We create narrative with jokes, ballads, tales, novels, poems, anecdotes, etc. “The Statue of Liberty Factory” (Stay True) “The Martyrdom of Monica MacAllister” (I Believe in Water)Ī short story is only one of many narrative structures. Without the character/conflict element, it’s not a story it’s a mood piece, a joke, a vignette, an essay, or maybe a prose poem. I’m sure your audience would like something more poetic, but there are so many right ways to write a short story that only technical definitions are really useful. “The Truth in the Case of Eliza Mary Muller, By Herself” (Stay True)Ī character whose conflict is resolved in under 10,000 words preferably, in the modern market, in under 5,000. All the details have to work toward that illumination. I think of it cinematically–the camera zooming in on this one climactic moment, then pulling back on either side of the moment to show all that leads up to and comes after it.Ī short story is like the illumination of a match. Emotional, spiritual, psychological, as well as (one hopes) narrative and event.įor myself a short story is fiction that is more immediate and urgent than a novel. The snapshot catches a moment in time, but the blur proposes an extension beyond the margins. But the blur, the things one can’t see but can only infer, has implications, too: of movement, of cause and effect outside the range of the print. I liked that, as a snapshot itself, but when asked to comment, I add that the short story, to me, is a blurred snapshot by an incompetent chronicler, who cannot be trusted as a novelist should be. Without that structure, the piece is not a short story at all but a scene, a vignette, a fragment–evocative, yes, but not emotionally or psychologically satisfying.Ībout twenty years ago I heard someone say that if the novel was a feature film, the short story was a snapshot. In addition, while it is the audience that supplies the backstory for a photo, it is the writer who must give the audience a beginning, middle, and end of a short story. The change may be subtle or obvious, but it is definite and definitive. In the story’s moment of time something important, something irrevocable has occurred. But while a photo may or may not suggest consequences, a short story always does. “The Magic Bow” (Stay True) “Fabulous Shoes” (I Believe in Water)Ī short story is, in some ways, like a photograph–a captured moment of time that is crystalline, though sometimes mysterious, arresting, though perhaps delicate. Contributors to these two anthologies and several editors from different publishing houses attempted to answer this perennial question. At the time I compiled this, I had edited two collections of short stories: STAY TRUE: Short Stories for Strong Girls (Scholastic) and I BELIEVE IN WATER: Twelve Brushes with Religion (HarperCollins).

Rob thomas masterwriter