300-Word Story Examples: Two Complete Stories, Counted to the Word
Quick answer: Two original 300-word stories, one about a piano tuner in an emptied house and one about the last night of a toll booth, with a breakdown of how each works.
Three hundred words is where a story stops being a single held breath and becomes a small room you can walk around in. There is space for a second character to speak more than once, for an object to appear early and return, and for an ending that takes its time. The two original stories below are exactly 300 words each, followed by notes on structure, and both would sit comfortably in a flash fiction submission or a contest with a 100-word floor.
Pitch
Emeka Okafor had tuned the Bösendorfer in the Whitlock house every October for twenty-two years, and every October Mrs Whitlock had stood in the doorway with a cup of tea she never handed over until he finished. This October the doorway was empty and the hall was full of boxes. The daughter, Judith, let him in. She had her mother's way of standing with one hand on the frame. 'The buyers come tomorrow,' she said. 'I know it's stupid. It's going to a school in Leeds. They'll have their own man.' 'Then I'll make it easy for him,' Emeka said. He lifted the lid and set out his tools on the felt as he always had: the hammer, the mutes, the fork he no longer needed but carried anyway. The piano was a quarter tone flat across the middle, the way a house goes when the heating has been off. He began at middle C and worked outward, the small metal complaints of the pins, the strings coming up into agreement one by one. Judith stayed. She did not go and pack. After an hour she said, 'She used to time you. Forty minutes for the top half, she said, fifty for the bass.' 'She was right,' he said. 'Bass is stubborn.' When he finished he played what he always played, the opening of a Schubert impromptu, badly, because he was a tuner and not a pianist and had never pretended otherwise. Judith laughed, then stopped laughing. He closed the lid and packed the tools in their order. At the door she held out a cup of tea. It had gone cold. He drank it standing in the hall, and told her the piano would hold its pitch through the winter if the school kept the room above sixteen degrees.
Exact Change
The barrier on lane four was going electronic at midnight, and Bea Sandoval had been told to leave the booth as she found it, which was a joke, because she had found it in 1998 with a broken heater and a calendar of Alpine views. She kept the calendar. At 11.40 the lorry came through, as it had every Thursday for nine years: white cab, Portuguese plates, a driver whose name she had never asked. He always paid in exact change. Six coins, counted into her palm in the same order, warm from his pocket. Tonight he stopped a moment longer than the transaction needed. 'Last night?' he said. His English was careful. 'Last night,' she said. He nodded at the sign that said the lane would be cameras from tomorrow. 'They don't take coins.' 'They don't take anything. They read your plate and send you a letter.' He looked at the coins in his hand as if they had become foreign currency. Then he put them in her palm anyway, one, two, six, and closed her fingers over them. 'For the calendar,' he said, though he could not have known about the calendar. Or perhaps he could; the booth had a window. Bea raised the barrier. The lorry pulled through into the dark toward Dover and she watched the tail lights until the motorway curved them away. At midnight a man from the contractor came and took the till, the stool, the heater that had never worked. He did not ask about the calendar or the six coins on the sill, and she did not offer. In the morning she drove home through lane four with her window down, and the camera flashed once, and no letter ever came, and she chose to believe that was somebody's exact change.
How the two stories use the room
Pitch is built on repetition with one element missing. Twenty-two Octobers, a doorway, a cup of tea: the story tells you the pattern in its first sentence so that the empty doorway in the second reads as loss without the word. The tuning itself is the plot. Flat across the middle, worked outward, forty minutes and fifty. Judith's line about her mother timing him is the turn, because it tells Emeka he was watched with affection for two decades and never knew. The cold tea is the same object as the opening, returned changed.
Exact Change runs on a transaction that becomes a gift. Six coins, always the same order, warm from a pocket: the detail is small enough to be true. The turn is the driver paying anyway when payment is no longer possible. The story then refuses to explain how he knew about the calendar, offering two answers and letting the reader choose. The ending stretches into the next morning, which 300 words can afford, and closes on a private interpretation rather than a fact.
Borrowing the shape
Both stories open with a long sentence that establishes a routine and then break the routine within two lines. Both give the protagonist a task with a technical vocabulary, tuning pins, toll barriers, and let the emotion travel underneath the vocabulary. If your 300-word draft feels loose, check that an object from the first fifty words comes back in the last fifty. Three hundred words also sits comfortably inside Writory's monthly short story contest, which takes anything from 100 to 3,000.
What writers can take from this
- Open on a routine described in one long sentence; break it in the next.
- Give the work a real vocabulary and get it right.
- Let the second character say one thing that reframes the past.
- Return an object from the opening, altered.
- Two possible explanations beat one; leave both standing.
Try it yourself
Write a 300-word story about the last time a person does a job they have done for years. Include one tool of the trade, one line of dialogue from someone who has been watching, and no reflection on what it all means.
Questions
Is a 300-word story still flash fiction?
Yes. Flash fiction covers everything up to roughly 1,000 words, and many competitions set their limit at exactly 300. It is one of the most common flash lengths, so examples at this count are directly useful for submitting.
How much dialogue should a 300-word story have?
Enough to turn the story and no more. Pitch has six short lines; Exact Change has five. In each case a line of dialogue carries information the narration could not deliver without becoming explanation.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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