| The short story is a form of narrative prose writing that is characterised by the number of words contained
therein.
Determining the actual length of a short story is problematic. A classic definition of a short story's length is that it must
be able to be read in one sitting. However, in contemporary usage, the term most often refers to a work of fiction up to 20,000 words. But, in practice, a short story's length is determined by where
it is published.
Regional definitions
In the United States, short stories can be anywhere up to 10,000 +
words (and are called “long short stories”) whereas in the United Kingdom short stories average around 5,000 words but in Australia they are rarely more than 3,500 words. Although some short stories can be just a few hundred words long
(and are called micro-narratives or vignettes) there is an expectation among
contemporary readers that short stories contain at least 1,000 words in length.
Genres
Short stories are most often a form of fiction writing. The most widely published
form of short stories are genre fiction: science fiction, horror fiction, detective fiction, etc. The short story has also come to embrace forms of
non-fiction such as travel writing, prose poetry and postmodern variants of fiction and non-fiction such as ficto-criticism or new journalism. Fictional short stories that exceed the length of short stories
(even of "long short stories") are often called novelettes or novellas, and lengthy works of fiction (generally, 40,000 words or more) are called novels.
History
Stories were of interest right from the beginnings of humanity. Perhaps the first short story written in the English language, the entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 755 AD gives us a good
idea of what the core purpose of a short story might be.
Essentially, the short story was the evolution of a new form that seemed to rise spontaneously to meet a need. Because the
Chronicle as we have it now was compiled by King Alfred the
Great near the turn of the last millennium, we might assume that this piece long post-dates earlier English prose writing
like Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. But the chronicle is actually a
compilation of numerous older sources and we can safely say that the older entries especially are much nearer to their
stated dates than the compilation as a whole.
The Chronicle is almost entirely composed of brief entries like the following:
A.D. 754. This year died Cuthred, king of the West-Saxons; and Sebright, his relative,
succeeded to the kingdom, which he held one year; Cyneard succeeded Humferth in the see of Winchester; and Canterbury was this
year on fire.
What happens to bring about the much longer and more fully detailed 755? We can only speculate. But it seems that several
events must have converged. First the author had to have the extra information. Second he must have determined that it added
something to his overall text. Chroniclers of the time would have had access to some amount of information and it seems likely
that they would have exerted editorial control over what was and was not important. That is, there was probably more information
available than what ended up in their respective chronicles. So why add this particular story? Frequently we can see that we only
get entries of the "so-and-so-died" variety, and 755 could easily have been no different. It seems possible, likely even, that
this was an aesthetic choice on the part of the chronicler. The story, when read as an aesthetic experience, reveals much more in
the way of color and drama than in actual historical information. It is a tale of mistresses and sex, trickery and revenge,
loyalty and betrayal. It is, plainly, artful, if only in a rudimentary way.
But the literary art of the time was poetry, heroic verse like we see in Beowulf or Finnsburgh. So why write in
prose what you can write in poetic form?
That is the eternal conundrum of the short story, and its longer prose brethren.
Since the chronicle was printed, short stories have had spurts of popularity and long periods of absence. Geoffrey Chaucer, in his book, The Canterbury Tales, wrote a collection of tales in verse something close to short stories,
influenced by books like the Decameron. And folk tradition from the beginning of
time have contained some narratives that we might consider short stories (for example, Little Red Riding Hood.) Once printing was
invented, Elizabethan and 16th century authors in England and writers such as Daniel Defoe were free to experiment with short prose translations of classic authors, and original
fiction.
But a direct genesis of the modern short story is in the anecdote, the fictional
Sir Roger de Coverley's letters relate: the character reappears through some of Addison and Steele's essays in the early 18th
century. The anecdotes had the function of a parable, a brief realistic narration
that embodied a point.
Addison and Steele's essays were published weekly, and the short story remained in part a creation of journalism. Magazines
are still the venue of the modern short story. St. Nicholas Magazine was an early venue for the tales of Washington Irving for example. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe,
Herman Melville, and others like them created these brief tales
because they fit nicely amongst the advertisements and the recipes, and the genre gelled in French with the atmospheric short
stories of Guy de Maupassant.
The desire to tell a short tale in prose may stem from its resemblance to the writing of history, the sense of authority and
verisimiltude that prose uniquely confers. Due to its origins in historical writing, prose can command weight and import . It is
a form that forces you into a one-on-one connection with the author in a private setting. It demands a kind of attention and
commitment that oral poetry typically can't match. Certainly our old chronicler decided that what he had was good enough for a
chronicle, but not worth the time for a poem. He may even have preferred his stodgy, literate prose form to the florid oral
poetry of his day. But certainly into modern times, those aesthetic concerns were bolstered substantially by the fact that
magazines didn't have room for whole novels. Nor did they have as much use for poetry which seems to waste all of that perfectly
good paper with a lot of white space.
Thus the modern short story was born from a combination of aesthetics and economics.
Its concerns remain very much the same now as they were a thousand years ago. There is a kind of austerity to the prose short
story. It's no accident that Edgar Allan Poe used this form to invent
the detective story. There is no better form to mimic the cold, clear style of a police report or a newspaper account. And it's
no wonder that newspaper man Ernest Hemingway picked up the form
one hundred years after Poe.
Certainly the form has many practitioners and many styles. These days especially, it traipses about the range of possible
styles and genres, flirting with all sorts of poetic abstractions and excesses.
Nonetheless, what was true a thousand years ago is still true today: the short story is a quick form set for quick action.
Ephemerality dominates over longevity. There is no space, nor desire, for the weighty and lengthy examinations of the novel or
epic poem. Only quick truths need apply: epiphanies, surprises, twist endings and suicides. Novels are divine because they, like
gods, go on forever. But short stories are the perfect mirror of mortal man.
External links
|
