So what’s a short story?
Google the above and you’ll get the following definition: “a story with a fully developed theme but significantly shorter and less elaborate than a novel.” Scroll down a little and you’ll find several informative, if technical, articles about what separates a short story from a novel, novella, and so forth. As so many of the aforementioned articles have found fit, it’s quickest, easiest, and least time consuming to define a thing or idea by comparing the strange with the familiar. To have any real understanding of a thing, however, it should be taken on its own terms. That said, there seems to be a particular dearth of information about the beast in its own right; most sufficing to say that the short story is “shorter” than its brethren and treats less at once. While good enough for taxonomy, that about tells us the same as saying a bear is a relatively large, omnivorous mammal. There’s none of the flesh there; none of what make’s it a real, conceivable thing, right?
We’ll start by getting the technical out of the way. Let’s erect a skeleton from which to hang the more interesting facts of life. A short story is a piece of literature that spans around fifty or fewer pages (12,500 words or less), deals with few characters, is relatively straightforward, and focuses on a single main plot. Look good? Let’s start adding the musculature.
A short story is a briefly unshuttered window into a character’s specific place, time, and mind. It relays a single event of unparalleled importance to the story’s principle characters; showing a time of struggle, of coping, of changing… or of failing to do so. Short stories are passionate, or at least emotional, and operate on the level of a single, sustained theme. This is a good thing. If you want to write about political intricacy and saving the world, this probably isn’t your medium (more on that in posts to come). The birth of the Ursine Revolution that will ultimately conquer said corruption and save the world, however, is more than fair game.
Bam. The skin. Genre. The outer seeming. The meat needs to speak to a specific crowd, so it clothes itself in genre. Maybe our aforementioned bear runs about the woods rescuing knights and damsels from witches’ curses. Maybe our bear speaks with an eloquent air, discussing the finer parts of a well turned insult while preparing for a series of duels arranged one after the other. Or perhaps the bear is a wild, romantic, wreck of a bear-person looking only for a small glimmer of hope in the wide and soul crushing, urban landscape. Short stories have a few unique genres, too. They are, after all, the only place to go for a good ghost story… and anyone who’s taken an English class has probably known more than their share of autobiographical (and often summer-themed) shorts. The skin, the genre, cradles the theme of the story, holding it together while giving the author the freedom to explore. The genre encapsulates the action and gives the reader a quick and easy lens by which to understand the goings on of the story. Like the skin of the bear, the genre is also the first thing we should see. Let’s put it this way… Would you recognize a bear by its musculature or skeleton alone? We need this, the genre, the skin, to tell us how to process the story. That out of the way, we can get to the finer details of the work.
Lastly, then, we have that certain thing which separates the skeleton, muscles, and skin of a story from the actual thing; that thing which the taxonomist and, her buddy, the taxidermist, lack… Life.
We know our friend, the bear, must eat. So what does she eat and how? Our bear might stroll into the local diner and be greeted with a piping hot cup of coffee and the warm comfort of amicable serving staff who know “the usual” and make interesting, if not exactly plot important, small talk (often in the early, early part of the story – Act 1, Scene 1, the set-up and establishment of “normal life” and the “preexisting conflict”). Our bear may prefer a strict diet of blueberries over any other kind of berry, despite the blueberries’ alarming proximity to the campsite of the frequently replenished hoard of human hunters. The taxonomist won’t tell you how our bear expertly camouflages herself and surreptitiously plucks every last blueberry while dangling from an overhanging tree. This is one small part of the picture, but indicative of the whole. Not only is a bear unique as a species, each bear has its own proclivities and particularities. Ten thousand writers could conceive of and build a story around a bear and its search for food and, should they thus, ten thousand writers will bring ten thousand different stories; all of the same basic concept, but all with their own unique themes, characters, mood, setting…. You’ll see stories of salmon catchers and berry pluckers and high-tech escapades and robberies of pic-a-nik baskets. You’ll find the classiest gentle-bears and pandas and grizzly bears and koalas-who-aren’t-a-bears and, in all likelihood, at least one who will get it’s head stuck in a rabbit hole while pilfering honey. There are ten thousand ways to write a new story; to elevate a body from simple bones, flesh, and skin. Give the body, your story, life.
For a fantastic look into how to tell a better story from the bones up, go read Hulk. Hulk’s amazing. http://filmcrithulk.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/hulk-presents-the-myth-of-3-act-structure/
