Magazines are swamped with submissions and some only have time to read a paragraph or two before deciding to reject or continue on. How do you hook a reader in the first sentence?

Have you ever read a story that pulls you forward through the narrative seemingly without effort? Each paragraph pushes your attention forward, like a well-timed paddle from an olympic rowing crew. For me, the writer who best exemplifies this is Octavia Butler. Even if I’m rereading a story of hers to study how it works, I get lost in the plot and end up reading the final line before I know it. How does an author learn to do that?

When you need to make a reference to an event that occurred earlier in your narrative, the first tool you may think to use is a flashback. But what if you don’t want to break the flow of the narrative by jumping back in time. What if, instead, you want to use the reference to evoke a remembrance in the reader? Not to mention the fact that flashbacks can be tricky to pull off.

Ursula Le Guin’s writing is chock-full of craft, and she also doles out a fair measure of advice on how to improve your own writing in her book Steering the Craft. In it, she introduces the idea of crowding and leaping to describe portions of a story that are full of rich detail and others that move at a faster pace.

Have you ever read a paragraph that introduces a secondary character, and by the end of it that new character feels like a real human being? You may not particularly care about them yet, and their role in the overall story is still murky, but they seem to be standing right in front of you, breathing, blinking. The writer has found a way to pull a solid individual out of the ether with only a few words. “How?” you might wonder.

In the world of writing advice, the refrain most often repeated to beginners is “first you need to learn the rules, then you can break them.” New writers are told again and again that the best novelists, poets, and journalists are the ones who break the rules better than anyone else.

What makes a story memorable months or years after reading it? How can you make a plot device stand out, particularly when it is one as timeworn as a reversal?

Metaphors and similes must be consistent, and I don’t only mean internal consistency. Yes, you should avoid writing mixed metaphors. But there is an external, story-wide type of consistency that you should also consider. Here’s what I mean: if you’re writing a story in third person limited and your viewpoint character is a mechanic from Wells, Nevada who’s just seen a flying saucer, she’s not going to describe it in the same way that a physicist would.

Most scenes unfold chronologically, but some literary techniques interrupt the flow of narrative time. The flashback (or analepsis) is one of them. When well-written, it provides valuable context to the reader; written poorly they cause confusion and frustration.

How long do you have to hook your reader? One sentence? One paragraph? Longer? The truth is that anything in that nebulous “beginning” section of a story needs to be compelling. Nancy Kress suggests that we use three paragraphs as a rule of thumb for short stories.

A well-placed metaphor can add a dash of color to a paragraph. But what if you want to add more than a dash? What if you want to turn the paint bucket upside down and drench the paragraph in color?

Short story writers are always in need of shortcuts: ways of getting the characters and scenes moving in the right direction with fewer words. This is easier said than done. It feels impossible to trim away words when staring at a piece of the story as large and important as the central conflict. It’s better to start small.

So you want to write an analepsis (flashback)? Well then, which kind are you going to write? There’s the internal analepsis which flashes back to a section of time that the narrative has already covered. Then there’s the external analepsis, which flashes back to a time wholly outside of the narrative. Since most short stories cover a short period of time, I’ll assume it’s the latter. Consider the following passage from A Lingering Scent of Jasmine by Pat Murphy...

The catalog of literary devices is vast. How can anyone remember them all? Especially with names like litote, polysyndeton, and zeugma. I can’t keep them all straight, but when I run across an unfamiliar device that deserves a highlight, I give it a temporary name, something that will help me remember why I enjoyed it.

How can you add world-building without presenting it to the reader in one enormous expository lump? How can a character describe the world around them without it feeling contrived? Short story writers take great pains to avoid narrating directly to the reader, preferring to show their world to the reader rather than tell them about it. This bias toward showing over telling is accepted wisdom, so it’s no surprise that there are endless techniques for hiding exposition.

How can you describe the setting of your story without it reading like a dry litany of told facts? How can you keep this exposition centered firmly around the main character to keep it grounded in the narrative’s flow of time? Action is a natural complement to early descriptions of the setting.

Throwaway characters. Every author has ’em, but not every author writes them the same way. Some authors give us a character’s life story only to have them speak a line and disappear forever. Other authors push these characters so far into the background that they practically part of the scenery—referenced by titles alone: the secretary, the general, the robot. I don’t know about you, but by the third time I read “the AI said,” I’m a bored reader. In Persepolis Rising, James S.A. Corey strikes a balance: keep the plot moving but don’t lose the reader’s attention. How? By giving throwaways nicknames.