Where should I begin in creating a page to allow authenticated users to submit a short story that will become it's own independent page?
Hope this gets you off the ground. Of course you need some more reading/googling.


Give users the right to register an account on your site.
Create a content type with all the fields you need. You can do this with the built in fields features.
Create a role that has the right to create/edit/delete a this content type. This is a drupal core feature as well.
Assign a role to this users up on register (auto assign role module).
Make sure nice descritptive URLs are created automatically from the node titles (and maybe some fields) (path auto module)
Done.