Why my short stories keep getting shorter

My first short story, Dust and Memory, was 13,500 words. I was proud of it — it had room to breathe, several threads working together, a proper sense of place. Then I asked a few people to read it, and got the same gentle feedback more than once: it was hard to get through in one sitting. Not bad, just long. People kept putting it down and picking it back up later, which isn't the worst thing in the world, but it wasn't what I'd pictured when I wrote it.

Dust and Memory is set on Mars, in the same universe as my forthcoming novel Artificial Utopia, where a global AI called COGA runs society. A woman goes looking for the truth about her mother's death thirty-two years earlier — she has a childhood memory of a vampire visiting her mother the night she died, but the official record says suicide. Untangling it means a cover-up, drug dealers, an android investigator, and a narrator whose own childhood memories can't quite be trusted. Around all of that sits a fair amount of world: structures built from Martian regolith, habitats in lava caves, sub-orbital flights launched from space elevators. It's a lot of story for one sitting, and in hindsight, I can see why — there are at least three separate things competing for a reader's attention: the mystery, the unreliable-memory device, and the world itself.

For the second story, I aimed shorter: Restricted View came in at 8,000 words. It's a standalone near-future thriller with almost none of that worldbuilding — an engineer named Paul examines the arm of an "alien" robot and becomes convinced the whole thing is a hoax, engineered by a billionaire who once played a trick on him. He talks his way onto the official investigation and infiltrates a research lab to prove it. No Mars, no COGA, no invented geography — just one plot, one throughline. And yet it was still a bit long. A couple of readers still split it across two sessions. That surprised me at the time, because I'd assumed cutting the worldbuilding would be enough on its own.

The third story, You Are In No Danger, came in at 5,000 words, and something clicked. It's military sci-fi, set a hundred years before Artificial Utopia in the same COGA universe — soldiers on a base in Texas, preparing for a conflict over Taiwan, when all their sophisticated technology suddenly stops working. The entire story stays inside that one base. People read it in one sitting, in under half an hour, and told me so unprompted.

At the time, I put the improvement down to pacing — maybe the third story was just tighter, better written. That was true, as far as it went, but Restricted View had already shown me that trimming worldbuilding alone wasn't the fix. It took me longer to realise the actual answer was staring at me from the format itself, not the writing.

The realisation

I grew up reading short story anthologies as physical books — the kind you'd take on holiday, or read a story or two at the weekend. That format is forgiving of length. You've committed to an evening, or a week, with the book. A 13,500-word story fits comfortably into that kind of reading life.

But that's not how most people read short fiction anymore. A huge proportion of my readers are reading on their phones — in a lunch break, on a commute, in the ten minutes before a meeting starts. That's not a worse way to read; it's just a completely different one, with a completely different unit of time attached to it. Nobody opens a story on their phone at 12:05 expecting to still be reading it at 1:15. If the story doesn't fit inside the gap they've carved out for it, it doesn't get finished in that sitting — and a short story's whole effect often depends on being read in one unbroken breath.

That's also why Restricted View still ran long despite having almost no invented world to explain: the length problem was never only about how much setting I was describing. It was about how many separate things — plot threads, devices, locations — a reader had to hold in their head at once, and whether that whole bundle would fit inside a lunch break.

What changed, concretely

Looking back at the three stories side by side, the real differences weren't really about word count as a target. They were about how many moving parts each story asked a reader to carry:

Fewer threads. Dust and Memory interleaves a present-day investigation, a cover-up, and a set of childhood memories the reader has to keep re-evaluating. You Are In No Danger has exactly one situation: soldiers on a base, technology failing, tension rising. Nothing to backtrack over, nothing to hold in reserve.

One location instead of several. Restricted View moves Paul from his own investigation, onto an official one, into a research lab he has to infiltrate — three settings, three shifts in the reader's mental picture. You Are In No Danger never leaves the base. That constraint did a lot of the tightening on its own.

Worldbuilding earns its keep or gets cut. The Martian regolith structures, lava-cave habitats, and space-elevator flights in Dust and Memory are genuinely part of my universe and useful for the novels — but in a short story read on a phone, every one of those details is something the reader has to pause and absorb. You Are In No Danger is set in the same COGA universe, a hundred years earlier, but it doesn't lean on any of that scaffolding — it trusts a familiar setting (a military base, technology failure) to do the work instead.

The rough rule I use now

I don't hold myself to a strict word count, but I do ask a practical question before I start a new short story: could someone realistically read this in one sitting, on their phone, during a lunch break? For me that's landed somewhere around 5,000 words as a comfortable target — not because shorter is inherently better, but because that's roughly what fits the reading conditions most of my readers are actually in.

If you'd like to test the theory yourself, all three stories — Dust and Memory, Restricted View, and You Are In No Danger — are free on my website and on StoryOrigin. (There's also The Marie Curie alongside them, which is a bit different: it's an expanded first chapter of Humanity's Hope rather than a short story in its own right, so it doesn't really belong in this particular experiment.) I'd be curious whether the shortest one really does read differently on your phone than the longest one did on mine.