Story form (Damon Knight):

Stories need coherence, balance, and proportion. The parts must fit together, must balance by contrast of opposites, and must be at the correct scale to work together.

Some story forms:

Inwards spiral: begins far from its central mystery and gradually approaches.

Plot skeleton: a straight course with a series of obstacles. Hard to do at short lengths.

Braid: two characters or plot lines keep intersecting and diverging until they meet and resolve together at the end. More common in novels.

Target: the story with the obvious and inevitable ending.

Circular: the end takes us back to the beginning.

#shortfiction