When you write yourself you need a measure, call it a benchmark against which to compare your own stories. You need to know your competition. A quick route to discovering current short story topics and writing styles is through online magazines and newspapers and literary websites. The following sources publish interesting, well-written short stories that you can access easily.
The Atlantic
The Atlantic Magazine has a section for short stories. The magazine is a literary magazine but I was first attracted to it for its articles on politics, current issues and for its crossword puzzle. I got to the fiction later. This magazine is a very instructive place for emerging writers and for writers who are trying to improve their writing.
The fiction in The Atlantic is sometimes cutting edge. The topics can be unexpected and sometimes the treatment of the subject is unexpected. This makes you pay attention and have a second look at your own writing. Such fiction may encourage you to try new approaches and escape your safe mode. All writers need fine examples of the craft. The stories in the Atlantic will provide some of these.
The Irish Times
The short stories in the Irish Times are very diverse. This magazine is another place to observe examples of how writers create multi-layered stories. In one of these stories “I told him not to fly so high”, the writer brackets his modern day story of drones and viral videos with the echoes of the ancient legend of Icarus. Within that same story the writer also deals with the conflicts in a relationship between the protagonist and his girlfriend’s son. Included as well is the internal conflict and emerging self-awareness of the protagonist.
When you read such stories you learn how a writer can manage these threads in the short fiction form. it makes you want to reach deeper within yourself for engaging ideas and fresh treatments for even commonplace issues.
That’s the reason for reading the stories of others. You can see where other writers are more inventive and how they create interest in the reader. And you can try to follow their example.
adda Magazine
Commonwealth Writers produces adda as an online literary magazine. The stories come from across the Commonwealth. Commonwealth Writers describes adda as an “online magazine that crosses literary borders”. Because the stories come from different areas of the world they are rooted in the cultures and experiences of the writers and this gives a very global perspective to the collections.
The stories in adda encourage you to tell the story of your place. They give you the confidence that your characters can be like the people of your city, town or village no matter how small or remote your location. The characters can speak like you. The fiction in adda promises that you have a place to be heard and stories to tell which have not yet been heard. That is encouragement to the new writers who might have thought that their voice was too small to be heard.
Benchmark
As a writer you will find these publications as sources for encouragement, entertainment and education as you continue to learn the craft of telling the short story. Benchmark your writing against those you find in these sources and level up your skills.