This sounds like an easy question. But the answer, "A short story is a story that is short," doesn't tell us much. The truth is, writers and critics have argued for years about what is and isn't a short story. But who cares? you might ask. What difference does it make whether we call this or that a short story as long as it's enjoyable, right?

Well, yeah, I agree; except, as a writer, I'd like to have some idea of what I'm aiming at when I'm writing short fiction--some standard of personal judgment that allows me to say, "This works well," and I want to be able to explain to myself why this or that works well so I can write that way again. And as a reader, I'd like to be able to tell others why I recommend one short story over another; I'd like to be able to give them substantial reasons to consider my critical judgment. To support myself in both instances, then, I'd have to set up for myself a discriminating view of all short fiction in order to see where my work and my ideas fit into the scheme of things. In other words, to write short stories, and to read them well, I need a working definition of what these things are.

You may be inclined to call any piece of short fiction a "story" and that's okay, but you should understand that this is a very general term, because a "story" is simply a telling about something. Everything, in fact, has a story. There is the story of your life, for example, or the story of how you came to fail math in high school or the story of your commute to work this morning. If you were about to buy a used car, you might say, "Okay, what's the story on this car?"

The term story comes from the Latin word historia for "history," which English speakers changed to storie, after borrowing the word from the French, who called it estoire. At bottom, then, when we talk of a "story" we're talking about a kind of history: "Okay, what's the history of this car?"

So a story is a telling (a narrative) about something, and usually but not always about something's past. This "telling about the past" could be very long and involved or it could be very short and sketchy, depending on what you chose to describe and what you chose to exclude. The story of how you failed math in high school, for example, could amount to no more than this: "The teacher was a bore and I'm no good with figures. What more is there to say?"

There could be a lot more to say, of course, if you described the teacher, for instance, and told us something about his or her character. While you're at it, you could describe yourself and your own background, telling us something about your other experiences with math, how you came to dislike it and when that dislike first surfaced. To dramatize the story you could show us what it was like being in that class you could put us there in your own seat, letting us see, hear, feel, and think the things you did.

If you have done all of this, you have developed a fairly involved nonfiction story (an essay) about your experience with math last year. It is nonfiction because, we assume, you have been sticking to the facts, the observations and events that actually happened--those things that could be proven as "true," at least according to your own perceptions. If you were to imagine events that did not happen and describe people as you would like them to be (say the teacher starts to look and act like a monster) and invest yourself with qualities you know you don't possess (you become a wholly innocent, hard working student whom the teacher doesn't understand), then your story would become a kind of tale, and you would be moving into the world of fiction, of make believe.

Quite simply, a fiction is a lie, something feigned or made up. The word comes from fictio, the Latin word for "counterfeiting" or "disguising." And fictio comes from fingere, which means "to make" or "to shape." Story tellers have always been makers or shapers of characters and events.

A tale refers in general to a false or exaggerated story: Your math teacher had fangs, you say? He carried a whip and made chalk float across the room? What a tale!

You've no doubt heard of tall tales. These are fanciful narratives of great or wondrous characters and events. Tall tales are one kind of folktale. They are called "folk" because they are anonymous in origin and developed from repeated tellings among the folk or common people. Every country has its own folktales. The story of Paul Bunyan is an American folktale, as is the story of Johnny Appleseed.

Short stories grew from tales in the 1800s. Whereas a tale is usually very short and action-oriented, a short story is more developed and often character-oriented. When you think of tales, think of stories of ghosts, horror, adventure, and fantasy. Their characters are often generalities or "types," such as the good guy and the bad guy, who are secondary to the action--they serve to carry out the story line.

When you think of short stories, think of everyday people dealing with such common problems as love, marriage, family differences, debt, success, loneliness, and so on. This is not to say that short stories can't also be about ghosts and goblins. It is to say, rather, that even when they do deal with fantastic material, short stories pay more attention to the human experience than tales do: action is secondary to an examination of the characters.

Generally speaking, in a tale, we're along for a fast ride, a quick thrill. We don't read ghost stories, say, to learn more about the human condition, for instance; we read them for pure entertainment. In a short story, we're looking for more intellectual involvement: the interest of the short story is that it tells us something more about ourselves and others. That's why in a short story we may say, "Yeah, I know exactly what the writer's saying: I've experienced a similar problem, I've been in a similar situation." This kind of identification with, or sympathy for, the character or the situation accounts for much of the short story's appeal.

Okay, time for a big qualification: I'm talking about "contemporary" short stories--those that have currency now among the mainstream literary readership. There are plenty of exceptions to everything I'm saying. The exceptions are not going to help us here--not if we're trying to apprehend the contemporary literary standard. Once we understand the standard, and all that it privileges, then we can violate, mutate, or manipulate it to serve our purposes (if, say, our aim is is to be "experimental" or avant-garde).

To define the "short story," some traditionalists would point back to Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), who believed that a (short) story must achieve a "unity of effect," which is to say that every element of the story contributes to a single mood or theme or intention the one "point" the story makes.

Traditionally, the elements (discussed in detail later) of a short story are as follows:

Plot: the story line, the series of actions and events that move the story from beginning to end. It is what happens.

Character: the actor or actors involved in the story.

Narrator: the person or voice telling the story.

Setting: the site or locale where the story occurs.

Point of View: the perspective from which we see the story unfold. From whose eyes, whose head, do we see the story?

Theme: the idea or message the story imparts. Theme is the product of the reader's interpretation of the story: What does this story mean?

Structure: the shape of the story, how it is built in terms of action (plot) and the sequence of time in which those actions occur.

