SHORT STORIES

I love a great short story. Problem is, there are too few of them.

How many great short stories can you name out of the blue? Make a short list of them in the comments below.

Perhaps you are better read than I, because I can only think of three.

“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. Scrooge is an icon. Dickens was paid by the word to run his work serialized in the newspapers. That is why so many of his works are tediously long.

“The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway (more a novella than a short story). Even though I forget the Old Man’s Spanish name, I still smell the sea and the fish and feel the sting of rope on my hands as the big fish fight.

I cannot remember the name of the great O’Henry story about the man who sold his watch to buy a fine hair brush for a his love who cut off her hair and sold it to but him a watch. Maybe that was not the story exactly, I do not remember, but that’s a decently good one the way I described it.

Short stories are easy to read. 

They take more time than a blog or a post, so they require more time and effort from the reader. But when they are good, they are outstanding. 

Many great television mini-series are really enacted series of short stories that follow the same characters. This allows for character development. Come up with a great character and anyone will want to know them – love them or hate them. TV dramas are simply short stories with added visual action. The script does come first.

Written short stories are often better than TV stories.

We get to visualize our own image of the character and the setting. We get the added sense of smell from compelling descriptions. 

I believe that most novels could really be told in the time is takes to read a short story. I believe that every chapter of a novel could be – and perhaps should be – a stand alone tale that either leaves you wanting more or thinking about the implications of what that story means to you.

I think that a writer can serve themselves best by writing smaller works that can later be entwined and stitched together to make a larger work.