Contents
- What is a short story?
- What is the difference between a short story and a novel?
- What is the pattern of a short story?
- Some famous short stories you can read online
- Links
What
is a short story?
Definitions of a short story vary:
- “A piece of fiction that revolves around a character with a specific problem to solve.” (Polking)
- “. . . a work of prose fiction brief enough and unified enough so that it can and should be read in one continuous reading.” (Steele)
- “. . . A successful tale, or short story, as one that achieves a single, dramatic effect.” (Parkes)
The short story is to literature what baseball is to sports and jazz is to music: American made. For centuries, people told folk tales, but the “short story” was defined only a few centuries ago by a writer in the United States:
“Master story writer Edgar Allan Poe said that a short story has a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning, the characters meet, in the middle they face growing conflict, and in the end they resolve the conflict.” (Sorenson)
What is the difference between a short story and a novel?
- Age: The short story, as we know it today, has only been around since the 1800’s. Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne were published and Poe set standards for what a short story should be. The first novel is said to be The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikuibu, an eleventh-century Japanese writer. The first novel in Western literature is usually considered to be Don Quixote.
- Length: a short story is 2,000 to 7,500 words. A novel is at least 60,000 words.
- Time span: a short story takes place over a short period of time such as an hour, a day or a week. A novel’s time span can be that short or extend for decades.
- Number of characters: A short story has one main character (protagonist) with only a few other minor characters. A novel can have two or three main characters and dozens of minor characters.
- Effect: Everything in a short story—theme, point-of-view, plot— leads up to a single effect. The novel, on the other hand, can have multiple themes, more than one point-of-view, and many sub-plots.
Keep in mind that the purpose of the short story is to produce one single effect.
What
is the pattern of a short story?
A short story can usually be broken down into six basic parts:
- An initiating event: Either an idea or an action that sets further events into motion.
- An internal response: the protagonist’s inner reaction to the initiating event, in which the protagonist sets a goal or attempts to solve a problem.
- An attempt: The protagonist’s efforts to achieve the goal or alleviate the problem. Several attempts, some failed, may be in an episode.
- An outcome: The success or failure of the protagonist’s attempts.
- A resolution: An action or state of affairs that evolves from the protagonist’s success or failure to achieve the goal or alleviate the problem.
- A reaction: an idea, an emotion, or a further event that expresses the protagonist’s feelings about the success or failure of goal attainment/problem resolution or that relates the events in the story to some broader set of concerns.
See Freitag's Triangle for more.
Some famous short stories you can read online
The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway