Short Stories

The short sto­ry is a sta­ple of lit­er­a­ture, and it is inter­na­tion­al. Chekov—Russian. Alice Munro—Canadian. William Trevor—English. Guy de Maupassant—French. Fitzger­ald and Hemingway—US, to name a very, very few. There was a time they were very wide­ly pub­lished in the Unit­ed States, not just in spe­cial­ized mag­a­zines, but in mass cir­cu­la­tion pub­li­ca­tions like The Sat­ur­day Evening Post. I read recent­ly that in the 20’s Fitzger­ald was paid as much as $4,000  for a short sto­ry, which, in today’s world, would be close to $50,000. Today one would be lucky to get that $4,000.

Read most stan­dard lit­er­ary his­to­ries and Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849) is cred­it­ed with being the “inven­tor” of the short sto­ry as we think of it today. He even pos­tu­lat­ed rules for the genre. Among them were:

1. Able to read in one sitting.
2. A uni­ty of effect (think of his hor­ror stories).
3. A key, open­ing sen­tence, one which sets the tone for all that follows.
4. Noth­ing digres­sive. A uni­ty of subject.

Need­less to say, such rules are not required to play the game, but they are a good start­ing point to think about the genre.

Some years ago when I was select­ing short sto­ries for an anthol­o­gy of sto­ries (Best Shorts) it was stag­ger­ing to con­sid­er just how many good ones have been writ­ten. Also, I dis­cov­ered how many a short sto­ry was lurk­ing in the guise of a good num­ber of pic­ture books.

It has often puz­zled me why short sto­ries are not a sta­ple of the class­room in some kind of read aloud sto­ry-a-day cur­ricu­lum. For the most part I write nov­els and am eager to have them in young people’s hands and read in schools. But con­sid­er Poe’s rules above; con­sid­er how much eas­i­er to teach writ­ing if the goal is a short sto­ry and not a novel.

Need help in locat­ing sto­ries? Read Me A Sto­ry, Ink is a ter­rif­ic source.

In oth­er words, instead of short chang­ing your stu­dents, give them short stories.