Short story craft time

LitHub has an essay on powering short stories through engines other than character and plot.

While the character and plot engines are the most common engines, they aren’t the only ones and, in a certain sense, are slightly strange since they both create fiction from something outside of what is on the page: from a separate outline or characters fleshed out outside of the book itself. They are often, to extend the metaphor, external engines. As a writer and as a reader, I tend to be drawn to other, internal engines—“form engines” and “language engines”—that power the story from within the text itself.