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I have a love-hate approach to writing short stories. I want to write them, for a whole bunch of reasons. I even enjoy writing them, to a certain extent–when they’re going well. And that has always been the problem–they rarely go well. I rarely make progress beyond a few notes, a few paragraphs, or maybe a few pages. I almost never finish a short story. But when I do finish one? It’s tremendously satisfying. So I keep trying. And mostly, failing.

That may be about to change.

Recently, I stumbled onto a definition of a short story that gave me a different perspective on how to approach them. In his book, Scene and Structure, Jack Bickham wrote, “A short story has. . . a situation, a complication, a climax, and a denouement.”

OK, maybe you’re thinking, “Duh, Sam.” But I’d never heard it put in quite that way before. Bickham’s formula doesn’t merely describe how to structure a short story–it told me how to conceive a short story. And that has been my biggest problem.

Although I read short stories, I prefer to read novels. Although I’ll watch episodic television, I prefer shows with long story arcs or feature films. I’m programmed to think in terms of broad plots. When I tried to create a short story, it was always difficult for me to narrow my focus–instead of writing a short story, I try to cram a novel into 5,000 words or less.

The stories I’ve written that worked? I conceived them by thinking of a situation, a complication, a climax, and a denouement. I just didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. I sort of stumbled into the method, then stumbled back out of it with no idea what I’d done or how to repeat the process. With a better understanding of how to generate story ideas, maybe there will be more love and less hate in my approach to short stories.