The traditional short story follows a dramatic structure (the same found in plays), as follows:

1) exposition: an introduction of the characters and a setting of the time and place;

2) rising action precipitated by some complication: the introduction of the conflict or problem, which sets the plot in motion and raises the question, How are the characters going to deal with the problem?

3) climax: the point at which all action peaks, the characters experiencing some kind of crisis; and

4) resolution or denouement: the "unraveling" or clarification of events, when the characters come to terms (but do not necessarily solve) their problems.

There is, then, in the traditional short story, a clear sense of movement, from beginning to end, that makes readers feel they have gone somewhere, have been through something. Thus, when the story is done, readers feel that a circuit has been completed, that they have run a course of events, and now nothing else need be done or said: they feel that this end is the right place to stop.

This does not mean that you won't have questions or that a story won't bother you; it means, simply, that the story seems to have achieved what it set out to do: it seems to have run its full and natural course.

Most renown short stories feature some insight into the workings of the human heart and mind; these stories are often distinguished by psychological realism, accounting for the thoughts and motivations of characters in a realistic or plausible fashion. In other words, the characters don't change overnight: they evolve, growing or changing through experience.

In order to change a hateful man into a loving man in the course of a short story, for example, the writer would have to involve the man in some experiences, some interactions, that would help him change his ways. Since we readers know something about human nature, we can be fairly sure that a man who's been hateful all of his life would not become loving simply because someone, say, opened a door for him or offered him a stick of gum. He would have to undergo a more profound experience; otherwise his change would seem forced by the writer. Psychological realism, then, is a matter of allowing the characters to act as it seems they should act within the context of the story. When characters act as though they are simply the author's puppets, we say they are "out of character" and the story is poorly developed.

FORMS OF SHORT FICTION

Below I've outlined some of the major kinds of stories (tellings or narratives) that pre date the "short story." These categories are not meant as little boxes into which you should write your work. I offer them only as boundary points in the field of short fiction: by familiarizing yourself with some of the work that's been done in these admittedly arbitrary categories, you may help yourself define what your own artistic standard is for the short story and thereby determine where you stand in the scheme of things.

ANECDOTE
An anecdote is the very short telling of an incident or an episode, often humorous, told usually for entertainment and sometimes to make a point.

EXAMPLE: "When I lived in Naples, there stood, at the door of my palace, a female mendicant [beggar] to whom I used to pitch coins before mounting the coach. One day, suddenly perplexed at the fact that she never gave me any signal of thanks, I looked at her fixedly. It was then I saw that what I had taken for a mendicant was rather a wooden box, painted green, filled with red earth and some half rotted banana peels." Max Jacob, Le Cornet a Des (1917), translated by Anthony Kerrigan.

This anecdote might be used by the speaker in a conversation about his poor eyesight, say, or his haste. Almost always an anecdote is part of a larger context of discussion. The most common kind of anecdote is the joke.

EXAMPLE: A guy walks into the doctor's office. The doctor is shocked to see a tiny green man sitting on top of the guy's head. "Good thing you came in," the doctor says. "It looks like you need help." The little green man blurts, "You bet I do, Doc. Could you remove this ugly growth from my butt?"

EXEMPLUM & PARABLE
Like a parable, an exemplum (plural = exempla) is a short tale told to illustrate a lesson or make a moral point. Both of these are frequently religious and can be found in sermons, where they're used to underscore the preacher's point. In fact, "exemplum" is the Latin word for "example."

EXAMPLE of a Jewish parable of Lithuanian origin, from Folktales of Israel, by Dov Noy and translated by Gene Gaharav:

Many years ago in a small hut within a forest in Lithuania there lived a gentle old woman. Many thought that she was a witch. She lived on mushrooms and on water from the well close by. She did not like human company and used to repeat all the time a single sentence, "One day you will find yourself." Nobody knew the meaning of these words.

The old woman often paid visits to a Polish landlord in the neighboring village. From time to time he gave her some food. In the course of time the landlord began to hate the old woman, and one day he decided to get rid of her. He baked for her a beautiful cake but put within it some poison.

That day the landlord talked with his guest in a very friendly fashion, and the conversation went longer than usual. The old woman whispered again and again, "One day you will find yourself."

"Yes," thought the cunning man within his heart, "shortly she will find herself or the Angel of Death will find her." And he delivered the cake to the old woman. "Such a cake you have never tasted before," he assured her.
The old woman took the cake, thanked the merciful host, and went home.

On the same day that the old woman visited the landlord, his young son participated in a big hunt in the woods. He and his servants lost their way and so came across the hut where the old woman lived. He told her how thirsty and hungry he was, and she invited him to have a piece of cake, which she had not yet touched. The young man fell down after his first bite. When the servants saw the master dead, they sent immediately for the father. Only then, when the landlord fell down on his son's body weeping bitterly, did he understand what the old woman's words meant "One day you will find yourself."

You see how true is the Jewish proverb, "The man who makes holes falls into them himself" (Psalms 7:16).

EXAMPLE of an exemplum, from The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, edited by Thomas Crane:

A hermit was indignant at Adam's transgressions, and a companion to correct him inclosed a mouse in a dish, and gave it to him, saying: "Brother, do not see what there is in this dish until my return." The hermit could not resist his curiosity, and raising the cover the mouse escaped. When his companion returned, and did not find the mouse, he said to the hermit: "You blamed Adam because he so lightly transgressed the command, but you have transgressed it more lightly." The hermit's presumption ceased, and his anger was changed into pity.

