If your short stories feel like they're almost working but something's off, the problem probably isn't your prose — it's your structure. These three mistakes show up in the vast majority of short fiction drafts, and fixing them can transform a meandering piece into a story that hits.

1. Starting Too Early

Most short stories begin about two pages before the actual story starts.

Writers naturally want to set the scene, establish the character, build the world. In a novel, you have room for that. In a short story, you don't. Those opening paragraphs of a character waking up, commuting, reflecting on their life — they feel necessary when you're writing them, but they're almost always throat-clearing.

The fix: Find your inciting incident — the moment something changes, disrupts, or challenges the status quo. That's where your story starts. Everything before it is setup the reader doesn't need, or context you can weave in later through action and dialogue.

Try this: delete your first paragraph. Read what remains. Does the story still make sense? Now delete your first page. Still make sense? You might be surprised how often the answer is yes — and how much stronger the opening becomes.

The reader doesn't need to know everything about the character's life before the story begins. They need to be in the story from the first line.

2. The "And Then" Problem

This one's subtle but deadly. It's the difference between a plot and a sequence of events.

When scenes are connected by "and then" — she went to work, and then she had lunch with her friend, and then she got a phone call — you have chronology, not story. Things happen in order, but they don't happen because of each other.

Story requires causality. Scenes should be connected by "therefore" or "but" — not "and then."

• "She confronted her boss about the missing funds, therefore she was put on administrative leave."

• "She expected an apology, but instead he accused her of the same thing."

Each scene should be a consequence of the previous one. When a reader feels like a story lacks momentum — when it feels like things are just kind of happening — the "and then" problem is almost always the cause.

The fix: After you finish a draft, write one sentence summarizing each scene. Then look at the connections between them. Can you put "therefore" or "but" between each pair? If you can only put "and then," those scenes lack causal connection. Either revise them so one leads to the next, or restructure the sequence so causality drives the narrative forward.

This single technique — checking for "therefore/but" vs. "and then" — will improve your plotting more than almost anything else you can do.

3. Ending After the Ending

Writers often don't trust their endings. The story reaches its natural resolution — the moment of change, the final image, the line that carries weight — and then keeps going. One more scene. A paragraph of reflection. A flash-forward. An explanation of what it all meant.

This instinct comes from a good place: you want the reader to understand. But the extra material almost always weakens the ending rather than strengthening it. It tells the reader what to feel instead of letting them feel it.

The fix: Find the moment in your final pages where the story's central tension resolves. Find the image or line that resonates most powerfully at that moment. End there.

Read your last page. Now read just your last paragraph. Now read just your last line. Which of these three is your real ending? It's usually earlier than you think.

Great short story endings don't explain — they resonate. They leave the reader sitting with the weight of what just happened. If you explain the ending, you rob the reader of that experience.

Think of it like a bell. The story is the strike. The ending is the moment you stop striking and let the tone ring. Don't muffle it with extra words.

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These three fixes — starting at the inciting incident, building causal chains between scenes, and ending at the moment of resonance — won't solve every structural problem in every story. But they'll solve about 80% of the structural problems in most drafts. Try them on your current work in progress and see what happens.