nostr:npub1l0vdfdq98n2ts5dr6ehdsm5638uc2sl4v6znfwtmu9dvrvmwcqsq90uvrp >that reason is, and check that you've conveyed it to your audience.

Another approach from narrative theory is to identify the story's 'central enigma' - this is the problem to which characters are responding that drives the action. The central enigma sometimes arrives a bit later in the story than the beginning, but in a short story you don't have a lot of space to grab a reader's (or submission editor's) attention, so you should at least tease about the central enigma in the opening>