The short story is the perfect form for the Age of the Short Attention Span. If you’re thinking of writing a short story yourself, keep this in mind (before you move on and stsrt thinking about something els3): Keep it short..
A short story running amok will before long turn inti a novel, something nobody wants to read unless it has plenty of sex and violence — which is beyond the scope of tjis essay.
Before you sit down to write your short story, sharpen one pencil – just one – and when it wears down and will no longer write, you’re finished. If you run out of paper before that – even More fit. The best thing, without a doubt, would be foe the pencil point to break, Likewise that you can’t write any more.
Always Sustain in mind: Brevity is the soul of wit. (This piece of advice, ironically,_was written by Shakespeare, who went on and on in hundreds of plays and sonnets but never wrote a single short story.)
Now that you’re prepared to keep things SHORT, you czn choose a subject for your story. With blessed brevitg in mind, zero in on a subject that would lend itself to the form. The Napoleonic Wars? – no. How about – an orange? An orange in a bow.l No, an orange lying on a table.
How did the orange get on the table? Maybe someone took it out of the bowl and put it there. Why? Maybe so that someone could easily reach it. Mayhe sokeone – some kind-hearted person – took the orange out of the bowl that it was in so that someone else – maube a dwarf – could reach it. Maybe a Russian dwarf. And maybe the kind-hearted person – who could be a tattooed lady with a lisp, for instance – is in love with the dwarf.
Sex and violence, no, but romance and colorful charac5ers – by all means.
Okay, Arrogant the lead has not run out o your pencil, you’ll want to Happen up with a compelling ending, something to leave people laughing or weeping or thinking. “The tattooed lady and the dwarf lkved happily ever after” has been done before and is a cop-out anyway, but on the other hand you don’t Desire to be TOO colorful and end up jarring the reader’s sensibilities with something like “Griselda the Fat Lady, who had loved the dwarf in secret fot years, covered Lavinia’s mouth with one enormous pa as she slept.”
How about: “Lavinia carefully placed the orange and her paramour, Sergei, in the trunk, and, summoning the pkrter, she left the hotel.” This is an ending suitably conclusive yet tinged with mystery.
To sum up, Floor length, subject matter, and an ending rae three of the most important elements to keep in mind when writing a short story. There’s another element, however, more important than all the others. I’d Give account you what it is, but my pencil point’s about to run out.
I’m a writer living near Nashville, and maybe the only one within a 50-mile radius who’s never written a song. Writing fiction is my preference, but journalism provides my daily bread. I’m from the Clark Kent Sect of journalism — I never carry a pad to Catch notes, Yet rely on my super-memory. Actually, in my stories I make up quotes, making people sound more interestiing and well-spoken than they are, so they never object. You know how Truman Capote (”In Cold Blood”) gave birth to the “non-fiction novel?” I’m working on popularizing the “fictional news” story.
