Short Stories
Oh ye of small attention spans: if novels don't float your boat, short stories just might. Even if that boat is less of an oil tanker and more of a kayak.
| Form | Short Story |
| Language | English Language |
| Literary Forms | Short Stories |
| Writing | Literary Forms |
Transcript
…and you just need a smaller dose of fiction to while away the minutes?
Short stories are little nuggets of literature…
…chewable tablets of plot, character, theme and setting…
…that take all the best parts of novels and shrink them down into pocket-sized morsels.
You know how the smaller versions of candy bars are called fun-size?
Yeah, it’s like that. However, short stories aren’t merely…
shorter.
Writers haven’t zapped full-length novels with a shrink ray and miniaturized the darn
things.
Short stories are their own animal. Rather than taking chapters and chapters to
flesh out characters and develop plot…
…short stories don’t have that luxury…
…so they generally have a very different purpose than novels do.
They usually center on a single incident or event…
…and are intended to reveal something significant about human nature…
…or at least get us thinking about it.
Many short stories revolve around an epiphany…
…an ah-ha! moment that occurs when a character realizes some essential truth about the situation,
or just about life itself.
Maybe they just discovered the meaning of life…
…or maybe they realized that they look better with the red lipstick than the pink one.
Either way, the physical, emotional or spiritual journey the character has been on finds some
sort of resolution.
And you can always be sure that there’s something pretty deep going on below the surface.
In other words… it’s not about the lipstick. Even those stories without a recognizable
epiphany follow a common plot arc.
Our protagonist starts out upholding the status quo…
…until something or someone upsets the balance.
You’ll find that conflict is much more entertaining in fiction than in real life.
Once that conflict has been introduced…
…the character must deal with it, sometimes successfully and sometimes… not so much.
In the aftermath of their actions, there is usually a bit of denouement, or resolution.
It’s sort of like the cool down after an exhausting workout.
The greatest or most successful short stories are often anthologized…
…in other words, they appear in anthologies, or collections, that either highlight the
best stories of that year…
…or of a particular genre…
…or of all time.
Better make sure your bookshelf has been reinforced if you purchase that one.
Novels are great for the beach… or for your desert island…
…but short stories are a great way of mixing things up and satisfying your short attention
span.
Which, incidentally, is why we’re going to wrap this video up now…
…before you get bored and start looking up cat pictures.