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.