Parables, obviously, are as old as the Bible (older, actually). Exempla were used as lessons in sermons by priests in the Middle Ages (1000 1500 A.D.), and they are still used today. Both are often allegorical. In its simplest form, an allegory personifies certain ideal qualities or attributes. For example, an allegory may present the idea of virtue in a character called Virtue, who acts and speaks as the ideal virtuous person. An allegory, then, makes a one to one correspondence between the character and the idea that character represents. It is a very clear kind of symbolism.

EXAMPLE: A story in which two characters, one named Virtue and the other named Vice, fight for the company (the soul) of a man named Pilgrim, would be allegorical; Virtue representing the goodness of humankind, Vice representing the bad, and Pilgrim representing humankind seeking its proper place in the scheme of things. Like its related forms the parable and the exemplum, the allegory involves very little character development or plot complication. Its function is didactic, to teach a lesson.

FABLE
A fable is like the tale in that it is fantastic, very short, and often anonymous in origin. Unlike the tale, however, the fable is distinguished by a very specific convention (common practice): usually its characters are animals that talk and act like humans. You may have heard the fable of the fox and the grapes. After trying every possible way of getting at the grapes, growing high above him on an arbor, the fox decides to give it up. "The grapes were probably sour anyway," he says. This is where we get the term "sour grapes," meaning that we usually look down on something we can't get.

As this example illustrates, the fable usually makes a point or lesson, called a moral. The fable of the fox and the grapes comes from Aesop. Like the brothers Grimm, Aesop, a Greek slave who died in 560 B.C., assembled a collection of fables common to his native land. Many of our best known fables come from his collection.

EXAMPLE of an Aesop fable, "The Mice and the Weasels," translated by Lloyd Daly in Aesop Without Morals:

The mice and the weasels were at war. The mice kept losing in every engagement and decided that their lack of leadership was responsible for this. They therefore chose candidates from among themselves and elected generals. These, wishing to be distinguished in appearance from the others, devised horns and attached them to their heads. Once the battle started, the mice found themselves defeated. While the others all ran for their holes and got in without any trouble, the generals couldn't get in because of their horns and so were caught and eaten.

You should be aware that the words "fable" and "tale" are often used in a general way to describe any make-believe story, just as the word "story" is used to refer to any narrative.

FOLKTALE
There are many kinds of folktales: tall tales, fairy tales, ghost tales, fables, parables (as in the example above) etc. All are anonymous, having grown from various tellings among the common people (the "folk"), and all are usually short and to the point, sometimes humorous, sometimes scary, but always entertaining. Virtually every culture in the world has its own body of folktales which were told orally for generations before anyone bothered writing them down. Usually folk tales reflect the particular needs, desires, fears, and hopes of the people who cherish and tell them.

Here's an EXAMPLE of an African-American folktale, many of which centered on the master/slave or overseer/worker relationship; this one, found in A Treasury of Afro- American Folklore, edited by Harold Courlander, is called "Old Master and the Bear":

So John said all right and he went and hid in de field.

Pretty soon he heard somethin' breakin' corn. So John sneaked up behind him wid a short stick in his hand and hollered: "Now, break another ear of Ole Massa's corn and see what Ah'll do to you."

John thought it was a man all dis time, but it was a bear wid his arms full of roastin' ears. He throwed down de corn and grabbed John. And him and dat bear!

John, after while got loose and got de bear by the tail wid de bear tryin' to git to him all de time. So they run around in a circle all night long. John was so tired. But he couldn't let go of de bear's tail, do de bear would grab him in de back.

After a stretch they quit runnin' and walked. John swingin' on to de bear's tail and de bear's nose 'bout to touch him in de back.

Daybreak, Ole Massa come out to see 'bout John and he seen John and de bear walkin' round in de rin [ring]. So he run up and says: "Lemme take holt of 'im, John, whilst you run git help!"

John says: "All right, Massa. Now you run in quick and grab 'im just so."

Ole Massa run and grabbed holt of de bear's tail and said: "Now, John you make haste to git somebody to help us."

John staggered off and set down on de grass and went to fanning himself wid his hat.

Ole Massa was havin' plenty trouble wid dat bear and he looked over and see John settin' on de grass and he hollered: "John you better g'wan git help or else I'm gwinter turn dis bear aloose!"

John says: "Turn 'im loose, then. Dat's whut Ah tried to do all night long but Ah couldn't."

EXAMPLE of a Mexican folktale, from Folktales of Mexico, edited by Americo Paredes:

Many years ago, in the flour mill at San Pedro Piedra Gorda, elves drowned a little old man in flour. In those times there were many elves who played really mean tricks on people. One family got so tired of their elf that they decided to move to another house. They did so, and they were leaving their old dwelling when they remembered they hadn't brought the broom along. They were asking each other about it when they heard a little voice saying, "Let's go. I've got it here with me." They saw it was useless to move, and they came back home and made the best of living with their elf.

FAIRY TALE
The fairy tale is one kind of folktale. Whereas the tall tale deals more with superhuman characters, the fairy tale deals more with supernatural characters (ghosts, goblins, witches, and fairies). You'll find more magic in fairy tales than in tall tales, for instance. Like tall tales, though, most fairy tales are anonymous and national in origin: each country has its own collection of fairy tales.

Many of the most memorable fairy tales in the USA and England such as Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Little Red Riding Hood come from Germany. One reason for this is that two German brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, gathered together a great number of German fairy tales and published them in the early 1800s, when reading was becoming widespread among the middle class here and in England.

