Reading Guide
What Distinguishes a Short Story?
Lauren Groff - “A novel is a long, slow, delicious creation that lives with you the entire time you work on it; a story is a blazing bright flare. Looseness is desirable in a novel, because too much tautness can make for a wearisome read, while every word in a short story must carry three levels of meaning. Yet both are still fiction, sculptures created out of time, character, and words.”
Lorrie Moore – “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” And “Short stories are about trouble in mind. A bit of the blues. Songs and cries that reveal the range and ways of human character. The secret ordinary and the ordinary secret. The little disturbances of man.”
Edith Pearlman – “The novel tells. The short story suggests.”
Francine Prose – “Unlike most novels, great short stories make us marvel at their integrity, their economy. If we went at them with our blue pencils, we might find we had nothing to do. We would discover that there was nothing the story could afford to lose without the whole delicate structure collapsing like a souffle….The sense of the artistic whole, this assurance that nothing has been left out and that nothing extraneous has been included, is part of what distinguishes the short story from other pieces of writing.”
Emma Donoghue – “The great thing about a short story is that it doesn’t have to trawl through someone’s whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.”
Daniel Menaker - “A short story is more like a single space than a number of spaces—a full-blown narrative with plots and subplots and so on....it’s better to regard it as a space that the reader will experience all at once, like a big painting, rather than something that will develop over time.... So in a way, it’s more spatial than linear.”
Stephen King – “A short story is a different thing all together – a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
George Saunders – “When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.”
Ernest Hemingway – “If a writer knows about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows….The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-ninth of it being above the water.”
The shortest short story:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
--Ernest Hemingway
What to Think About When Reading a Short Story
Plot - What happens in the story? Tessa Hadley said, “Stories for me begin with those two questions, which sound so banal but are, in fact, the richest and most mysterious ones: What happened? And: What happened next?” But, Anton Chekov thought that a story should have neither a beginning nor an end, but should just be a "slice of life," presented suggestively, and that it’s up to the readers to draw their own conclusions.
Characters – Who are the characters and how do they interact with each other? Am I sympathetic to them? Do they interest me? Do I judge them? Root for them? According to William Faulkner, a short story is character driven and a writer's job is to “trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”
Narration – Is it first, second, or third person narration? If third person, does it seem to give special attention to one character’s point of view (third person close or limited) or does it seem omniscient and providing multiple points of view (e.g., As the campers settled into their tents, Zara hoped her eyes did not betray her fear, and Lisa silently wished for the night to quickly end.)? How does the narrative point of view affect the story?
Chronology – Is the story told in chronological order or does it move around in time? Does it take place in a single span of time or multiple periods? How does this influence the story?
Author Intention/Purpose - What does the author want me to see or discover? Is it a puzzle or mystery? Is it a feeling – empathy, revulsion, identification? William Boyd, “Short stories seem to answer something very deep in our nature as if, for the duration of its telling, something special has been created, some essence of our experience extrapolated, some temporary sense has been made of our common, turbulent journey towards the grave and oblivion.”
Every Element is Essential - If something seems odd or out of place to you, try to seek out why the author put it there and how it relates to the rest of the story.
Author’s Story, Not Your Story - While a story may remind you of something in your own life, acknowledge that, let it inform your reading, but put it aside and return to thinking about the story itself. Stay in the story, in the world the author created for you.
Look It Up - If the story refers to a word, event, poem, song, person that is unfamiliar to you, Google it and figure out how it supports the story.
Who Decides What Art Means?
Although this video focuses on art, I think it also poses questions relevant to looking at stories--particularly as they relate to the author's intentions.
Purely Optional & Amusing
Kurt Vonnegut - The Shape of Stories
Kurt Vonnegut's Eight Essential Tips on How to Write a Short Story
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
The Ambition of the Short Story by Stephen Millhauser
A brief essay comparing novels and short stories
Millhauser_Essay.pdf