Kurt Vonnegut put together 8 basics to his works while writing amazing works like Slaughterhouse Five.  I read over these and some are very agreeable for short stories.  However, you don’t have to follow all of them to make an amazing story (just ask Flannery O’Connor).  And we all know, as writers, that our goal is to break all the rules in new and exciting ways!  But, here they are!

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.