Short Stories Aren’t Supposed to Be Mini-Novels: 1/3

Most writers, however new to the scene, understand that a TV commercial is not a movie and that a cover letter is not a letter to the editor. Other types of literary diversity, however, are less obvious, and one I often see clients get confused over is the difference between a short story and a novel/novella.

Short stories are their own little creatures.

Word Count

It’s a little boring, but we can start with structural differences. A novel is generally accepted to be from 70,000 to 120,000 words. (The longest official novel in English is Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson, at about 900,000, and the shortest is whatever you like. No one can agree where the cut-off is.)

A short story, meanwhile, has a word count of 1,000 words (or so) to about 20,000. So, in short, a short story is shorter.

Famously, there is a six-word short story sometimes attributed to Ernest Hemingway:

For sale
Baby shoes
Never worn

But for most of us, we’re talking a 1,000–20,000 words.

Expectations of the Genre

There’s a lot more going on, however, than length.

A good short story doesn’t work like a novel. Generally speaking (There are always exceptions when you get artists involved.), a novel has at least three acts. It sets up a conflict inside a well-developed universe. It has some sort of hook-oriented introduction, rising action leading to a climax, and a denouement that ties up the loose ends. Great novels have exceptional character development, are free from plot holes (unless it’s on purpose), and draw the reader into another world.

Short stories don’t have time for all that. They are their own unique form offering slices of life and pieces of puzzles, and they leave readers both satisfied and wanting more. While they should never contradict themselves (unless it’s on purpose), they don’t worry about the sorts of details people look for in a novel.

Often in a short story, it doesn’t matter who we are or how we got here. We are here, and this is what happens. Deal with it.

But to understand short stories as their own literary form, we need to read a few (or better, quite a few). I offer some suggestions, not as a “top ten” or anything, but as great examples of not being “little novels.” Since my intro is so long, this month we only have space for the first one.

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

A short story close to perfection is Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948). It opens almost novel-like: “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”

In the next sentence, it pivots: “The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.”

Notice there is no explanation of this “lottery.” Sure, a novel could open like this, but the reader would expect this “lottery” to be the subject of exposition. There could be digressions into just why the lottery has to be on this date and when it started and who started it.

Think of Suzanne Collins’s  The Hunger Games and how much information the reader gets up front about how the “reaping” works: “The reaping system is unfair, with the poor getting the worst of it. You become eligible for the reaping the day you turn twelve. That year, your name is entered once. At thirteen, twice. And so on and so on until you reach the age of eighteen, the final year of eligibility, when your name goes into the pool seven times. That’s true for every citizen in all twelve districts in the entire country of Panem.”

The reader of a typical novel expects to know what’s going on. The details are part of the fun, part of the craft of universe-building.

With “The Lottery,” we just get selective details: the uneasy children, the selection of stones, the three-legged stool, and the black box. Actually, we learn a lot about that black box: “The rest of the year, the box was put away, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves’ barn and another year underfoot in the post office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there.”

But for all this detail, we watch the action unfold in ignorance.

Then, rather brutally, we learn just what the lottery is. And that’s the end of the story. Period.

No denouement and no explanations: that lack of information is part of the point. Jackson makes a strength of the short story’s brevity.

“The Lottery” begins in media res (in the middle of things), and it ends the same way. The story is timeless and placeless, universal and human, and all the more horrifying for being so.

OK, I’ve run out of room. Next time, we’ll look at more stories, starting with Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.”

Meanwhile, check out the services of ProofreadingPal with a free sample!

Julia H.