150-Word Story Examples: Two Complete Stories With a Breakdown
Quick answer: Two original 150-word stories, counted exactly, one about a beekeeper in winter and one about a spare key, with notes on how each earns its ending.
At 150 words you get one thing a 100-word story cannot afford: a second beat before the ending. You can show a situation, complicate it, and still have twenty words to close. The two original stories below are exactly 150 words each. One is quiet and wintry, the other is about a teenager and a radio. The breakdown afterwards shows where each one spends its extra room.
Listening
Ingrid Haugen pressed the stethoscope to the side of the third hive and closed her eyes. In February you do not open a hive. You listen. The first two had hummed back at her, a low steady sound like a fridge in another room. The third gave her nothing back. She moved the disc lower, then round to the sunny side, then to the roof. Snow ticked off the pines behind her and settled on her shoulders. Her husband had built these boxes the summer before his heart stopped, and she had promised him, out loud, in this field, that she would keep the bees. She knocked once, gently, on the wood. Then, so faint she thought she had invented it, a stir. Not a hum. A shifting, like sleepers rolling over. Ingrid stayed crouched in the snow until her knees ached, saying nothing, listening to something decide to live.
Spare
Filip had kept his grandmother's key on his lanyard since he was nine, between the school pass and a bottle opener he was not supposed to own. Nobody thought to take it back after the funeral. Three weeks later he let himself into her flat at ten to seven, before anyone from the family arrived with boxes. The place smelled of her, coffee and lavender soap. He stood in the hall and did not touch anything. At seven exactly the radio in the kitchen switched itself on, the way it had every morning of his life, and a man began reading the shipping forecast to an empty room. Filip sat down on the floor. He listened to the whole thing, Viking, Forties, Dogger, Fisher, and when the music started he got up, turned it off at the wall, and put the key on the table where she could find it.
Where the extra fifty words go
Listening uses its room for repetition. Three hives, three sounds, and the third one silent: that pattern needs space a 100-word story could not give it. The husband arrives in a single sentence, placed after the silence so the silence means more. The turn is a stir rather than a hum, which is smaller than the reader hoped for and therefore more believable. The final clause names what Ingrid is doing without naming what she feels.
Spare spends its budget on time. Nine years old, three weeks after the funeral, ten to seven, seven exactly: the story is built on a clock. The radio is the object that carries everything, and the shipping forecast is specific enough that a reader who knows it hears it. The ending turns on a contradiction the story does not resolve. He switches the radio off, ending her routine, and leaves the key where she could find it, as though she still might.
Notes for your own draft
Both stories begin with a name and a small physical action. Neither explains the grief. Both hand the emotion to an object, a stethoscope and a radio, and both end on a gesture that the reader interprets. If you are writing at this length, try giving your story a rule or a routine in the first two sentences and then let one moment break it.
What writers can take from this
- Use the extra beat for a pattern of three, then break the pattern.
- Anchor the story to a clock or a calendar; time is free structure.
- Keep the dead offstage; one sentence of backstory is plenty.
- Pick an object your character can touch in the final line.
- Read it aloud; at 150 words a single flat sentence shows.
Try it yourself
Write a 150-word story in which a routine continues after the person who kept it has gone. Do not use the words grief, loss or miss.
Questions
Is 150 words flash fiction or microfiction?
Both terms cover it. Microfiction usually means anything under about 300 words, and flash fiction is the wider umbrella for stories under 1,000 to 1,500 words. Editors will not argue over the label; they will count the words.
How many sentences fit in 150 words?
Between eight and fifteen, depending on rhythm. Listening has thirteen, several of them very short. Vary them: a run of long sentences followed by a three-word one is the cheapest emphasis you own.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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