This week: Narrative Gravity Edited by: Jayne  
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| Hi, I'm Jayne. I'll be your editor today. |
My take of the week:
Stop worrying about being clever and start worrying about your weight.
Why? Because good short stories don’t rely on surprise. They rely on gravity.
By gravity, I don’t mean the seriousness of situations, tension, conflict, or stakes in the blockbuster sense. I mean the invisible force that pulls a reader forward sentence by sentence. It’s the feeling you get when you have to keep reading. You want to continue not because of sunk costs, or even “seeing how it turns out.”
There is just something that tells you to see it through.
It needn’t be a spectacle, or a shock, or even a twist. The story simply carries an unexpected weight to it.
You may not be able to name it, but you’re compelled to keep going because it feels wrong to stop.
Narrative Gravity
The best short stories establish a clear center of mass early on. The stronger and more focused that center is, the harder it becomes for the reader to drift away.
It might be a question, a pressure, or an unresolved need that everything else orbits around.
Many stories lack this weighted center. It’s not because the writing is bad, but because too many ideas compete for attention. The story wants to be about five things at once, and the reader can’t pick out what’s most important. Your story might still be perfectly fine, and you’re not repelling any readers. But you’re not compelling them, either.
Show Me the Gravity
Most writers have heard the advice to “hook” your reader as early as possible. A hook is about attention. It’s designed to make someone curious enough to keep reading.
If a hook asks a question the reader wants answered, gravity creates a narrative pressure the story cannot escape.
A useful question for checking whether your story creates its own orbit is this:
If I remove the ending, does the opening still feel like it’s going somewhere specific?
If removing the ending makes the opening feel vague, interchangeable, or directionless, the center of gravity hasn’t formed yet. You likely don’t need more plot in the story. In fact, you probably need less. Commit to a center and you’ll create motion.
I can feel you opening a new tab, but hold your emails for a second. A beginning like I'm suggesting doesn’t mean the reader can predict what will happen. It means the opening establishes a clear, weighted center. It’s something unresolved, unstable, or charged enough that the story cannot drift without feeling wrong. The reader may not know the destination, but they can feel the draw.
The best way to practice is to start on the smaller end of word count and focus on a single element as much as possible. Now, it might not be suitable to enter in a contest or match any prompts, but not all practice must end with the stamp “fit for human consumption.” Sometimes practice is just practice.
And practice is how we improve.
Next issue: Slow, or Unanchored?
As always, happy writing! |
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Short Stories: January 07, 2026 Issue [#13541]
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