Short & Sweet: Structure and Pacing in Short Romance

This is the second of five chapters in my crash course on writing short romance. For more information, read the introductory post for this series. A list of my stories that are referenced in this chapter can be found at the end of today’s post.

Last time, I went over the types of stories that work well for short romance, and what a happy ending for each of those types might look like. Today, I’m going to talk a little more about the nitty-gritty of each type of short fiction, its word count requirements, and how I put each type of story together.

Types of Short Fiction by Word Count

Within the broader category of short fiction, there are several subcategories.

• Drabbles: stories of 100 words or less

• Microfiction: under 500 words

• Flash fiction: Under 1000 words

• Short story: 1000-10,000 words

Depending on the length you’re aiming for, the structure and scope of your story will vary.

When I’m writing a drabble, I zero in on one very specific, brief moment in the lives of my characters. The time that lapses in a story of this length is typically only seconds to minutes. You do still need some semblance of a beginning, a middle, and an end, to avoid ending up with a prose poem or a vignette or something other than an actual short story. But a drabble is not going to be the place to take on a major event. The drabbles I mentioned in the last chapter, “Whamageddon Love Story” and “Under the Porch Light” are each comprised of a single conversation between the two main characters. The conversations may carry a lot of weight, but the amount of time that lapses in the story is a matter of moments.

For microfiction, you can usually sneak in a bit more detail, but you’re still working within a very small space, and you’re most likely still looking at a story that spans minutes, maybe hours, but not days. My story, “In Sickness” follows Dave and Fern through a single day early in their marriage when Dave has a cold and can’t stop apologizing for it. The story dramatizes a few key moments throughout the day to illustrate the situation, and then when Fern calls him on his silly apologies at the end of the day, there is a final scene that brings it all together.

Microfiction often only covers one scene, in one setting, but in flash fiction, you can sometimes have two scenes, or at least have the characters change location as they move through the story. Whereas drabbles and microfiction can’t accommodate a lot of detail, you can usually work a little backstory into flash fiction and also hint at the characters’ future a little bit.

Finally, when we get to the short story, we can really flesh things out a lot more. While a short story won’t have subplots and secondary character arcs like a novel might have, it can take place over a matter of days or even weeks, as long as it’s all focused on just the one main plot line.

Structuring the Short Romance

I’m not an outliner, and I’m not someone who sits down and plots out any portion of my story before I start writing. I have a beginning and a sense of the ending, and I just go and see what happens. So I’m not going to give you a chart that lays out short stories beat for beat because I don’t use one and wouldn’t know where to begin. What I will do is share what I observe in my own work when it is finished.

The Beginning

In the beginnings of all my short romances, regardless of length, I like to get the protagonist speaking dialogue aloud within the first paragraph. In a novel, you have that whole first chapter, maybe even two, to bring readers into the characters’ lives and get them invested. Short stories offer no such luxury, and you want to grab readers as quickly as possible and orient them in the world of your story.

In flash fiction and in stories over 1000 words, I will sometimes start with a little prologue scene. One example of this is in my Summer Sweethearts contribution “One Week with Wyatt,” which opens with the main character driving across a bridge on her way to the beach and chatting on speakerphone with her sister. This conversation lays out the backstory for Gretchen’s romance: she was supposed to get married, the wedding was called off, and she’s going to the beach for a week to get away from it all.

In “Christmas Card Crush,” I also start with a phone call in which the protagonist talks to her mom about her lack of interest in opening her Advent calendar. When she hangs up, her handsome neighbor comes over to deliver a Christmas card, and after they have some cocoa together, she determines she does want to open it. I used the phone call to establish her personality as well as the main source of tension in the story.

If a character is alone at the start of the story, I still don’t like to write a long wordy description to start things off. If there is no one around for the character to talk to, I lean into her internal monologue, basically having her talk to herself inside her head. Another option is to give her a pet, or as I did in “Gnome One But You,” a baby to talk to. A conversation in text messages with someone who is not physically present also works.

In shorter pieces, I aim to get both the hero and the heroine on the page together within the first few sentences if at all possible. Establishing who they are individually and as a couple is what is going to get your reader invested in whether they fall in love. With a limited word count, jumping right into an interaction between them is a great way to establish an immediate connection with the audience.

Another rule of thumb that I follow is that I never start with a flashback. Sometimes, especially if you’re writing characters with a long history together, you will need to look back at some moment from their past to help the reader understand their current circumstances. This can be fine to do if you can spare the words, but I find it’s best to establish the present-day situation first and then quickly flash back to the moment you need readers to know about. Get them invested before you start sharing the details of your characters’ past.

The Middle

The middle of your short romance needs to get the reader efficiently from the beginning to the end. Since you’re working with a limited word count, you want to be really selective about what you put into the middle section of your story.

For me, one of my priorities is to move through time as quickly as I can. This means that I will only write events into the story that contribute to the plot. If I have a story that spans a week, and the significant events occur on Monday and Thursday, I am not going to write in detail about Tuesday and Wednesday. I will use one sentence, or maybe even just the first half of a sentence to move past the time period in which nothing relevant to my story takes place.