LEGEND
A legend is an anonymous tale or story that has been passed down orally over the years and is generally believed (by the common folk) to be true or at least based on a true incident, though no one can prove its validity. Every region or locale has its legends about certain historical figures who made a mark in that part of the country. Many legends or myths have grown up around such American heroes as David Crockett and George Washington, who, as you well know, were real people.

MYTH
Similar to legends, myths are anonymous tales or stories about deeds, actions, or events that explain certain customs, rituals, characteristics, etc. of a place or a people. One myth associated with the Spartans of ancient Greece told of a Spartan youth who secretly brought a wolf cub, under his toga, to the training field where he was ordered (along with the other youths) to stand at attention for hours. The youth true to the Spartan credo was so disciplined that he did not break his stand at attention the entire time, even though the wolf cub, still hidden in the toga, ate through the boy's stomach.

A collection of myths pertaining to a particular people or to a particular subject is called a mythology. Greek mythology, for example, is the collection of stories that tell of the Greek gods and what part those gods played in shaping and controlling the Greeks' universe.

EXAMPLE: the myth of Pandora, as told by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod in Works and Days, translated by Rhoda Hendricks in Classical Gods and Heroes:

The Gods keep the means of livelihood hidden from mankind. Indeed Zeus [the king of the gods] concealed it from men, for he was angered in his heart because the crafty Prometheus had deceived him. For that reason he brought about sorrowful misery for mankind.
Zeus hid fire, but Prometheus, the brave son of Iapetus, stole it back from him in a hollow stalk of the fennel plant without being seen by Zeus who delights in thunder. But soon Zeus the cloud gatherer spoke to him in anger:

"Son of Iapetus, crafty above all others in schemes, you rejoice that you have stolen fire and deceived me, but this will be a great sorrow to you yourself and to all men in the future. For, in return for the theft of fire, I shall give mankind an evil over which everyone may rejoice in his heart, but he will lovingly embrace his own destruction at the same time."

As he finished speaking, the father of men and gods laughed aloud. Then he commanded famous Hephaestus [god of craftsmanship] to mix earth with water without delay and to put into the mixture the voice and strength of a human and to create the shape of a fair and lovely young maiden like the immortal goddesses in appearance. He also bade Athena [goddess of wisdom] teach her handicrafts and how to weave a web with artistic skill, and directed golden Aphrodite [goddess of love] to shed grace upon her, and longing and cares that bring pain and weariness to soul and body. He also instructed the guide Hermes to put into her both a shameless heart and a deceitful disposition. . . . Zeus named this woman Pandora [meaning "all gifts"], because all those who had their homes on Olympus [the mountain headquarters of the gods] presented her with a gift, each one a source of misery to mortal men.

When he had completed this utterly unavoidable snare, the father [Zeus] sent renowned Hermes, the swift messenger of the gods, to take it [all the miseries, which were sealed in a jug, and Pandora] as a gift to Epimetheus [Prometheus's brother]. Epimetheus was not mindful of what Prometheus had told him when he had warned him never to accept a gift from Olympian Zeus but to send it back so that it might not in any way turn out to be an evil to mortals. Instead, he accepted the gift and then, after he already had the evil thing, he remembered the warning.

For before this the tribes of men [without any woman until Pandora showed up] had lived on earth apart from evils and without the hardships of toil and grievous sicknesses. But the woman [Pandora, who couldn't help her curiosity] lifted up the great cover of the jar of gifts with her hands, and they were scattered everywhere. Thus she brought about sorrowful misery for mankind.

. . . There is no way at all to escape the will of Zeus.

SKETCH or VIGNETTE
Both of these terms refer to incomplete pictures. A vignette is a photograph or picture focused on a scene or person without attention to the surrounding background and the finished borders. You've seen portraits, no doubt, that have only a little shading around the person and no other detail. That's one kind of vignette. A sketch, of course, is just that it's sketchy, unfinished, a rough approximation of the scene or character.

A sketch, an anecdote, a vignette, or a scene are all short writings that do more to show a "slice of life" than to tell a story. They are like snapshots, whereas a short story is like a movie. A short story is comprised of several scenes, for example, and usually goes into greater character and plot development than does a sketch, a vignette, or an anecdote.

A character sketch, for example, simply draws (in words) the rough picture of a person's character. It describes how the person looks and acts, and it may show how that person deals with a particular problem; but it doesn't go farther, as a short story would, to follow that character as he or she changes or evolves significantly in response to some problem a sketch, then, is fairly one dimensional; it doesn't illuminate the story of a life; and it doesn't really "go" anywhere; it simply focuses on a particular aspect in appreciation or appraisal.

Here's an EXAMPLE of a sketch about a general type of character (a stereotype) by Charles Dickens, from Sketches of Young Gentlemen (1836); this piece makes fun of the gloomy, "poetical young gentleman," the would be creative writer or "artiste" of Dickens's time:

. . . We know a poetical young gentleman a very poetical young gentleman. We do not mean to say that he is troubled with the gift of poesy in any remarkable degree, but his countenance is of a plaintive and melancholy cast, his manner is abstracted and bespeaks of affliction of soul: he seldom has his hair cut, and often talks about being an outcast and wanting a kindred spirit. . . .

The favorite attitude of the poetical young gentleman is lounging on a sofa with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling, or sitting bolt upright in a high backed chair, staring with very round eyes at the opposite wall. When he is in one of these positions, his mother . . . will give you a nudge . . . and whisper with a shake of the head, that John's imagination is at some extraordinary work. . . . Hereupon John looks more fiercely intent upon vacancy than before, and suddenly snatching a pencil from his pocket, puts down three words . . . on the back of a card, sighs deeply, paces once or twice across the room, inflicts a most unmerciful slap upon his head, and walks moodily to his dormitory.

