To write a short story with AI, decide the ending first, split the story into about six beats of 300 to 400 words, and have the AI write each beat from your own one-line sketch, not from a premise. Then do the human pass: cut the last paragraph of every beat, rewrite the dialogue aloud, and check the ending lands on an image, not a moral. Before you start, decide where the story is going, because eight of the nine short-fiction magazines and contests we checked in November 2026 refuse AI-written or AI-assisted stories, and two of them name editing too.
Where a short story written with AI can go (checked November 2026)
We read the submission guidelines of nine paying markets and contests on 10 November 2026. Quotes are verbatim.
| Market | Length | Pay or prize | What it says about AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clarkesworld | 1,000–22,000 words | 15¢ a word | "We will not consider any submissions translated, written, developed, or assisted by these tools." |
| Asimov's Science Fiction | "seldom" under 1,000 or over 20,000 | 8–10¢ a word up to 7,500 | "We will not consider any submissions written, developed, or assisted by these tools." |
| Analog | up to about 20,000 | 8–10¢ a word | Same statement as Asimov's; trying "may result in being banned from submitting works in the future." |
| Uncanny | 750–10,000 | 10¢ a word | "does not accept any submissions written with artificial intelligence or similar technologies" |
| Strange Horizons | up to 5,000 | 9¢ a word | No stories "wholly or partially generated or edited by AI/LLMs, including but not limited to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini". "Basic non-generative spelling and grammar checkers are fine." |
| Apex Magazine | up to 9,000 | 8¢ a word | Not for us: "AI-generated or AI-assisted writing." |
| MetaStellar | flash and short | see site | Was hands-off until February 2025; now "We will no longer accept stories created using ChatGPT or other generative AI tools." |
| Reedsy weekly contest | 1,000–3,000 | $250 weekly winner | "The use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) or other assistive technologies to create, draft, or revise stories is not permitted." The same line covers the Month-Long Contest and the Literary Prize. |
| Commonwealth Short Story Prize | — | — | The 2026 rules had no AI restriction, per Lit Hub; the 2027 opening was postponed to January 2027 for a review of "entry rules and submission guidelines". |
Source: KudoWrite's read of each market's own page, 10 November 2026. Several of these were closed to submissions on the day we checked (Strange Horizons' guidelines, last updated 2 October 2026, say so); the rules apply when they reopen.
Strange Horizons and Reedsy ban AI editing and revising, not just drafting, so "I only used it to polish" doesn't get you in. And the bans are being enforced after publication: in July 2026 Apex removed a story from Issue 153 "suspected of being written with AI assistance" and sent readers amended copies, while saying it "will not be implementing AI 'detection' tools". In May 2026 the Caribbean winner of the Commonwealth Prize was publicly accused on X of submitting an AI story; the Commonwealth Foundation's review found no AI was used and the story went on to win overall.
So: a story you want to sell to a genre magazine is written by you, start to finish. A story you'll publish yourself, on a story site, on Amazon KDP with the AI disclosure, or in a reading library, is where AI drafting belongs. The rest of this page is for that second kind. Looking for a paying market that takes AI-assisted fiction? None of the nine above does. Since May 2026 editors can add an AI policy to their Chill Subs listing, so filter there before you submit anywhere.
How to write a short story with AI in one sitting
A 2,000-word story is a good one-evening length: it fits Reedsy's 1,000–3,000 window and most magazines' lower bounds, and it is short enough to revise the same night. Six beats of about 330 words each gets you there.
- Write the last line first. One sentence, an image or an action. If you can't, you don't have the story yet, only a situation.
- Write six beats, one line each. Who does what, where. No adjectives yet.
- Turn one beat at a time into prose. Hand the AI the beat you're on and the one before it, never the whole premise and "write a story". A premise produces a summary with dialogue in it.
- Stop each beat where the next one starts. Models love to finish the story early. Tell it the next beat's first moment so it knows where to stop.
- Do the human pass (below) on all six together.
- Read it aloud once. Anything you stumble on is either a rhythm problem or a line you didn't mean.
What to paste for each beat
In ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, start each beat in the same conversation with the same four parts, in this order:
Story so far: three sentences, updated after every beat.
Last paragraph written: pasted, not summarised. This is what keeps the voice.
This beat: the one line, with every name in it. Third person, past tense (or whatever you chose for beat 1).
Stop at: the first moment of the next beat. Don't write it.
Give the point of view and tense every time: across six turns a model drifts, and the line costs nothing. Don't paste the whole story so far into each turn; past a page or two the model starts echoing earlier beats instead of moving on. Our guide to continuing a story with AI explains why the last paragraph matters more than the rest.
