may occur in our perception or appreciation of a character’s motives or origins. ‘Bullet in the Brain’ cleverly reverses the typical ‘arc’ by returning us unexpectedly from the final moment of Anders, a stultified, world-weary critic, through a cascade of possible ‘significant’ memories that didn’t occur to him, to a forgotten, youthful delight in the quirks of language.
[D] CHRONOLGY & CONSTRUCTION
The skeleton of any story – how it moves - is its structure. Part of this rests upon choice of narrative POV – first or third, omniscient or partial, reliable or not, single or multiple. Is there a framing narrative, and if so, what does it add? The tense in which the story is told may reflect the narrator’s knowledge of, or distance from, the events unfolding. Then there’s chronology. How does the story’s structure embody the actual timeline? A ‘who-dunnit’ for instance will typically have a double timeline – one leading from the dead body, the other leading up to it.
A key consideration here is the (temporary) withholding of key information. A story fails when it is too linear or predictable; but a sudden reveal in the final couple of lines may feel gimmicky. Stories relying on a twist will fall flat if the twist is anticipated – a case in point would be Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’. On the other hand, if a curve-ball is thrown into the narrative – think again of the moment the eponymous bullet enters Anders’ brain – it’s worth considering when might this occur to greatest effect.
It has been said that stories should end, not simply stop. But what constitutes a satisfactory end? Beyond the terms of the story itself, ie, the problem or challenge that impelled it, nothing is required. Now they’ve made their choice, do we really need to know whether Anna and Gurov, in Chekhov’s famous story ‘Lady with Lapdog’, manage to pull it off and stay together?
[E] CONCLUDING REMARKS (a 9th ‘C’?)
Based on the ten stories that have won contests to date together with the two dozen or so that were placed or shortlisted, my experience is that those which have done well have a limited cast of two or three characters; are narrated from a single POV, whether first person or close third, with a strong emphasis on voice; and are focused on a single event or issue – a hitchhiking couple accept a dodgy lift; a town clams up in the wake of a vicious racial attack; a father unexpectedly returns after a ten year absence; a schoolboy becomes obsessed with the mother of a deceased classmate. The ‘issue’ tends to have a certain resonance or weight beyond the story or, at the least, obvious significance for the narrator. I avoid those stock characters who crop up so regularly in contests I’ve judged: the incestuous father and the paedophile priest; the insensitive, homophobic or racist parent; the cheating partner getting their comeuppance. Where plots appear to be running too linearly from A to B, a curve-ball will frequently send the story instead to C, so that initial assumptions need to be revised. First, second and third drafts of these stories tend to overrun the specified word limits, often by several hundred words. The challenge then is to pare back and economise. Interestingly, when these stories have subsequently appeared in collections, I’ve never felt the urge to reinsert anything deleted back into the leaner models.
© David Butler.
David Butler is the author of three short story collections, the most recent of which is White Spirits, (Arlen House, 2025). Awards for the short story include the Maria Edgeworth (twice), Benedict Kiely, Colm Tóibín, ChipLit Fest, ITT/Redline, and Fish International. He teaches regularly at the Irish Writers Centre. For a review of White Spirits, see:
https://booksirelandmagazine.com/white-spirits-the-work-of-a-true-artist/
The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025, judged by Irish author Nuala O’Connor, is open for entries until June 30th, 2025.
Very helpful and succinct article. I’ll bear in mind for another time. Had I read it before submitting, I probably wouldn’t have! 😂