. . . The poetical young gentleman is fond of quoting passages from his favourite authors, who are all of the gloomy and desponding school. He has a great deal to say, too, about the world, and is much given to opining, especially if he has taken anything strong to drink, that there is nothing in it worth living for. . . .

When the poetical young gentleman makes use of adjectives, they are all superlatives. Everything is of the grandest, greatest, noblest, mightiest, loftiest; of the lowest, meanest, obscurest, vilest, and most pitiful. He knows no medium, for enthusiasm is the soul of poetry. . . .

TALE
The word "tale," like "story," is used to refer in a very general way to any number of fictive narratives. More specifically, however, a tale is often characterized by fantasy: characters and events that are incredible, if not downright otherworldly. When you think of tales, think of ghost or adventure stories told around a campfire. No doubt this is where many tall tales and fairy tales began, for tales are one of our oldest kinds of stories. It's important to note that tales are fast paced and very short, touching upon the highlights of action and spending little time on character development or complicated character relations. This is due, most likely, to their "campfire" origins: the tale had to keep a wide range of listeners interested, so it did not bother with the kind of sophisticated developments we find in short stories and novels much later.

Although tales are primarily for entertainment, they do serve secondary functions. Tall tales, such as those about Paul Bunyan, often serves the country's chauvinism (patriotism or pride), advertising certain native virtues in an exaggerated fashion; and the fairy tale usually suggests a lesson. At the end of Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, Little Red says, "I'll never wander off into the forest as long as I live," which makes an interesting statement about the storyteller's (and, more generally, that culture's) notion of the woman's/girl's place in the world.

EXAMPLE of a tall tale of mythic proportions, based on the legendary abilities of Davey Crockett, as narrated by Davey himself supposedly:

EXAMPLE of an Arabic folktale, "The Story of the Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths," which serves as something of a parable:

Men worthy of credence (though Allah knows more) relate that in the early days there was a king of the islands of Babylon who gathered together his architects and magicians and ordered them to construct a labyrinth so puzzling and subtle that the wisest men would never venture to enter it while those who did would lose themselves. This work constituted a scandal for confusion and wonder are workings proper to God and not to man. With the
passage of time a king of the Arabs visited the court, and the king of Babylon (to make mock of his visitor's simplicity) had him enter the labyrinth, where he wandered in shamed confusion until the fall of day. He called for divine help, and found the door. No word of complaint escaped his lips, but he told the king of Babylon that in Arabia he possessed a better labyrinth and that, if God so willed, he would show it to him some day. He went back then to Arabia, along with his captains and governors. Presently he returned and ravaged the kingdom of Babylon in such a thoroughgoing way that its forts were battered down, its people broken, and the king himself taken prisoner. He tied him on a swift camel and told him: "Oh king of time and of substance and cipher of the century! In Babylon you wanted to lose me in a bronze labyrinth of many stairs, doors, and walls. Now the All Powerful has deemed it propitious for me to show you mine, where there are no stairs to climb, nor doors to force, nor weary galleries to wander, nor walls to block your way."

Thereupon he had him unbound and abandoned in the middle of the desert, where the Babylonian died of hunger and thirst.

Glory be to Him who does not die.
(from The Land of Midian Revisited by R.F. Burton)

Quotes, Squibs, Opinions, & Observations on short fiction:

"I want stories to startle and engage me within the first few sentences, and in their middle to widen or deepen or sharpen my knowledge of human activity, and to end by giving me a sensation of completed statement. The ending is where the reader discovers whether he has been reading the same story the writer thought he was writing."

"The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony, and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it a weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph."
John Updike, from the introduction to Best American Short Stories 1984

"The `short story' is a highly elastic term. . . . A brief enigmatic dream tale by Kafka . . . a dense, meditative, slow moving story by Henry James . . . a spare exchange of dialogue by Hemingway: all can be considered `stories' yet each is radically different from the others."
Joyce Carol Oates, interview in Studies in Short Fiction (summer 1981)

"I consider the story merely a frame on which I stretch my materials. It is the play of thought and sentiment and language, the weaving of characters, lightly yet expressively, delineated, the familiar and faithful delineation of scenes of common life."
Washington Irving, from The Sketch Book

"A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is."

"A story that is any good can't be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four."
Flannery O'Connor, from Mystery and Manners

"All good fiction today, in whatever form, is exploratory with regard to the medium [of fiction] and highly conscious of it even realistic narrative. . . . Therefore Experimental Fiction is no long a valid category, if it ever was." Ronald Sukenick, from "Ten Digressions on Ten Digressions"

"The most valuable capital usable in building of novels [or fiction in general] is personal experience."
Mark Twain

"The short story, brief, elliptical, and unwinking, tends to ask questions rather than to suggest answers, to show rather than attempt to solve."
William Peden

"To anyone concerned with the evaluation and appreciation of literature, it is not crucial whether a particular work be a novel, a condensed novel, a novelette, a story, a tale, a sketch, an anecdote, an incident, a dramatic dialogue, or whatever other term be applied. What does matter is whether a specific piece of writing provides the reader with an experience, whether it increases his or her understanding, intensifies his or her consciousness, provides the reader with pleasure and refreshment."
James T. Farrell, from "Nonsense and the Short Story"

"The writer should never forget that he is also a reader, though a prejudiced one, and if he cannot read his own work a dozen times he can scarcely expect a reader to look at it twice. Likewise, what bores him after the sixth reading is quite liable to bore a reader at the first, and what pleases him after the twelfth may please a reader at the second. Most of my stories have been rewritten a dozen times, a few of them fifty times."
Frank O'Connor, from The Lonely Voice

"Though writing that is short and fast may be an accurate way to record an era of fast food, fast music, and fast computers, the writer's task is to do more than record the world in the same banal language in which we experience it."
Elizabeth Benedict, from "Punk Fiction," Esquire (September 1984)

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. If you do it right, you're coming up out of yourself in a way that's not entirely governable by your intellect. That's why the most important lesson I've learned is that planning to write is not writing. Outlining a book is not writing. Researching is not writing. Talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."

