Nalo Hopkinson told us something at Clarion West 2001, which like a lot of the things we were told at the time, I understood theoretically, but couldn't absorb on an instinctive, fundamental level. She said, and I paraphrase, because it was a long time ago, that a short story needs to have two things happening or plot threads in it. These can be almost entirely separate: plots following two different characters, for example. Or they can be much more closely related: two different things happening to the same person/group of people. Or one can be a plot arc while the other is an emotional arc. The point of having two different elements to a story is that they can reflect, echo, contradict each other. By doing so, they create a depth to the story that far outweighs the depth of the individual elements.

It occurs to me that one of the major differences between many of the stories I see published in amateur/semi-pro magazines (ignoring the other deficiencies some of them have) and those published in professional magazines is exactly this. Those amateur/semi-pro stories often contain just that single element/plot thread. Here's the situation and character. Off goes the plot arc. It finishes. The story is done. And it's not much of a story. It needs that something else, and the something else needs to be carefully woven into the first something.
(I should say that there are also wonderful stories published in semi-pro zines, and some semi-pro zines that publish great fiction, but these are the exception, I think.)

Looking back, I can see this with my own fiction. My most successful stories have had two elements. Sometimes it's been two interweaving plot threads. Sometimes one of the elements is thematic or character based. But they all have those two parts.

I've been thinking about this because I've been struggling, on and off, with a short story over the last month. I know that it's potentially a good story: it's got good ideas and a nice style. But it didn't really seem to have a heart. There are two elements to the story (good), both plot threads, but it only occured to me recently that the second of these was the most important, and that it was empty. I.e., it didn't have a story in it. Without that second story, the story as a whole wasn't going to work. I recalled Nalo's advice this morning, and now I know where I have to do the work. Of course, I don't yet know what the second story is nor how it will reflect and magnify the first, but I do know what I have to figure out, and that's the first stage.