03 Track 3

Unit 5

A Good Read

Chapter 1

What Exactly Is a Short Story?

Page 81

What Exactly Is a Short Story?

In a recent class I was asked “What is a short story?” My first answer was that it was something that could be read in one sitting and brought in illumination to the reader, sudden and golden like sunlight cracking through heavy cloud.

I went on to say that in my opinion a “real” short story was closer to poetry than to the novel.

Not all my students were convinced. Let’s discuss. Word count: when is a short story too long to still be a short story? Is there an official point where a short story becomes a novella, another where a novella becomes a novel?

Is Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea truly a novel? Let’s set an arbitrary limit of words. For now let’s agree that stories up to 10,000 words in length are short stories.

I’m not trying to be definitive here, so let’s look at some definitions of the short story. My favorite is Benet’s “something that can be read in an hour and remembered for a lifetime.”

One writer said, “The theme of a novel will not fit into the framework of a short story; it’s like trying to squeeze a mural into the frame of a miniature. And as in a miniature painting, the details need to be sharp.”

The short story is an example of one facet of human nature. Often a character undergoes some event and experiences. Something that offers him or her change.

This is why it’s said that short stories usually “say something,” often a small something, but sometimes delivered with such precision that the effect is exquisite, even a life-changing moment for some readers, something similar to a religious experience or to witnessing a never-to-be-repeated scene in nature.

The perfect short story is written with the poet’s sensitivity for language, with the poet’s precision. The shape and sounds and rhythms of the words are more commonly part of the effect than they usually are in the novel.

Just as in a poem, the bear words themselves are never the complete meaning. They interact with each other. Their sounds do things. How they are placed on the page matters.

The poem tries to create a piece of truth, an insight into being human and the form is so tight, so sparse that we can argue over exact meanings long into the night.

One reason for the confusion students often have over the definition of short stories is that other word forms, anecdotes, sketches, vignettes, or slices of life often find their ways into them.

These are often pretty and faintly moving, but somehow, they leave us with a slightly unsatisfied feeling. The fewer words we use, below a certain point − let’s imagine this point is 1,500 words − the harder it is to have something clearly happen to a character, and have that occurrence, change him or her.

So, for now, under 10,000 words is at the long end of short stories, but how short? Are we saying under 1,500 words is not a short story? Great writers can do in 600 words What a solid writer might manage in 1,100.

Maybe at 500 words, the confinement begins to create a new form, often very interesting, but more of an intellectual exercise; literary showing off rather than a natural giving of truth.

In the United Kingdom, there’s an annual competition for “stories,” complete in exactly 50 words. Here is one: Frank believed in his luck. Frank smoked too much but he knew he’d never die of a heart attack or lung cancer. Frank smoked all the time.

One day there was a gas leak in Frank’s kitchen. Frank went to fix it. He didn’t die of a heart attack or lung cancer.

It’s fun and sort of complete, but it isn’t likely to find a place in our hearts and change our outlook on life. Technically it’s a story, and short it definitely is, but “short story,” I argue, it is not.

There is a degree of unity in a well thought out short story, one I tend to call its theme. This kind of intensity in a novel would indeed tire the reader. But in the one-sitting contract with the reader of a short story, it is presumed that he or she will cope.

Hence, when the story has quality, often the experience seems profound. Okay, so let’s form a definition here: A short story is a narrative, rarely over 10,000 words, or below 500 words more commonly 1,500 to 5,000 words, a single-sitting read, but with enough time and wait to move the reader.

It is narrow and focused to produce a singular effect through the story, most commonly through events affecting some change, or denial of change, in an individual.

All aspects of a short story are closely integrated and cross reinforcing – language, point of view, tone and mood, the sounds as well as the meanings of the words, and the rhythm.

Writer Isabel Allende once wrote: “Novels are, for me, adding up details, just work, work, work, then you’re done. Short stories are more difficult − they have to be perfect, complete in themselves.”