E. L. Doctorow interview, "The Myth Maker," New York Times Magazine, October 20, 1985

"To desire to write poems [or stories] that endure we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it."

Donald Hall, "Poetry and Ambition"

"Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a pitch dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material."

Ted Solotaroff, "Writing in the Cold"

The craft of writing "is power, and a student with daring, with character, with intelligence, with vision, with experience in the world, with, finally, talent (whatever that is) might use that power to produce work worth listening to, work that might change our lives, even if only for a moment."

Eric Pankey, "Craft and Community in the Writers' Workshop"

"If the writing is really good, the reader should not think anything about the writer; the reader should only think about the work."

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

"I have never in my life written anything straight out, not even a five line poem. I have always revised and edited."

Joyce Carol Oates

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Checklist of Short Story Elements

Below is a list of the things I look at when I read student short stories. These elements constitute the fundamentals that all accomplished short story writers have mastered. I've listed them from the least difficult to the most difficult and have offered an explanation of each as a review of the strategies and techniques we're learning.

I) Technical control

1) Punctuation & Spelling: every published story you read is a resource for strategies of punctuation use. Strive to vary yours: make punctuation--colons, parentheses, dashes, etc.--work for you, to orchestrate the mood, the attitude, the pacing of your language.

Remember, poor spelling and poor punctuation distract the reader from what you have to say and may suggest to others that you are indifferent to your craft.

Things to avoid (unless orchestrated for effect): run-on sentences, unmarked clauses, overuse of punctuation (like exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!), unmarked possessives (Bobs car)....

2) Verb Tense

a) Have you chosen the verb tense that best suits your story? Present tense, for instance, is well suited to replicate entrapment or confinement in the moment: "J.P. and I are on the front porch at Frank Martin's drying-out facility. Like the rest of us at Frank Martin's, J.P. is first and foremost a drunk." (From "Where I'm Calling From" by Raymond Carver.)

b) Consistency: do you stay with the tense you begin with? Usually, inexperienced writers shift tenses unintentionally--moving from present to past, past to present for no apparent reason--because they are writing too quickly and/or thinking only of the plot line (what happens next).
c) Is your use of tense well orchestrated? If a story occurs in the past tense (I thought....), for instance, flashbacks from that point should be in the past-past tense (I had thought....).

3) Point of View

a) Orienting the reader: If the story belongs to a certain character, in other words, you'd do well to place us with that character as soon as possible.

EXAMPLE: "Several times, when David comes home from the hospital to eat with his family, or calls Jenny to come quick and listen to Zanny pick out words in her bedtime book, or looks up at the bathroom mirror and sees Jenny behind him, in the bedroom, pulling on jeans and a sweater, he sees a difference in his wife's face, some subtle but fundamental alteration, and he knows that she is remembering what has been done to her." This first sentence of "Things Not Seen," by Lynna Williams, places us firmly in David's point of view, for it frames the story in terms of his experience: when he comes home, when he calls his wife, when sees her behind him, when he looks at her and sees a difference in his face--then he knows....


b) Stay faithful to the point of view you've started with. That is, stay with--inside--your character's head. EXAMPLE (of what not to do): "When she saw Derek leave the room, Vicki felt her heart wither. She looked like she had just bitten into a raw onion." Notice how the writer, in the second sentence, jumps from Vicki's p.o.v. to look at her from the outside like a reporter. Usually when this happens, it suggests that the writer is avoiding the more challenging, more difficult, task of describing what the character is going through in his/her thoughts and feelings.


c) If you are varying points of view--moving from one person to another--keep it consistent. Give each character equal time, otherwise your readers may find the switching from one head to another too disruptive. See Margaret Atwood's story "True Trash" for an example.


II) Control of Language: This is a matter of being a keen-eyed editor of your word choice (diction) and your sentencing.


1) Say the most with the fewest words: make your language as efficient as possible first by cutting down redundancies. "He shrugged his shoulders," for instance, should be "He shrugged," since you really can't shrug anything else.

Get into the habit of cutting other unnecessary words that add nothing to the sentence. While words like "actually," "even," and "just" are common in spoken language, they weigh down written language. "She didn't actually go home" should be "She didn't go home." "He just had to do it" should be "He had to do it."

2) Diction is a matter of choosing the best-suited word for the description you're writing. This means that a) obviously it has to be the correct word: You wouldn't write, "She was a doleful [sad] teammate" when you really mean "She was a droll [humorous] teammate." If in doubt about the word you've chosen, you'd better look it up. b) A simple word often has a stronger impact than a fancy one: "He hated his father," for instance, is far superior to "He hated his progenitor." Latinate words are usually show-off words that draw more attention to the writer's vocabulary than to the story he or she is trying to tell.

