The short story may be the most amorphous of literary forms — so loosely defined it that it can encompass anything from a few words, to a very short novel. Embracing its spirit of experimentation and surprise, writers have gotten away with some very wacky things.
Perhaps this stems from its oral storytelling origins, which novels are less directly linked to — in the trancelike recital of folklore, there is an emphasis on the here and now, where anything could happen. Short stories are not just short as a convenience — they are concerned with capturing a moment.
To explain why a brilliant short story works would be to point out a few outstanding technical elements (tight plotting, rich imagery, psychological realism: take your pick) whilst only feebly grasping at the special essence of the story that allows it to dig its claws into the subconscious. It may be interesting to read deeper into stories from a critical perspective, but if you want to write them, and write them well, it is the mechanics you need to solidify– at least up until the stage where you’ve produced something that can be shaped by interpretation. So, this will be my focus.
In this article, I want to briefly talk about two important elements — novelty and empathy — which are the cornerstones of many successful stories. In this context, novelty can be taken to mean an element of surprise, dramatic interest, or newness, while empathy is an interest in human behaviour and psychology. A piece of writing that was insufficient in these areas would be bland, unengaging and unbelievable. Of course, you are so much better than that (I hope).
Readers’ expectations
If short stories do not have a single definition, can they really be distinguished from novels (or novellas?) In practical terms, probably not, since some short stories are really long and stylistically identical to novels. Zadie Smith proved the arbitrariness of the distinction when she repackaged her short story The Embassy of Cambodia, as a novella.
However, in functional terms, they can be. Short stories often have a different rhythm and emphasis. More importantly, there is a valley of difference in the expectation a reader brings to a short story as opposed to a novel.
Readers often go to novels (whether they are 100 or 1000 pages) for interesting characters and character relationships, immersive worlds, layered and exhilarating plots. Often they open the book with the comfortable knowledge that they will be taken on a journey. Of course, any novel is a time investment; but audiences understand, or at least hope, that the investment will pay dividends in satisfaction. Beneath all of the busy mechanisms of a novel is the promise of emotional fulfilment.
Short stories can be emotional, of course, and we would hope to find empathetic characters in one. But they aren’t a big investment. We don’t usually expect them to be character-driven, contain complex plots, or present deeply immersive worlds. There’s not enough space, and they would be hard-pressed to compete with novels in these categories. Instead, we expect them to be driven by ideas. Simple, concise, potent ideas. In some ways, short stories share more in common with adverts than novels. This might sound blasphemous, but really it is a complement to the form — adverts stick in the mind and can foster an emotional response.
Like adverts, they are also transient. This might sound like a contradiction to what I said earlier about short stories capturing a moment. However, I hope it tells you something about the relationship between a writer and their audience. The writer captures the moment, the reader chases it — hopefully to a satisfying conclusion. Short stories cannot afford to sit still — they must be brisk in pace, and economical in space. This is possibly because the reader themselves cannot sit still; in the act of beginning a short story they become hungry to finish it.
Defining the ‘idea’
Some might not find a lot of difference between the concept of an idea and a theme when it comes to literature. But the difference becomes pronounced when we’re comparing novels to short stories.
We can think of an idea as a single aspect, whereas a theme is a fleshed-out idea, something with dimension. You could say that the writer comes up with the idea, and the themes are the reader’s impression of what the idea means.
An example. In Patrick Ness’ young adult novel, A Monster Calls, the idea is that living with the illness and death of a loved one is like confronting a monster. This is similar to a synopsis but focuses on what the story is communicating, rather than simply stating what happens in the book. The themes are coming to terms with death, self-acceptance, and hidden truths — all things that branch off from the idea.
Because themes, like motifs in music, become more defined with repetition, and over periods of duration, they are usually not a major feature of short stories.
Let’s take a famous example. Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery might have themes of judgment, herd mentality, and disenfranchisement, but only if you read beyond the necessary function of the writing itself. Most readers will just be enamoured by the idea, which is arguably that humans are complicit in terrible acts for no reason at all. It’s not only that short stories don’t have enough semantic space to accommodate themes; they don’t occupy enough mental space in the reader’s mind, either.
This isn’t to say that short stories are necessarily any less meaningful than novels. At their best, they can have a higher density of meaning than comparable novels. However, when writing them, it’s better to think of them as simple creatures. Complexity should arise from the implications of the idea, not the number of ideas.
Characters should also be drawn in less detail. You do not need to give them deep interior lives or provide every detail about their relationships. They should be plausible sketches of people, created in service of the message of the story. Sometimes short stories give us players and actors, rather than characters.
The shortfalls of literary short stories
The short story is having something of a renaissance at the moment. The form works well on screens, and it has benefitted from the publishing industry uplift since 2020, which has seen a greater number of people retreat into books, and a trend of promotion of social media. It’s also because the short story has become, for a certain cohort of writers, a conduit for socio-political ideas. Like poetry, it’s a concise way of getting across something close to your heart. It can be autobiographical, it can be confessional.