A worked example: six beats for a 2,000-word story
Written for this page, a quiet mainstream story:
Last line: Ines folds the list into a paper boat and sets it on the water, and the ferry's horn answers.
1. Ines, night clerk at the Varna ferry office, reconciles the boarding list at 2 a.m. 2. Her own name is on it, marked "did not board", with tonight's date. 3. She calls the captain; he says the 11:40 sailed full and nobody missed it. 4. She checks the cameras: the gangway is empty at 11:38, then the footage skips. 5. Her mother rings, awake for no reason, and asks if she's on the boat. 6. Ines walks to the end of the pier with the list.
Each line is an event, and each one leaves Ines with less room. Give the AI "a clerk finds something strange" and it invents the strange thing for you, and the story stops being yours.
The human pass: what to change in an AI short story
What a draft from almost any model needs, in order of how much it improves the story:
| Fix | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The last paragraph of each beat | Models close every scene with a summing-up ("She knew nothing would be the same") | Cut it. End the beat on the last thing that happens |
| The ending | A short story lives on its last line; models explain it | Replace theirs with the line you wrote in step 1 |
| Dialogue | Characters say exactly what they mean | Read it aloud; make one person in each exchange avoid the question |
| Stock phrases | The same few turn up across models (table below) | Search the draft for them and replace each with what the character actually does |
| Repeated setting | Each beat re-describes the room | Keep the description in beat 1, cut it from the rest |
| Names | Models reach for the same names | Name every character yourself in the beat line |
The stock phrases and the names are measured. In KudoWrite's AI slop index (13 models, 1,321 scenes, 341,546 words, October 2026), the stock phrases that came back most often were "casting long shadows" (16 times), "first time in my life" (9), "air hung thick" and "one last time" (8 each), "words hung in the air" and "took a deep breath" (7 each). Left to choose, 7 of the 13 models' most-used character name was Mara; GPT-6.1 Sol gave it to someone in 23% of its scenes, and Mistral Large 4 used Elias in 11%. A short story has room for three or four names. Pick them before the AI does.
Before and after, on beat 3 of the example:
Before: Ines felt a chill run down her spine as she picked up the phone, her heart pounding. "Captain, there's something strange about the list," she said, her voice trembling. Little did she know that this call would change everything.
After: Ines dialled the bridge. "Did the 11:40 sail full?" "Every seat." "Did anyone miss it?" A pause, long enough for the radio behind him to say something about wind. "Why would anyone miss it?"
The after version cut three feelings the reader can infer, cut the foreshadowing line, and gave the captain a question instead of an answer.
What people search around short stories
Monthly US searches, Keyword Planner, pulled 9 November 2026:
| Query | Searches a month |
|---|---|
| how to write a short story | 3,600 |
| how to write a good short story | 320 |
| how to write a short story for beginners | 320 |
| plot twist ideas for short stories | 320 |
| short story generator ideas | 320 |
| how to write dialogue in a short story | 140 |
| how to write a short story outline | 70 |
The craft question outsearches every tool query around it by ten to one, so the method above works in whatever AI you already have.
Common questions
Can you write a short story with AI and submit it to a magazine? Not to any of the eight markets above that publish AI rules: they refuse AI drafting, and Strange Horizons and Reedsy refuse AI editing too. Check each market's page before you submit.
Is a story written with AI considered your own? For self-publishing it can be, if the events and the ending are yours and you revise the prose. Amazon KDP asks you to say whether content is AI-generated or AI-assisted; our KDP disclosure guide explains the difference.
How long should a short story be? The markets above range from 750 words (Uncanny's minimum) to 22,000 (Clarkesworld's maximum). For a first one, 1,500 to 3,000 words.
What's the best AI prompt for a short story? Not one prompt: one per beat. Our AI prompts for story writing guide has templates you can adapt.
Writing the six beats in KudoWrite
In KudoWrite you don't assemble that paste yourself. A chapter there is a page of paragraphs: you type a line for the first, press Expand, and it writes the prose from your words at the level you pick. Stick keeps closest to what you typed, Balanced fills each moment out a little, Novel the most. A one-line steer changes the beat in place ("the captain doesn't answer the question"), and the edit pass, after a Balanced or Novel Expand, goes over the draft sentence by sentence for repeats, flowery lines and anything invented past the moment you wrote. It's in the story as soon as it's on the page; the story bible keeps Ines, the ferry and the list so beat 5 still knows what beat 2 found.
When it's done, export it as EPUB, PDF or plain text, or publish it to Community Books, where readers read free and leave comments and kudos. Start your short story in KudoWrite with the free credit: one evening, six beats, and the last line you wrote first.