By way of definition, a short story could simply be a story that is, well, short. Ah, but how short? Or how long? For years, The New York Times has published an occasional column called Metropolitan Diary, in which readers tell a story — no more than a hundred words — in which is related something amusing or interesting that happened to them in the city. Are these brief tales short stories, or anecdotes?
An anecdote has been defined as “a short, personal, and usually amusing or interesting story about a real-life incident.” Are anecdotes short stories? I own a copy of The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes. It consists of brief tales (all non-fiction) about writers, writing, publication, and books. I find them fun to read, and they sure seem like short stories to me.
Can short stories be too long? I also own a collection of stories titled Long Short Stories. Instance: Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea: It has 26,500 words. Is that a short story or a novella?
A novella is often defined as a story with a word count somewhere between a short story and a novel. An AI platform I surveyed suggested that novels are at least eighty thousand words. The Great Gatsby has 47,094 words. Does that make it a novella? Or a long short story?
Does all this counting of words matter?
It does for the reader. But it is not as if a reader contemplates a book and thinks, Ah, that has (X) words. I think readers eye a book’s bulk and thinks something like That will be a long read. Do I wish to commit to that? There are readers who seek out big, immersive books. In the same way I have seen young people examine a book to see the size of the print before committing themselves to read it.
My own guess is that readers know a short story when they see it as simply a story that is not long. That works for me.
As a literary form the short story has an extraordinarily long history. Check the online Britannica entry for “Short Story,” and you will read a survey that will tell you how far back such narratives go, and from which vast variety of literary cultures they emerge.
In the English language you can go to the Fourteenth Century and find The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. And those tales were not the earliest English short stories.
The early American tradition includes writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Mark Twain, and the highly influential, Egar Allan Poe, who (in the 1840s) set down what a short story should be, while writing some of the most famous ones. The mid-1920s — before television existed — was the absolute peak of the print magazine era in the United States and they published the short fiction that was the primary form, so it has been claimed, of popular entertainment. Think of O. Henry, Fitzgerald, Lardner, Thurber, Anderson, Benchley, to name just a few writers from that time who pop into my mind.
I enjoy reading short stories because they can induce long thoughts. If I have had a long, problematical day, I like nothing better than, when going to bed, picking up a collection of short stories, reading one and then pondering someone else’s life entanglement just enough to shuffle off to sleep.
All these thoughts come to the fore because I have just published a collection of short stories titled Strange Happenings. The story — if you will — of the book’s evolution is anything but short. Indeed, it has the strangest, and longest publication history of any book I have ever created.
I will tell that story in my next blog post, next Thursday.