These are interesting approaches to the form and I hope to explore them elsewhere, but I think it’s also worth pointing out that they have contributed to a trend of deeply personal and utterly boring stories.
The stories we remember are the ones where something interesting happens, not where the characters (or the author) have interesting lives. Empathy is important, but it needs to be structured in such a way as to create novelty, a point of dramatic interest.
When we see skilful uses of empathy and novelty in stories we interpret them as moments of meaning. However, it would be a mistake to construct meaning directly, in part because meaning is not a device, but an aspect of interpretation. The writer’s job is to create an interesting arrangement of words that stem from some kind of experience or truth, adding a sense of novelty that keeps the story interesting for the readers. If it’s well-crafted, if it successfully fulfils an idea, it will be meaningful. Although you have no control over how your work is interpreted, and shouldn’t worry about it.
However, you should still keep your reader in mind, especially when redrafting. What sort of audience you’re writing for will depend on why you wrote the story, but for a successful piece, you will want an element of the universal. This is another area that literary fiction can fall short — its aims might be noble and speak to the author’s truths and experience, but if it is too indulgent, it will be unreadable. Every successful story contains at least some key elements that are broadly appealing — which, I might add, does not mean they have to appease everybody. Often this is a case of communicating rich ideas with simple language.
Ideas that emerge naturally
If the form inclines us to focus on the novelty or focal point of interest, where does this leave our characters? Put another way: how can we generate empathy if our characters are just facilitators of ideas?
One answer is that the idea can emerge from the interaction between characters, or from a recognisable social scenario. A clever writer will make this interaction feel natural and have the idea emerge almost without us consciously realising it.
This is something Raymond Carver is good at, and the subtle buildup of interest in his story Cathedral is an example of a slow burn. In this story, a woman invites an old, blind friend to dinner and after falling asleep leaves her curt husband to watch tv with him. Their interaction begins stilted and awkward, but as a documentary about churches comes on they are led to more interesting territory. I will not spoil the idea, only that it leads you to see things in a new way.
Anton Chekhov is another great writer to study, as well as read, for this style of writing, not least because there is so much writing to look at. His stories are not grand narratives, but snapshots of society. They are not loud like many modern short stories, but unassuming, often observing unextraordinary characters within quiet interiors and public spaces. His ‘slice of life’ style should give you an impression of how memorable ideas can emerge from unextraordinary lives. Alice Munro represents a modern-day equivalent of this style, although she has a few tricks of her own.
These are names that are so commonly associated with the short story that if you’ve read much on the subject you must be absolutely sick of them. However, they are a strong example of writers with an inclination towards empathy. In this case, the novelty (sometimes appearing as a twist or revelation) is a response to a premise of human behaviour.
Illustrative ideas
The social realist approach to writing may, forgivably, not be your thing. Just as well, because the short story form celebrates experimentation.
There’s no reason that a nose can’t fall off a civil servant’s face and make scandalous appearances around town. There’s no reason why a man can’t wake up transformed into a giant insect. There’s no reason why an elephant in a zoo can’t magically evaporate.
The reader will gracefully take what they’ve been given. It does require a bit of conviction from the writer, though. While we don’t need explanations for any of these things, we do need them to speak to us at some deeper level.
The above examples — namely, Gogol’s The Nose, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes, succeed in part because of the strength of their images. Each also presents a convincing exploration of the consequences and implications of these rather unusual incidences. There’s novelty — the unexpected — and empathy — a reflection on human nature. Notice how the different emphasis of these elements creates a very different effect.
Putting it into practice
Here’s an exercise.
Start with a scenario, experience or memory. It doesn’t need to be particularly impactful, but it should give you enough substance to work with. You might choose to focus on an interior monologue or an interaction between two people. You can write from your perspective or somebody else’s. Sketch this out with little observations that reveal something about the scene or the people in it.
Now, focus on a moment of transition within this scene. It could be when a new element intrudes into the scene. Or where the conversation takes a different course. If this is a memory, you might choose to focus on a defining image that immediately comes to mind, and consider what led up to that. For now, make sure this is natural.
Next, we want to introduce an element of novelty, or interest. Consider how the scene is subtly different now that this change has taken place. Round off the scene with a sense that things have changed slightly.
Read over what you have written. If your change arose naturally from the dialogue or experience of the narrator, then you might want to think of the structure as novelty arising from empathy. But if your change was more visual, symbolic or seemed to come out of the blue, then perhaps you want to write the story emphasising the significance of this, and the implication in human terms. Or perhaps you will find that the result is somewhere in-between.
The main advantage you will have in each redraft of the story is knowing more about it than you did before. Once you discover the moment or aspect of significance you can think of the rest of the story as being an anticipation and a reaction to this. As our good man George Saunders says in his meditation on Russian short stories, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: ‘A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we’re saying that it responds alertly to itself’. So toy around with your idea until you get a sense of synthesis, where novelty and empathy work in conjunction with each other.
