The editing platform Reedsy, where I do some freelance work, asked me to write a post on the above subject for their blog and this is the result:
https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/short-story/how-to-write-a-short-story/
One of the rarely-mentioned pleasures of reading period fiction lies in spotting those little anachronisms – a striking clock in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar most famously – that have crept undetected into the text, leaving you with a self-congratulatory smugness that makes you feel briefly superior to the writer of the book in question.