Here’s an example of how I handled moving through time in “One Week with Wyatt.” The romance begins on a Saturday when Gretchen runs into Wyatt in the grocery store. After that she actively tries to avoid him, so I jumped ahead by writing, “All day Sunday and most of Monday, she didn’t see Wyatt at all.” Whatever Gretchen did on Sunday and the first half of Monday had nothing to do with the romance, so I didn’t bother adding it to the story.

I also don’t spend precious words on anything else that is unnecessary. In most of my stories, you will not see me write out dialogue where characters meet each other. If I’ve already established the characters’ names and identities, I don’t repeat that information for the reader. I just say “They introduced themselves” or “they exchanged names,” and immediately jump into the next moment that furthers the plot. Even when I do need to introduce a character that the reader hasn’t met yet, I try to make it as interesting as possible, and ideally I pair it with some other significant information that moves the story forward.

Here’s the moment Annabel introduces herself to Spencer in “The Marriage of True Minds” after he has found her reading poetry aloud to her dog on the college campus where he teaches:

“And let me guess. Your name is Emily.” Whatever her name was, she was beautiful, and she was reciting poems under his favorite tree. Spencer was enthralled.

“Not quite,” said the stranger, laughing softly. “I’m Annabel.”

Spencer gave his name in return, then pulled from his memory another favorite poem: “And neither the angels in Heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”

Instead of a boring introduction, I found a way to incorporate her name thematically with the overall focus of the story, and I kept the story moving quickly once her name was out there.

Another thing you won’t see me do much is describe the setting. I’ll mention where the characters are in a general sense: high school football game, on the couch by the fireplace, in a car in the grocery store parking lot, on a train, in a train station, etc. but I will usually leave most of the specifics up to the mind of the reader. Only when something is out of the ordinary and differs from what the average person is likely to imagine do I spend words to paint a picture of the setting.

One more thing to consider. Sometimes if I’m feeling bogged down by the middle of a short story with a longer word count, I will write dual points of view. This really only works in short romance if you’re writing something in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 words, and you have a reason to introduce two character arcs. Out of all the short romances I’ve published, only three stories have been in dual POV, and each time it was because a single POV could not convey everything I needed to get into the story to make the romance believable. If I can do without it, I always do, but sometimes the story needs that extra voice to flesh it out.

The End

At the end of a short romance story, there is usually a specific note I’m aiming to hit. I want that feeling of hopefulness, the giddiness over new love or the relief over a break-up prevented, or the exhilaration of an engagement or pregnancy announcement. I always make sure the ending arises naturally from the events of the middle of the story, and I try to echo something from earlier in the story to bring everything full circle.

In “Crafting Our Thanksgiving,” single mom Dana is drowning herself in craft projects to escape her feelings of disappointment over her daughter being snowed in at college up north for Thanksgiving. At the end of the story, when the guy she’s dating surprises her by bringing her daughter home, these are the final words: “As they headed inside, Dana went to remove the pens and other materials from the dining table, laughing softly as she realized she couldn’t have crafted a better holiday for herself if she had tried.”

The ending of a short romance is always happy, and as much as possible, it hints toward the characters’ future happiness. A short story should be self-contained unless you’re explicitly writing a series of connected stories, so you don’t want to leave readers with any lingering doubts or red flags about your characters. Whatever tension you have introduced in your story (more on that in a future chapter), you need to resolve it fully by the end of your story so that even if your characters have only gone on one date or only shared one kiss, the reader feels comfortable believing they will ultimately end up together forever. If the resolution of the story feels like it’s lacking something, I will sometimes tack on a short epilogue-style scene that either flashes ahead a little bit or reinforces the happy ending.

In “One Week with Wyatt” Gretchen calls her sister on the phone again at the end of the story to talk about her happiness at having found Wyatt at the beach. At the end of “Denny’s with Milo,” the heroine calls her Denny’s-skeptic coworker to report on the way Milo has forever changed her view of dates at Denny’s.

Epilogue scenes work best when they occur only a short time into the future after the conclusion of the main story. In general, short stories are not the place for epilogues that summarize the whole rest of the characters’ lives, or that follow them to their death beds. Happy-ever-after can be implied without showing us every moment.

Tomorrow, as a bonus “episode” of this series, I am going to annotate one of my flash fiction stories to comment on how it is structured and why it works. The next main chapter will go up in next week, and it will be about creating conflict and tension in short romance plots.

Stories Mentioned in This Chapter

• “Whamageddon Love Story,” Micromance Magazine, November 2024

• “Under the Porch Light,” Micromance Magazine, February 2025

• “In Sickness,” Micromance Magazine, February 2025

• “One Week with Wyatt,” Summer Sweethearts (click for free ebook), June 2024

• Gnome One But You, ebook available from Amazon, April 2025

• “Christmas Card Crush,” Micromance Magazine, December 2024

• “The Marriage of True Minds,” Micromance Magazine, April 2025

• “Crafting Our Thanksgiving,” Micromance Magazine, November 2024

• “Denny’s with Milo,” written for Spark’s First Date February in 2024

Questions?

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