Short story

The short story is a form of short fictional narrative prose. Short stories tend to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Because of their short length, successful short stories also rely even more than longer fictional forms on such literary devices as character, plot, theme, language, and insight. Famous English-language short stories include "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway, "The Dead" by James Joyce, and "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner.

1 History of Short Stories
2 Characteristics of Short Stories
3 Short Story Word Lengths
4 Genres
5 See also
6 Examples of Classic Short Stories
7 Other Short Story Resources

History of Short Stories

Short stories date back to oral story-telling traditions, such as Homer's the Illiad and the Odyssey. Tales such as these were told in a rhyming, poetic format, with short sections of the tale focusing on individual stories that could be told at one sitting. The overall arch of the story would only emerge after the telling of multiple sections of the tale.

In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to transition into written stories in the early 14th century, most notably with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Both of these books are composed of individual short stories existing within a larger narrative story.

A direct precursor to the modern short story is the anecdote, such as those related in the fictional 18th century letters of Sir Roger de Coverley. These anecdotes functioned as a sort of parable, a brief realistic narration that embodied a point.

Modern short stories emerged as their own genre in the early 19th century. Early examples of short story collections include the Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales (1824–1826), Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales (1842), and Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1836). In the later part of the 19th century, the growth of print magazines and journals created a strong market demand for short fiction between 3,000 and 15,000 words in length. Among the famous short stories to come out of this time period was "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens.

The demand for short stories by print magazines hit its peak by the mid 20th century, although several high-profile magazines like The New Yorker continue to publish them. However, short stories have recently found a new life online, where they can be found in online magazines, in collections organized by author or theme, and on blogs.

Characteristics of Short Stories

Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually, a short story will focus on only one incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a limited number of characters, and covers a short period of time. Short stories sometimes start with an exposition, but more typical is an abrupt beginning. Within the story, the plot reaches a climax or turning-point and the ending is often abrupt and open. However, as with any art form, the exact characteristics of a short story will vary by author.

Short Story Word Lengths

Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic. A classic definition of a short story is that it must be able to be read in one sitting. Other definitions place the maximum word length (or number of words in the story) at 7,500 words. In contemporary usage, the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no longer than 20,000 words (at one extreme) and no shorter than 1,000.

Stories shorter than 1,000 words fall into the flash fiction genre. Fiction surpassing the maximum word length parameters of the short story falls into the areas of novelettes, novellas, or novels.

Genres

Short stories are most often a form of fiction writing, with the most widely published form of short stories being genre fiction such as science fiction, horror fiction, detective fiction, and so on. 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.

Examples of Classic Short Stories

Other Short Story Resources

Categories: Short stories