The effective steps you can take before drafting a short story are as follows: 1) Visualize the story from beginning to end as this will give you a brainstorm of ideas to include in the following steps; 2) create a plot outline because you will need to specify what the focus or main idea of the story will be. Once you have done these two, now you can begin to 3) write a sketch of each character based on the plot of the story to depict or give life to the personality of every person in the play; also because this step will lead you to 4) write out the dialogue to determine how the plot will develop and move along the characters of the story until the very end, which comes to be the last effective step in this process of writing a short story by 4) writing the ending since you must have clear how things will conclude for everybody. Finally, it is not as important to determine the title of the story since you may find fewer ideas for it whether you start from this step or consider it relevant; in fact, making the story from scratch and having a sketch of it can bring a vast list of names for the whole story that sums it up, so keep this step but for the last.