Story Writers to Learn From

Not biographies. These are craft files: what each great storyteller actually does on the page, why it works, and how to practise the same muscle in your own fiction.

Russian Masters

Anton Chekhov: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: A craft file on Anton Chekhov for story writers: how he withholds judgement, ends without resolving, and which of his stories to read first.
Leo Tolstoy: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Leo Tolstoy as a short story writer: the parables, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", "How Much Land Does a Man Need?", and what their plain method teaches.
Nikolai Gogol: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Nikolai Gogol craft file: the digressive narrator, farce that turns to pity, "The Overcoat" and "The Nose", and what his method still teaches.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Dostoevsky as a short story writer: "White Nights", "A Gentle Creature", "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", and how his monologues carry a plot.

European Masters

Guy de Maupassant: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Guy de Maupassant craft file: the cold camera eye, the turn in the last line, and the stories to read first, from "Boule de Suif" to "The Necklace".
Franz Kafka: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Franz Kafka craft file: the impossible premise stated flat, the logic that follows, "The Metamorphosis", "A Hunger Artist", "Before the Law", and what to steal.
Hans Christian Andersen: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Hans Christian Andersen craft file: the tale told in a speaking voice, the object with feelings, the ending that refuses comfort, and which tales to read first.
Italo Calvino: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Italo Calvino wrote the Cosmicomics, Marcovaldo and Difficult Loves: stories of ideas told with a fable's lightness. A craft guide to his constraints and levity.

American Masters

Edgar Allan Poe: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Edgar Allan Poe craft file: the single effect, the unreliable confessor, the locked-room detective, and which tales to read first.
O. Henry: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: O. Henry craft file: how the twist ending is set up, why his New York stories still work, and which of his 300 stories to read first.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Nathaniel Hawthorne craft file: the symbol nobody explains, the multiple-choice ending, "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil", and what to steal.
Herman Melville: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Herman Melville as a story writer: "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", the narrator who cannot see, and what his magazine fiction of the 1850s teaches.
Mark Twain: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Mark Twain craft file: the deadpan teller, the frame narrator, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog" and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg", and how his comic timing works.
Ambrose Bierce: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Ambrose Bierce craft file: the stretched second, the last sentence that revokes the story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "Chickamauga", and what to learn.
Kate Chopin: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Kate Chopin craft file: the last line that cuts both ways, the hour-long story, "The Story of an Hour", "Desiree's Baby", and what her compression teaches.
Edith Wharton: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Edith Wharton craft file: the social trap, the ghost recognised too late, "Roman Fever", "The Other Two", "Afterward", and what her stories teach about endings.
Jack London: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Jack London craft file: the body as plot, the reader who knows more than the hero, "To Build a Fire", "Love of Life", and what his Klondike stories teach.
Stephen Crane: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Stephen Crane craft file: colour as feeling, the indifferent sea, the refrain, "The Open Boat" and "The Blue Hotel", and what his impressionist method teaches.
Ernest Hemingway: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: How Ernest Hemingway built stories out of what he left out: omission, combat dialogue and plain sensation, with the stories to read first and exercises to try.
Alice Munro: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Alice Munro folded whole lives into thirty pages by cutting across time. A craft guide to her structures, her self-correcting narrators and the stories to read first.
Raymond Carver: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Raymond Carver made kitchens and motel rooms ominous by taking things out. A craft guide to his dialogue, his unemphatic endings and the two versions of his best story.
Flannery O'Connor: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Flannery O'Connor wrote comic stories that end in violence and grace. A craft guide to her free indirect cruelty, her endings and the stories to read first.
John Cheever: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: John Cheever made the commuter suburb a place of myth and dread. A craft guide to The Swimmer, The Enormous Radio and the lyrical sentence that turns.
James Baldwin: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: James Baldwin wrote few short stories and one of them, Sonny's Blues, is a permanent model. A craft guide to his long sentence, his framed narrators and the music scene.
Shirley Jackson: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Shirley Jackson wrote The Lottery and dozens of quieter stories where a village or a neighbour turns. A craft guide to her calm voice, her withheld facts and her endings.
Ray Bradbury: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Ray Bradbury wrote science fiction with a poet's ear and a small-town memory. A craft guide to his metaphor-driven prose, his single-image stories and what to steal.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Ursula K. Le Guin built worlds by asking one moral question and answering it in a story. A craft guide to Omelas, her invented societies and what to steal from them.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Jhumpa Lahiri writes stories of Bengali families in America where the smallest domestic detail carries the grief. A craft guide to Interpreter of Maladies and beyond.
George Saunders: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: George Saunders writes comic, broken voices from theme parks, offices and near futures, and lands them in grief. A craft guide to his diction, structures and what to steal.

