I’ve just finished a story, and somewhere in the primitive part of my brain, I’m determined to milk it for all it’s worth.

There’s a tendency for writers to obsess over rules. If you’re reading my blog series “Chasing the First Sale,” you know I’m the chiefest of sinners; it’s packed full of rules, and there’s a good reason for that: rules are helpful. They give shape to good tendencies and bad.

Short stories are a proving ground. They let you get out there, try a bunch of things out, and make your mistakes small so you don’t have to make all of them big. When I hear an unpublished writer talking about the epic fantasy trilogy they’re going to write, my first thought is, “What a shame.”

There are tons of great resources on writing fiction, and I won’t even attempt to get into all that information here. What I’m going to focus on are the macro, big-picture things I’ve learned through personal experience.