As you may know, short stories are how I started writing and I still love them dearly. The short story, however, is not a single literary format but multiple ones grouped under a single banner. This gives short story writers a multitude of structures to use to tell the stories they wish to tell in the most compelling, engaging, and effective manner possible.

Here are 10 of the most common short story forms to take a stab at with your proverbial–or literal–quill. As you will see, some of these are defined by their size, either in word or sentence count; others, by their style or form.

1. The One-Sentence Story

“The last man on Earth heard a knock on the door.”

There are a surprising number of one-sentence novels, so a one-sentence short story shouldn’t be so difficult by comparison. A story has a beginning, middle, and end, and…