British and Irish Masters

Saki (H. H. Munro): Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Saki craft file: the poised sentence, the child who wins, the last line that bites, and which of his Edwardian stories to read first.
Rudyard Kipling: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Rudyard Kipling craft file: the frame narrator, cutting until the story is denser than sense, "The Man Who Would Be King", the Jungle Book tales, and what to steal.
Oscar Wilde: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Oscar Wilde craft file: the fairy tale with an adult ending, the paradox as plot, "The Happy Prince", "The Selfish Giant", "The Canterville Ghost", and what to steal.
Arthur Conan Doyle: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Arthur Conan Doyle craft file: the deduction scene, the client's tale, negative evidence, "Silver Blaze" and "The Speckled Band", and what the Holmes stories teach.
Katherine Mansfield: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Katherine Mansfield craft file: free indirect voice, the moment of exposure, "Miss Brill", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and what her method teaches.
James Joyce: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: James Joyce craft file: Dubliners, the epiphany, the story that ends in paralysis, "Araby", "Eveline", "The Dead", and what his fifteen stories teach.
D. H. Lawrence: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: D. H. Lawrence craft file: the body as revelation, the repeating sentence, "Odour of Chrysanthemums", "The Rocking-Horse Winner", and what his stories teach.
Joseph Conrad: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Joseph Conrad craft file: the told tale, effect before cause, the double, "The Secret Sharer", "An Outpost of Progress", "The Lagoon", and what his method teaches.
M. R. James: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: M. R. James craft file: the placid scholar, the nicely managed crescendo, the horror glimpsed by texture, "Oh, Whistle" and "Casting the Runes", and what to steal.
Roald Dahl: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Roald Dahl's adult stories are cruel, funny and engineered to the last line. A craft guide to Lamb to the Slaughter, The Landlady and the mechanics of the twist.

Indian Masters

Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Rabindranath Tagore craft file: the village stories of the 1890s, the child's eye, the object that holds the feeling, and which stories to read first.
Premchand: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Premchand craft file: how "Idgah", "Kafan" and "Shatranj ke Khiladi" are built, what the village stories teach about character, and where to start.
Saadat Hasan Manto: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Saadat Hasan Manto wrote Partition in the plainest Urdu, without sides or sermons. A craft guide to Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do and the sketches of Siyah Hashiye.
Ismat Chughtai: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Ismat Chughtai wrote the inner rooms of Muslim households in the Urdu women actually spoke. A craft guide to Lihaaf, Chauthi ka Jauda and her child narrators.
Mahasweta Devi: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Mahasweta Devi wrote Draupadi, Rudali and Breast-Giver out of decades among Bengal's tribal poor. A craft guide to her documentary anger and reversed myths.
Ruskin Bond: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Ruskin Bond has written hill-station stories for seventy years in prose a child can read. A craft guide to The Night Train at Deoli and his unfinished encounters.
R. K. Narayan: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: R. K. Narayan built Malgudi, a town so complete readers look for it on maps. A craft guide to An Astrologer's Day, A Horse and Two Goats and the comic plain style.
Satyajit Ray: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Satyajit Ray the film-maker was also Bengal's finest writer of short uncanny stories. A craft guide to Bankubabur Bandhu, Khagam and the mild clerk who meets the strange.
Vaikom Muhammad Basheer: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Vaikom Muhammad Basheer wrote Malayalam the way people spoke it and made a banana, a goat or a prison wall carry a whole philosophy. A craft guide to his comic first person.

Asian Masters

Ryunosuke Akutagawa: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Ryunosuke Akutagawa craft file: the old tale recut with a modern mind, contradictory testimony, "Rashomon", "In a Grove", "Hell Screen", and what to steal.
Lu Xun: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Lu Xun craft file: the implicated narrator, the preface as frame, "A Madman's Diary", "Kong Yiji", "The New Year's Sacrifice", and what the first modern Chinese stories teach.
Haruki Murakami: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Haruki Murakami's stories start with a man cooking pasta and end with an elephant gone or a frog saving Tokyo. A craft guide to his flat voice, his wells and what to steal.
Yasunari Kawabata: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Yasunari Kawabata wrote more than a hundred stories short enough to fit in a palm. A craft guide to his compression, his single-image endings and where to begin.

Latin American Masters

Jorge Luis Borges: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Jorge Luis Borges wrote fiction disguised as book reviews, encyclopedia entries and footnotes. A craft guide to his fake documents, idea-plots and last-line reversals.
Gabriel García Márquez: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Gabriel García Márquez reported the impossible with a straight face. A craft guide to his deadpan tone, exact numbers and the realist stories that came before the magic.
Julio Cortázar: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Julio Cortázar built stories that run on two tracks and fuse in the final line. A craft guide to House Taken Over, Axolotl, The Night Face Up and what to take from them.
Clarice Lispector: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Clarice Lispector wrote stories in which a housewife sees a blind man chewing gum and her life cracks. A craft guide to her interior crises, her syntax and where to start.

African Masters

Naguib Mahfouz: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Naguib Mahfouz, the Cairo novelist and Nobel laureate, also wrote hundreds of short stories. A craft guide to Zaabalawi, Half a Day and his alley-level allegories.
Chinua Achebe: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Chinua Achebe's stories in Girls at War carry Igbo speech, proverb and war into plain English. A craft guide to Civil Peace, Dead Men's Path and what to learn from them.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote Secret Lives in English and then chose Gikuyu. A craft guide to Minutes of Glory, A Meeting in the Dark and the moral plot he returns to.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck moves between Nsukka and New Jersey with a novelist's patience. A craft guide to her point of view and detail.

By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.

Writory also runs the Writory Short Story Contest: original stories of 100 to 3,000 words, any genre, any language, judged blind against a published five-part rubric. Every entrant receives a certificate and a score out of 100, the top story takes $100, entries close 25 November 2026 at 11:59 PM IST and results arrive on 30 November 2026. Enter the short story contest and have your own story read and scored.