3) Inventing new turns of phrases--vivid images--is one of the writer's greatest challenges. Self-respecting writers dislike clich�s not only because they're easy but because they don't do justice to their work: readers simply glide over a clich�, since it's so well known, instead of savoring the image, as the writer would like. "Her face was as pale as wood pulp," for instance, is more striking than "Her face was as white as a sheet."

4) Active verbs are almost always superior to passive verbs because active verbs are more powerful because they more direct, demanding fewer words, which makes them less cumbersome.


ACTIVE: "He ate peas with a knife."
PASSIVE: "The peas were eaten by him with a knife."


5) Orchestrating sentences: you can make your sentences more efficient and more effective--make them "flow"--by a) cutting unnecessary information (again, being direct) and by b) combining sentences where possible.

WEAK: "She took transportation to the town of Manhattan. She hoped to find a job in this city she was traveling to. She wasn't hopeful about her job prospects in Manhattan however."
STRONG: "She traveled to Manhattan, where she hoped to find a job, though she wasn't hopeful about her prospects."

III) Audience Awareness: are you making your story accessible to your audience? Most stories--no matter how outlandish they may be--offer cues and clues that act as sign posts to guide their readers. They make reading easier and thus allow readers to enter the fictional world more fully. Work towards this awareness of what your readers need by studying how other writers make you comfortable with their fictional worlds. Remember, if more than one reader tells you that he/she is confused, your story probably needs more cues, clues, and clarifications.

1) time cues tell us when a certain event occurs (e.g., "that night....")

2) place cues tell us where we are (e.g., "at her house, she found him waiting....")

3) dialogue tags tell us who is speaking (e.g., "he said"). 4) "clues" are hints, usually in the form of descriptions or details, that suggest where we are

a) historically: "He was listening to the war news on the family's radio, a well-polished RCA as big as an icebox." Listening to the radio instead of watching the TV suggests that this scene occurs before 1950. The mention of "icebox" instead of "refrigerator" is another clue.

b) geographically: "Cyril used to grab at the Spanish moss that dangled from the limbs of the cypress behind his grandmother's house, which stood on a weedy rise overlooking the bayou." Spanish moss, cypress, and bayou all suggest that this story takes place in the south.

c) cultural/social/political climate: "He sees her across the street--she's wearing the latest fashion, something he's seen only in magazines: 'hot pants,' an outfit that seems a hybrid of a mini skirt and culottes. When he calls to her, she turns abruptly, then flashes him two fingers held up in a 'V.' Peace. She's grinning. He flashes her a 'V' in return, though he feels really out of it because he's only recently started growing his sideburns and his hair, he thinks, is much too short." The details about fashion--length of hair, length of skirts, and especially the mention of "hotpants" as something new--suggest the cultural climate of the late sixties or early seventies.

d) Clues may also reveal the nature of one character's
relations with another: "He ... looked at the bags [which belonged to him and his traveling companion] against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights." This excerpt, from Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," suggests--in the second sentence--that the man's relationship with his traveling companion is limited to the nights they "spent" together. "Hotels" adds to this, hinting that theirs was mostly a sexual relationship.

e) Clues may also reveal a character's personal history, as well as his/her emotional/psychological inclinations:

Richard Ford, the writer of this paragraph (the first in "Rock Springs"), plants a load of information to orient us to the speaker's history: 1) he's seen better times ("old glory days"); 2) he's a good enough guy to have loyal friends ("who wouldn't turn me in"); 3) he's broken the law more than once ("it wasn't the first time") but apparently his crimes are fairly small ("bad checks"); 4) he's good enough to have helped Edna, having moved in to protect her from her ex-husband; 5) he's got a young daughter (Cheryl); and 6) he's trying to be a decent father ("needing to give my little daughter...a better shake in things").

IV) Development: this is often a matter of slowing down to "show" us important scenes, descriptions, details, emotions, thoughts, and so on in order to bring the reader fully into the world you have created and thus it seem real.
"Showing," remember, is dramatizing while "telling" is summarizing. Every story has its share of both, and one is no less important than the other. Do not assume, then, that a summary doesn't take as much skill to write as a scene does. The first paragraph of "Rock Springs," for instance, (see example above) is an artful summary of the character's recent past.

1) Showing

a) Take time to show us a character's thoughts and feelings, especially at critical moments.

WEAK: "When Sarah saw that Derek was not at the party, she never felt sadder in her life."

STRONGER: "When Sarah saw that Derek was not at the party, she felt abandoned, as if she had shown up at the wrong park for a company picnic and now, standing in the shade of an empty pavilion, heard the gleeful cries of children in the distance, a reminder that somewhere her friends and co-workers were having fun. She wondered where Derek was right now. Who was sharing his company?"

b) Details create a strong sense of place.

c) "Stage directions"--descriptions of setting, movements, gestures and expressions--make a dialogue into a scene instead of simply a transcript of talk.

2) Character development is a matter of helping us understand why people in your story act as they do. Showing us the key character's thoughts and feelings (see above, item "a") is one of our primary strategies towards this end, as is showing us the details he/she sees (items "b" & "c"). Two other strategies are the use of d) flashbacks and e) "backfill".

d) Flashbacks are memories a character "flashes" upon during the course of the story. Usually they are cued by some detail or event the character observes. Flashbacks can be summarized: "When David saw the homeless man hunkered over the waste bin in the park, he recalled his uncle Stevenson, how he used to pick through his neighbors' garbage on trash day--every Tuesday--looking for things to sell at the Saturday flea market."

