If you’re here because you clicked through from my email saying: ‘interested in writing One Story along with me, thanks! Leave a comment, letting us know why you are excited about focusing on one story, for a month, or what you’ve achieved in past challenges.

“But I want to write novels! Why do people keep trying to get me to write short stories?!”

I hear you.

I used to simply answer: “If you don’t want to write short stories, you don’t have. Go, write your novels. Be free!”

Learning About Learning

Then I watched as thousands of writers struggled to get past the 30% mark of their novels, and got discouraged.

And I went and learned a few things about how we, as humans learn.

Turns out: it’s all very well to try new things, but unless you’re able to observe the consequences of your actions, you can’t know if what you’re trying is working.

Telling a story over the course of a novel might take you months or years.

Telling a story over the course of a short story is much faster.

• You get to see and feel what ‘idea generation’, and ‘writing a bold beginning’ and ‘getting through the middle’ and ‘managing the turn towards the end’ all feel like.
• You begin to be able the feel a story taking shape and tell if it’s correctly proportioned.
• You get to find experiment with different styles and genres
• You get to find out–more often and more quickly–what readers experience when you write different types of stories, characters, endings, and language.

In short, you develop your craft skills more quickly when short stories are part of your practice because you:

• Experiment more often and more freely,
• Experience the consequences of those experiences for your characters, stories, and readers.
• Can adjust course or abandon experiments more often, and try something new.

And don’t even get me started on the value of a having ‘low cost of entry’ ways for new readers to experience your writing and discover they love you; or the marketing options that open up for you if you have ‘teasers’, ‘interludes’, or ‘reader magnets’ in short form, to invite readers in or keep them interested while you’re finishing off the next novel.

You Don’t Have To Love Short Stories…

…but it’s a really great idea to incorporate them into your writing life

(There’s a reason MFA programs feature them so heavily.).

I still hate the idea of them being ‘just for practice’, but the reality is that—even though they can be so much more—they actually are really good practice in storytelling.

Fiction Is Hard, Even For Good Writers

If you’re a good writer you might have ended up in a profession that has writing as a part of it, but here’s a hard truth: it may have trained you out of being good at writing fiction.

• If a life in journalism has stunted your ability to spin out a longer tale
• If you’ve been away from fiction writing for a while
• If your day job requires you to manipulate language to sell things to people, or write persuasive copy, or organize technical manuals

…coming back to fiction can be humbling. Being able to string words together in pretty sentences is only one of the skills you’ll need.

Short stories are a great way to level up in all those other skills.

Yes, you may want to write novels—you may have started or even finished a couple.

But if you are finding it slow-going, consider spending a little time with me here, in the One Story Challenge – The Whole Story Edition, coming live in September 2026.

This Is Not The StoryADay Challenge

In fact, it’s kind of the anti-StoryADay Challenge.

I’ve run this twice before, each time forcusing on a different fiction skill (“Show, Don’t Tell”, and “Mastering The Middle”).

Each time, I’ve led a group of writers through a month of bite-sized tasks that took them through the process of

• coming up with a new story idea
• fast-drafting a version of the story
• sticking with it throughout the month to craft a complete story they’re proud of.

Along the way they’ve benefitted from:

• 3-4 small lessons and prompts a week, to keep them on track
• A community of other writers going through the process at the same time
• Bonus writing sprints and Q&A sessions with me
• Built-in ‘Rest and Recharge’ days every week
• The limited container of a single month, to create just enough urgency that you get the story finished.

The Whole Story

This year the challenge is focused on ‘The Whole Story’, which means we’ll be making sure each part of the story adds up to a well-structured whole.

By the end of the month you’ll have learned a whole lot about your writing, your skills, your interests, and you’ll have proved to yourself that you can finish, and learn from writing a single story — one that is more complex than the kind of one-day Flash Fiction we often create during StoryADay May.

Sound interesting? Sign up for updates. It’s coming soon.