A short story is just that: a made-up tale about characters where something happens (usually bad), and you hope everything will turn out fine in the end. It is a piece of fictional writing, usually less than 5000 words, that contains six basic elements: characters, setting, plot, conflict, climax, resolution.
But definitions don’t tell you that a short story must grab your reader’s interest from the word go. Nor should you write pages and pages of flowery descriptive writing as you might in a novel. You have, in this case, 2000 words in which to introduce your characters, define the setting of your story, and embark on some sort of conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist that will keep the reader dying to know how it all ends.
Does this mean every story has to have a happy ending? Definitely not. But it should reach a satisfactory conclusion so your reader thinks, “That was a good read”.
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