Or they can be dramatized:

f) Backfill is my term for any background information (usually summarized) the writer offers about a character: "David was from a large family--five brother, three sisters--that shared a three-story victorian his father had inherited from a distant aunt. David was three when they moved in and he vaguely remembered, years later, how his eldest brother, Michael, had run panicked from the top floor that first day, screaming about a bat he'd seen in the attic."

g) Consistency of character: although a fictional character must, ideally, be as complex as you or I--and consequently unpredictable to some degree--he/she must also be "consistent," which is to say that within the context of the story you have made clear the realm of possibilities for this character's behavior. Should your character step out of this "realm," your readers will protest, charging that he/she is "out of character." For example, say your character, Bob, is a dairy farmer who has a great affection for the many stray cats he cares for on his farm. We wouldn't expect Bob to start shooting the cats at some point in the story unless you prepared us for this act by showing how Bob has grown so desperate and dejected that he feels cat-killing is necessary. On the other hand, we might expect him to shoot at a fox or even a stray dog if he thought it was threatening his cats.

3) Plot development is a matter of making the most of your story (i.e., what happens). A strong plot is one that shows movement or change. At its most elementary level, such movement may be literal, as in a story about an athlete running a race: we follow the runner from start to finish. A good story, of course, offers us more than a simple description of an event--it will offer us movement also on the emotional or the psychological level. Consequently, in our story about the athlete running a race, we may see the athlete's expectations before the race, how these expectations relate to the rest of her life (i.e., What will winning the race mean to her?), and the circumstances that define who she is and why she feels as she does. In other words, through her interactions with others, her memories (flashbacks), and her reactions to the current events, we receive not simply an account of a race but also a sense of this racer's life.

One of the hardest things to write about is a character in isolation (a prisoner in a cell, say, or a monk sitting on a mountain) because a character in isolation is static--he's not going anywhere, he's not interacting with anybody, he's not doing anything except waiting, thinking, worrying. There's little or no plot, in other words. Usually, when we come upon an isolated character in fiction either he's insane, like the narrator of Edgar Alan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart," or she's eccentric, like the narrator of Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." In either case, the isolation usually serves as the character's excuse for telling us how he or she got to be so isolated. We're taken out of the isolation, then, and placed into a story that promises to move us from some point in the past to the current point in the present. The narrator of "Tell-Tale Heart," for instance, relates how he came to kill the old man he was working for and how, later, he gave himself away to the police. There's plenty of physical, psychological, and emotional movement in this.

Predictability: If a story is boring, chances are its plot is too predictable. This does not mean that, in order to keep your reader's attention, you must impose all kinds of outlandish twists and turns upon your plot. On the contrary, impositions of this kind will also alienate your reader because they will feel artificial--too clearly your effort to fiddle with your fictional world. Remember that first and foremost unpredictability resides in the character you're writing about, because he or she should be as idiosyncratic and varied as we ourselves are. When a character becomes too predictable, we consider him a type or, more specifically, a stereotype, like the nerd, the jock, the bimbo, etc. While many people in real life may share some attributes and inclinations of such types, few people are wholly predictable--that's what makes life, and stories about life, interesting.

One primary strategy for creating interesting situations is to undercut a reader's expectations. For example, in a boy-meets-girl story, since we know what to expect, i.e., that the boy either will or won't get the girl, the experienced writer knows not to make this the story's focus. The writer may focus instead on the way the boy's pursuit of the girl affects his relations with his brother, for instance. Not long ago, I wanted to write a story that started with this line, which I overheard while eating at a restaurant one night: "My greatest ambition in life fourteen years ago was to be a Dancing Boot, those long-legged girls who performed during half time at my high school football games." However, as I began to write from this line, I discovered very quickly that a story about a girl who wants to be a Boot is fairly predictable. After all, either she gets to be a Boot or she doesn't; and we've all read or heard of such stories. So I decided to let a man say these words. This turned the situation on its head and created a number of options for me to explore.

4) Thematic development: As I read a story, I ask, What ideas or issues is the writer working with? Is it evident that the story matters to the writer, that he/she is striving to work towards some understanding of the subject? Or is it clear that the writer is simply running the character through a maze of misfortune to see what happens? In other words, what is the point of the story? This is not to say that the story must have a lesson; it is to say, however, that the writer must give us a reason to read, not simply have us witness his/her lab experiment. Stories that bear re-reading are usually stories that offer something to think about--characters whose complexities we want to ponder, predicaments that speak to our own concerns, issues that resonate in our own lives.

In Richard Ford's "Rock Springs," for instance, Ford is striving to understand how a decent man, Earl, becomes mired in misfortune of his own making. Earl's hopes and dreams are neither unusual nor outlandish--he's a regular guy, for the most part, with some irregular habits, like stealing cars. It is these habits, the way Earl has taken a detour in life, that make him interesting. But it is his earnest desire to hold his ragtag family together, to give his child a "decent shake" in life, to make his lover happy--these things make him like us and raise questions about love, honesty, and loyalty that most of us may ask of ourselves.
 

The author is the writer who creates the story and the characters who act out that story.

The narrator is the character who tells the story. There are three basic kinds of narrators.

Our view of the story depends on the narrator's perspective, because the narrator is our guide, our commentator, and our interpreter. If the narrator knows everything about everybody in the story, our perspective will be god like (omniscient), as if we were sitting on a throne in the sky looking down on the actors. If the narrator only knows what he/she has experienced, then our perspective will be limited to that experience. Point of view, then, is the perspective (the site) from which the story is told or presented. To understand point of view, we must ask ourselves, "From whose head do we see the story's actions and events?" There are three points of view:


1) FIRST PERSON: the "I" or "we" perspective.

EXAMPLE: