What makes a good short story?

gtanders

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Hi all,

Someone suggested I post this here, as a discussion came up in SFF SYW.

I struggle to find a scope of change in short stories that gives them emotional satisfaction. I can spend years doing this in the last third of a novel, and it feels like home turf to me.

What's the trick with stories? Am I looking for *as much* scope of change for the MC as I would in a novel, and compressing it by a factor of 20 or 50?

Am I being too analytical about this? Help!

Oh, and cheers. :)
 

lonestarlibrarian

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What genre are you writing?

Most of what I do is short stories for anthologies, but they tend to be mysteries/fantasy/science fiction. So in those cases, the emphasis is less on character, and more on putting together a compelling plot with an interesting problem in 5-10k words. The characters are often vague sketches, so that the reader can fill in the blanks based on what they know of the "type" you're portraying, or are encouraged to identify with the main character/project themselves into the adventure. But in general, I try to create something compact that can be enjoyed with a minimal time commitment, but still be satisfying.

So a lot is going to depend on what market you're writing for, and what the readers in that market expect.

Name three authors who write the kinds of short stories you're trying to write, and where did their work originally appear? What are the active markets where those kinds of stories continue to appear? Have you read what's been published recently? When you analyzed the mechanics of how they put together their stories, what did you want to emulate and what did you want to avoid? etc.
 
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Lakey

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I asked gtanders to start this thread because I thought the question was so interesting and didn’t want to hijack his SYW thread with my ramblings on it! And what follows is definitely rambling; I don’t think I’ve pulled these thoughts together to the point of internal consistency or even coherence. So there’s my disclaimer!

I think a lot about short stories, as I too have been trying to learn how to write them. I started the short-story reading challenge back at the beginning of this year to help focus myself on reading them more widely and more intentionally. Looking back on my favorite stories of the year and previously, I think the ones I like the best are strong in voice and densely packed with meaning. Details are chosen with symbolic value. Characters are efficiently shaped. Their situations are startling and also layered with meaning.

Some years ago I went to an acclaimed restaurant with food inspired by middle-eastern flavors. The appetizers were bold, exciting; powerful little bites of flavor. The entrees, though, were disappointingly bland. I think I know what the chef was thinking; she worried that if the entrees carried the same intensity of flavor as the appetizers, the diner would be overwhelmed—too much of a good thing, numbing by the time it was all done. So she toned town the intensity. The appetizer just has a bite or two to get its message across, and so it can be bolder and louder and more surprising. With an entree, ideally, the experience of it should build, so that its complexity, and your understanding of the harmony of its flavors, increases with which bite.

In this particular case I think the chef overdid it, dumbing down the flavors in the entree a little too much, so that it came out flat instead of layered. But leaving that aside, it’s a provocative way to think about the relationship between short story and novel. A short story can be bolder in style; an experiment in style or voice that can be delightful to read for 5,000 words might be exhausting in a novel-length work. In a novel you can reveal who your characters are—what flavors are within them—slowly, a structure built of a series of events and actions; in a short story the characterizations must be swift, efficient, developed in just a few bites.

But to stretch the metaphor even further, in a way that gets to gtanders’s question of scope, the complete meal of the novel must be satisfying in a way that the appetizer needn’t necessarily be. Novels that raise questions often answer them, or at least begin to answer them; a short story can raise a question and then leave the rest as an exercise for the reader. The novel should leave you feeling sated, while a short story can, like an appetizer, just whet your appetite and leave you looking around for more. (That’s not to say that short story can’t answer a question, or be satisfying in itself, or that a novel can’t leave you yearning for more; series authors depend on this, I suppose. So maybe the metaphor doesn’t stretch this far. What do you think?)

I think the protagonist of a short story should experience some arc, just as she does in a novel. It can be a smaller, more localized arc. In the best short stories, the character is swiftly and sharply drawn, a situation efficiently set forth, and then either resolved or not resolved. gtanders, as I was thinking about this post I read one of the stories in your signature—you clearly have a better sense of what makes a story than you perhaps feel comfortable articulating, because “The Kaleidoscope Kid” is an excellent story. And your character does undergo a pretty complete arc! But things don’t have to be resolved in a short story in quite the same way. Short stories admit of ambiguity—of the story ending before the resolution. (Again an overgeneralization—I recently read a novel that did this, and it rather blew my mind.)

Okay I think I’ve rambled on long enough. I want to come back later with some specific examples. I’ve written a lot about short stories in the challenge thread—I’ve put down at least a sentence or two about every story I read this year—and I want to look through and find some examples to illustrate the thoughts I started developing here.

Thanks for starting the thread, gtanders. I look forward to more discussion.

:e2coffee:
 

Night_Writer

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I struggle to find a scope of change in short stories that gives them emotional satisfaction. I can spend years doing this in the last third of a novel, and it feels like home turf to me.

What's the trick with stories? Am I looking for *as much* scope of change for the MC as I would in a novel, and compressing it by a factor of 20 or 50?

What do you mean by "scope of change"? Are you talking about character development?

Because short stories don't deal much with character development. There's no time. Short stories are about plot, a short, quick, speedy plot. The more unexpected the ending, the better.
 

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I don't read very many short stories so take this with that in mind. I try reading 'best short stories of (year)' from time to time, and I search for award-winning short stories on the web and read those. They are never the experience I want, which is a prolonged interaction and relationship with a story world.

The shorter-than-novel stories that I write end up around 15,000 words. This seems to be a natural length for me to write a conflict-resolution within. Something around 5,000 words? Still struggling a lot with that.

From the efforts I've made in reading short stories, I think they can focus on something repetitive in life. I said in SYW that the act of picking up the kids from school seems to me to be something that could start a short story. A parent does that job every day, at 3 in the afternoon, same mind-numbing task whether they want to or not, for well over a decade. For one person, pickups are a day-in-day-out tedious task. But, not every single day needs to be, and that would be the story. For another person, pickups are that moment when they might cross paths with the person they're cheating on they're spouse with.

Answer: A common experience that anyone whose had it can immediately recognize the emotional state of, and then it's made remarkable by something unexpected.
 
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Elle.

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I write a lot of short stories and flash fiction and at the beginning it was a steep learning curve. What makes a good short story depends on the genre and what the writer wants to achieve. The scope for development is really a spectrum and depends on you. One thing for me is that opening and ending are somewhat even more important in a short story and/or flash fiction as you don't have the expanse of a novel. Every word counts even more and there can be no wastage.

Like novels I think reading a lot of short stories will help determine what makes a good one I know that has helped me a lot.

What do you mean by "scope of change"? Are you talking about character development?

Because short stories don't deal much with character development. There's no time. Short stories are about plot, a short, quick, speedy plot. The more unexpected the ending, the better.


Sone short stories definitely deal and offer character development. A short story with a quick plot and unexpected ending is just one type of short stories but there are lot more than that. A short and powerful scene or situation can definitely end with a character development leaving the MC a different person than when the story started.
 

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I've wondered about this a lot myself--it's one of the reasons I've shied away from short story writing for so long. As someone who has almost exclusively worked on big novel project for my (still young) writing career, expansive plots and well-rounded character development often feel like the only ways to write a story. With input like this, and the other viewpoints I've been finding around AW, I just might try my hand at short stories in the not-so-distant future. :)
 

Night_Writer

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Sone short stories definitely deal and offer character development. A short story with a quick plot and unexpected ending is just one type of short stories but there are lot more than that. A short and powerful scene or situation can definitely end with a character development leaving the MC a different person than when the story started.
Yeah, definitely. But that "powerful scene or situation" is still part of the plot. A character might undergo character development, but it's a result of the action. So the plot is still the main thing. Character development is a bonus.
 
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gtanders

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What genre are you writing? ...

Name three authors who write the kinds of short stories you're trying to write, and where did their work originally appear? What are the active markets where those kinds of stories continue to appear? Have you read what's been published recently? When you analyzed the mechanics of how they put together their stories, what did you want to emulate and what did you want to avoid? etc.

Heh... full disclosure, I'd *really* like to break into the paying SFF markets. My one real short story, which someone mentioned in the thread, was speculative but was in PANK, more of a literary outlet. (Much as these distinctions make my head spin, they do reflect different audiences, so I'll just go with them...)

So I read F&SF, Analog, Strange Horizons, etc. from time to time, though not super regularly. I love about 10% of what I read. Can't get into the rest of it. F&SF tends to prefer really voice-y stuff, IMO (which I enjoy), while Strange Horizons is more "literarily surreal," like David Lynch in literary form. I like that a lot too, more than the "traditional" SF of Analog, Asimov's, etc. Those are two markets which I really enjoy reading. Can't figure out why they don't love me back. :'(

Specifically, I'm trying to understand why my draft, The Proud Bird in SFF SYW, doesn't do it for critters as much as it does for me. :)

Thanks!
 

Earthling

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I don't care much about character development in a short story. What I look for is some sort of question/mystery to keep me reading (what's in the box? Why did the narrator tell his wife he was going to work then went in the wrong direction and changed into overalls? So the narrator is buying a corpse... how did the person die?) and then a twist at the end.
 

gtanders

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What do you mean by "scope of change"? Are you talking about character development?

Because short stories don't deal much with character development. There's no time. Short stories are about plot, a short, quick, speedy plot. The more unexpected the ending, the better.

More the scope of the emotional journey which the reader will go on across the length of the story. I think of them having a self-same shape, so *relative* difference between peaks and valleys should be the same between both types of literature; but the *size* of those peaks and valleys, in emotional units, if you will, is far different.

See why I said this might be too analytical? :p

short-story-vs-novel.png
 

gtanders

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Some short stories definitely deal and offer character development. A short story with a quick plot and unexpected ending is just one type of short stories but there are lot more than that. A short and powerful scene or situation can definitely end with a character development leaving the MC a different person than when the story started.

Yeah, I'm sorta surprised to see people downplaying character development. But that could be a difference in the markets we're going after. E.g., I'm pretty sure F&SF specifically asks for character-driven fiction.
 

gtanders

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I think the protagonist of a short story should experience some arc, just as she does in a novel. It can be a smaller, more localized arc. In the best short stories, the character is swiftly and sharply drawn, a situation efficiently set forth, and then either resolved or not resolved. gtanders, as I was thinking about this post I read one of the stories in your signature—you clearly have a better sense of what makes a story than you perhaps feel comfortable articulating, because “The Kaleidoscope Kid” is an excellent story. And your character does undergo a pretty complete arc! But things don’t have to be resolved in a short story in quite the same way. Short stories admit of ambiguity—of the story ending before the resolution.

Thanks, I appreciate the perspective. I'm glad you enjoyed that story, too--it remains my one bullseye. :cry:

I think we're looking for the same thing. I think that's why I put down a lot of short SFF, *because* the character is a construct, a name on the page acting as a lens on a mechanistic plot. But it sounds like some people are looking for that kind of thing.
 

Elle.

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Yeah, I'm sorta surprised to see people downplaying character development. But that could be a difference in the markets we're going after. E.g., I'm pretty sure F&SF specifically asks for character-driven fiction.

I guess what is expected from a good short story depends on the genre. I can't say for the other genre; I read and write a lot of literary short stories which are mostly character-driven so even though character and plot are entwined I always put more importance on character than plot.
 
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Ari Meermans

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I think we're looking for the same thing. I think that's why I put down a lot of short SFF, *because* the character is a construct, a name on the page acting as a lens on a mechanistic plot. But it sounds like some people are looking for that kind of thing.

We need to be very careful about bald statements like this about the works of other writers. What we as writers might call "mechanistic" others might call "universal" or "relatable". Too often we approach the reading experience as writers rather than as readers. This is a huge loss to our writing skillset—we begin to forget our own readers and, then, fall prey to Golden Word Syndrome. A symbol or a metaphor that seems plain as a pikestaff to us can be uninterpretable or is interpreted differently by our readers. This is why being relatable is such a big deal.

Btw, everything in fiction is a construct. What your character is, thinks, feels, or perceives is the lens through which the narrative should flow organically. Very often I see questions in the mode of "what is X?" That's the wrong question. The question we should be asking ourselves is "what is X from the perspective of my character?"
 

gtanders

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We need to be very careful about bald statements like this about the works of other writers. What we as writers might call "mechanistic" others might call "universal" or "relatable".

Well... I meant mechanistic in the sense of a story that engages the rational principle only, through cause/effect relationships between the linear plot points, without inviting the reader to care--i.e. without engaging the emotional/intuitive/Dionysian/whatever-you-want-to-call-it principle.

The alternative to a mechanized story is one that engages the heart, too. Makes sense rationally (the mechanisms of external cause and effect are in place, flawless, believable, and occasionally surprising), but makes everything ring emotionally, too (flashpoints in relationships really get to you, you live the MC's emotional life as your own, etc.).

What I'm saying is, it's actually pretty easy to construct a mechanistic plot that works as far as cause/effect, that's even surprising. But it's much harder to make that mechanistic plot matter.

That's the journey for us as writers.
 

Ari Meermans

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Well... I meant mechanistic in the sense of a story that engages the rational principle only, through cause/effect relationships between the linear plot points, without inviting the reader to care--i.e. without engaging the emotional/intuitive/Dionysian/whatever-you-want-to-call-it principle.

The alternative to a mechanized story is one that engages the heart, too. Makes sense rationally (the mechanisms of external cause and effect are in place, flawless, believable, and occasionally surprising), but makes everything ring emotionally, too (flashpoints in relationships really get to you, you live the MC's emotional life as your own, etc.).

What I'm saying is, it's actually pretty easy to construct a mechanistic plot that works as far as cause/effect, that's even surprising. But it's much harder to make that mechanistic plot matter.

That's the journey for us as writers.

Yes, well that's not what you wrote, is it? Here, you write in general terms about the process and the product. There, you personalized your comment to reflect negatively on other writers' works and readers tastes:
I think that's why I put down a lot of short SFF, *because* the character is a construct, a name on the page acting as a lens on a mechanistic plot. But it sounds like some people are looking for that kind of thing.

I'm saying don't do that, by which I mean don't do that.

Now onward.

What makes a good short story?
 
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gtanders

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Ari, I feel like you're having a really strong reaction to this. I feel a little irritated by it. If you want to shut the thread down, I suppose you can, but I don't think that's necessary--this DOES fall under the scope of the question, "What makes a good short story?" because the answer to that question is multi-faceted, refracting the opinions of everyone who's ever read one and formed an opinion.

When I say this...

I think that's why I put down a lot of short SFF, *because* the character is a construct, a name on the page acting as a lens on a mechanistic plot. But it sounds like some people are looking for that kind of thing.

I'm saying, maybe I'm not actually in the target market reader-wise that I think I am writer-wise. There's no value-judgment inherent in what I wrote. When I say, "looking for that kind of thing," I'm saying those readers must find value in it. Okay, maybe I should've specified that I respect their tastes--fair enough. I do! :)

Buuut....

I'm allowed to not find value in it myself. I should be able to say that without my statement being construed as objectively negative reflection on whatever work I was referring to (which wasn't specified, anyway). It was a description of subjective experience which I'm wrestling with, trying to understand where I fit in that market (if anywhere).


So...
I'm saying don't do that, by which I mean don't do that.


I wasn't, and I feel you've read me uncharitably.

Thanks for your time, and cheers! ;)
 
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gtanders

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Giving this some more thought...

Take the story "Scanners Live In Vain" by Cordwainer Smith. (Thanks to Patty for sending me the link!) I couldn't put it down, and I don't know why. On paper (heh), it looks dated. But it never stopped weirding me out, and that feeling was delicious.

Or "Strange Waters" by Samantha Mills, Strange Horizons, 2 April 2018. For me, there's an almost immediate build of empathy with the MC in the first paragraph. It's something beyond all the technical attributes of the writing--a gestalt attribute. There's even plenty of filtering in the POV, which we're told not to do, but--it works!

Maybe it's silly of me to try and pick apart stories and figure out how they work their magic. (If it really is strictly a gestalt thing, then it really is silly.)

Ahh well... I'll just keep reading.

Anyone else? What are some great stories you've read recently (or not-so-recently)?

Cheers all!
 
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Woollybear

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I liked the short stories in Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri). They were told efficiently, without flair, and were long enough (perhaps 10,000 or so words apiece) that I felt I was able to 'get into' the story space.

I was disappointed when I reached the end of each, because they had ended, and I felt I had been bait-and-switched. I hadn't of course, but it felt that way, which I didn't like at all and why I prefer novels. But in terms of short stories, I liked these well enough and feel she did a nice job.

Here's some commentary on them and on short stories more generally:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/07/unaccustomed-heart-mullan-book-club
 

gtanders

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long enough (perhaps 10,000 or so words apiece) that I felt I was able to 'get into' the story space.

I've definitely had that experience. Longer shorts (!) in F&SF have really immersed me.

Love this quote from the Guardian article--maybe this is the key:

"[FONT=&quot]With their density of specification, each one of Lahiri's stories could be supplying the material for a novel."[/FONT]

Which leads me back to that silly graph I posted above. Maybe.
 

Earthling

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Well... I meant mechanistic in the sense of a story that engages the rational principle only, through cause/effect relationships between the linear plot points, without inviting the reader to care--i.e. without engaging the emotional/intuitive/Dionysian/whatever-you-want-to-call-it principle.

Do you think having a character arc is the only way to do that?

I need to care about what happens in the story. That doesn't mean the character needs to undergo some change to their personality or outlook during a short story.
 

gtanders

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Do you think having a character arc is the only way to do that?

I need to care about what happens in the story. That doesn't mean the character needs to undergo some change to their personality or outlook during a short story.

That makes sense. And the shorter the story, the less room you have for that arc.

Here's a story where there isn't really too much character arc (I think?) https://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/future-societies/dafydd-mckimm/the-colossus-stops

Cheers! :)
 

gtanders

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Also, a quick note... I need to apologize for taking issue with a Mod above. I violated the guidelines because I didn't know them. That's on me.

Ari, I apologize. Thanks for serving as a Mod and putting up with people like me.

Guys... don't be like me.

Sincerely,
George
 

ElaineA

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I could be way off base, but I feel like there's an, IDK, narrowing (?) of definition going on? One of the reasons short stories have always been a key component of literature is that they can encompass each/all/any of the things being discussed. As with novels, there is no One Way (™) with short stories. What a short DOES require, though, is for it to be a complete story. Not a vignette. That means resolution, on both a characterization *and* plot level. Sometimes it's a quiet resolution where the character merely learns something, often about themselves. Or it can be a grand adventure, saving the galaxy in 5K words with the MC striding away a hero.

No matter the scale, I often find if there's a struggle with a story I've written feeling emotionally unsatisfying at the end, it's an indication it's still a vignette, not yet a story.

I also believe that attempting to write a short story using the mental template of a novel is a recipe for struggle. No one would write poetry that way, and novels and short stories are truly different forms. It's kind of like saying, "I don't know why the enchiladas I made with spaghetti sauce didn't turn out right." Well...