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- short story, brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few characters. The short story is usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a few significant episodes or scenes.
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Mar 24, 2024 · A short story is a brief work of fiction, usually ranging from 1,000 to 7,500 words. Unlike novels or epics, which have complex narratives spread over hundreds of pages, short stories focus on a single incident, character, or period.
Short stories give readers compelling characters, drama, and descriptive language in a compact package. Learn the definition, key elements, and more. Compared to novels, short stories often get overlooked as an art form, but these singular works of fiction deserve a closer look.
- Overview
- Analysis of the genre
short story, brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few characters.
The short story is usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a few significant episodes or scenes. The form encourages economy of setting, concise narrative, and the omission of a complex plot; character is disclosed in action and dramatic encounter but is seldom fully developed. Despite its relatively limited scope, though, a short story is often judged by its ability to provide a “complete” or satisfying treatment of its characters and subject.
As a genre, the short story received relatively little critical attention through the middle of the 20th century, and the most valuable studies of the form were often limited by region or era. In his The Lonely Voice (1963), the Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor attempted to account for the genre by suggesting that stories are a means for “submerged population groups” to address a dominating community. Most other theoretical discussions, however, were predicated in one way or another on Edgar Allan Poe’s thesis that stories must have a compact unified effect.
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By far the majority of criticism on the short story focused on techniques of writing. Many, and often the best of the technical works, advise the young reader—alerting the reader to the variety of devices and tactics employed by the skilled writer. On the other hand, many of these works are no more than treatises on “how to write stories” for the young writer rather than serious critical material.
The prevalence in the 19th century of two words, “sketch” and “tale,” affords one way of looking at the genre. In the United States alone there were virtually hundreds of books claiming to be collections of sketches (Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book, William Dean Howells’s Suburban Sketches) or collections of tales (Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales). These two terms establish the polarities of the milieu out of which the modern short story grew.
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- “Speaking in Tongues” by ZZ Packer. Tia, disillusioned with her strict Pentecostal upbringing in a sleepy Southern town, escapes her great-aunt’s clutches to find her mother in Atlanta.
- “Viewfinder” by Raymond Carver. “Viewfinder” has a simple premise: a traveling photographer takes a photo of the narrator’s house, sells it to him on his doorstep, and is invited in for coffee.
- “We Love You Crispina” by Jenny Zhang. Zhang’s 2017 short story collection Sour Heart chronicles the rough-and-tumble lives of recently immigrated Chinese-American living in downtown Manhattan.
- “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor. This short story sent shock waves through the American literary establishment when it was first published in 1953.
In this article, you'll learn what you need to make sure your short story is a complete story—with three famous short story examples. These story elements are what you should focus on when writing a short piece of fiction.
Write a short story by sparking an idea, outlining your plot, creating characters, setting the scene, and building conflict. Use dialogue for character depth, choose a consistent POV, and end with a satisfying resolution. Keep your prose clear, concise, and engaging.
The plot and structure of a short story (otherwise known as a story arc) is the logical order in which events happen in the story. It’s important to set the scene, introduce the inciting incident and obstacles, then show the resolution.
