WHAT IS ‘FICTION’/ THE SHORT STORY?

•In an inclusive sense:

Literary narrative, whether in prose or verse, which is invented instead
of being an account of events that in fact happened

•In a narrower sense:

Only narratives written in prose (the novel and short story)
Sometimes used simply as a synonym for the novel

WHAT FOLLOWS THEN?

 TYPES OF FICTION
Plot Diagram

• 2 types: The Novel & the Short Story

The Novel
1) A term applied to a great variety of writings that have in common only the
attribute of being extended works of fiction written in prose
2) Distinguished from the short story and from the work of middle length called the
novelette or novella
3) Also distinguished from the long narratives in verse of Geoffrey Chaucer,
Edmund Spenser, and John Milton which, beginning with the eighteenth century,
the novel has increasingly supplanted
4) The novel’s magnitude permits a great variety of characters, greater
complication of plot (or plots), ampler development of milieu, and more
sustained exploration of character and motives than do the shorter, more
concentrated modes
 STEPHEN KING ON THE CRAFT OF SHORT STORY WRITING
• Short stories are an art form many contemporary writers do not tackle
• Most contemporary fiction writers are preoccupied with writing novels
• Result: One forgets the tricks of writing short stories
• Novel is a quagmire many younger writers walk into
• Short story ideas often balloon into novels
• A short story should be of an appropriate length
• Miniaturization at the heart of writing short stories
• Short story writing is a craft, a difficult one at that
• Short story an art form not many writers tackle anymore
• Obsession to write novels make them lose the trick involved in writing
short stories
• Novel is a quagmire that lot of younger people tend to go to
• A terrific short story idea balloons into a novel
• Some short stories if they are too long can present a problem: too short to
be a novel and too long to be a short story
• Short story writing is a difficult craft
 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SHORT STORY
• Brief work of prose fiction/ Differs from the novel in dimension/ Condensed version of
the novel
• Most of the terms for analyzing the component elements, the types, and the various
narrative techniques of the novel are applicable
• Differs from the anecdote—the unelaborated narration of a single incident—in that,
like a novel, it organizes the action, thought, and dialogue of its characters into the
artful pattern of a plot
• As in the novel, the plot form may be comic, tragic, romantic, or satiric
• Story presented from one of many available points of view
• May be written in the mode of fantasy, realism, or naturalism

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SHORT STORY CONTD.

Limitation of length imposes differences both in the effects that the story can achieve and in
the choice, elaboration, and management of the elements to achieve those effects
Economy of management imposed by the tightness of the form
The short story writer introduces a very limited number of persons, cannot afford the space
for the leisurely analysis and sustained development of character, and cannot undertake to
develop as dense and detailed a social milieu as does the novelist
Author often begins the story close to, or even on the verge of, the climax, minimizes both
prior exposition and the details of the setting, keeps the complications down, and clears up the
denouement quickly—sometimes in a few sentences
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SHORT STORY CONTD.

• This spareness/ sparseness in the narrative often gives the

artistry in a good short story higher visibility than the artistry in
the more capacious and loosely structured novel

Disclaimers
• Many distinguished short stories depart from this paradigm in
various ways
• The name “short story” covers a great diversity of prose fiction,
all the way from the short short story, which is a slightly
elaborated anecdote of perhaps 200 words, to such long and
complex form as the novelette or novella
• Tautness and expansiveness of a particular short story is decided
by its author
 DEFINING THE SHORT STORY
A short story is a brief fictional prose narrative. It tells about imaginary events that happen to
imaginary people, and the events lead to a crisis which is resolved at the end. As an imaginative
literary form, the short story varies from author to author.
Something which can be read at one sitting of from half an hour to two hours, and is limited to a
certain unique or single effect to which every detail is subordinate.
A short story has a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning the characters meet, in the
middle they face growing conflict, and in the end they resolve the conflict. By taking readers
from the beginning through the middle to the end, the author conveys a message, or theme.
—Edgar Allan Poe
HISTORY OF THE SHORT STORY

The short narrative (both in verse & prose) is one of the oldest and most widespread of literary forms: the
Hebrew Bible, for example, includes the stories of Jonah, Ruth and Esther
Some of the narrative types which preceded the modern short story are the fable, the exemplum, the
folktale, the fabliau, and the parable
The present concept of the short story was developed, beginning in the early 19th century, in order to satisfy
the need for short fiction by the magazines (periodical collections of diverse materials, including essays,
reviews, verses, and prose stories) that were inaugurated at that time
Early practitioners of the short story in America were Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar
Allan Poe; Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley in England; E.TA. Hoffmann in Germany; Balzac in France; and
Gogol, Pushkin and Turgenev in Russia
Since then most European & American novelists have also written short stories
In America it’s called “the national art form”, and its American masters include Mark Twain, William Faulkner,
Flannery O’Connor, John O’Hara and J.D. Salinger
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Learn to develop the art form in 2 steps:

• Familiarize yourself with the elements of the form:

Plot
Character
Setting
Theme

• Practice combining those elements until your skills are finely honed.

HOW TO DO IT?
Develop believable characters with whom readers can identify and characters whose motives
readers can understand
Develop a plot that includes conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution
Have a setting consistent with the characters’ personalities
Contain a theme, or message, for readers
Follow a consistent point of view
Use dialogue appropriate for the characters
Show, not tell, about characters, themes, and conflicts through concise, specific description
Include imaginative language, imagery, and literary devices (such as flashback, symbolism, and
foreshadowing)
Maintain a consistent tone and mood
Be of appropriate length, from 200 to 10,000 words, but most likely 3,500 words
Result in a single effect, so that every character, every action, every word leads to the single
effect
PLOT
• Blueprint of the story/ distinguishable from the story
• Events and actions as they are rendered and ordered in a
narrative toward achieving particular artistic and emotional
effects
• Bare synopsis of the temporal order of what happens (×)
• When we summarize a story, we say that first this happens, then
that, then that….It is only when we specify how this is related to
that, by causes and motivations, and in what ways all these
matters are rendered, ordered, and organized so as to achieve
their particular effects, that a synopsis begins to be adequate to
the plot
• Plots are designed to attain certain effects: tragic, comic, satiric,
romantic, etc.
CHARACTER

• Persons represented in a narrative work

• Interpreted by the reader as being endowed with particular moral, intellectual,
and emotional qualities by inferences from what the persons say and their
distinctive ways of saying it—the dialogue—and from what they do—the action
• Actions performed by particular characters are the means by which they exhibit
their dispositional qualities—so, characters drive the actions and sometimes
events in the story
• The grounds in the characters’ temperament, desires, and moral nature for their
speech and actions are called their motivation
• A character may remain essentially unchanged in outlook and disposition, from
beginning to end of a work, or may undergo a radical change through a gradual
process of development or as a result of a crisis
• Whether a character remains stable or changes, the reader expects
“consistency”: the character should not suddenly break off and act in a way not
plausibly grounded in his or her temperament as we have already come to know
it.
 SETTING
• The overall setting of a narrative is the general locale, historical time,
and social circumstances in which its action occurs
• The setting of a single episode/scene within such a work is the
particular physical location in which it takes place.
• Example: The overall setting of Joyce’s Ulysses is Dublin, and its
opening episode is set in the Martello Tower overlooking Dublin Bay.
• Important in generating the atmosphere of the particular literary
work: for visual or picturable needs of the readers
• Also important from cultural and identity-related issues
THEME

A general concept or doctrine, whether implicit or asserted, which an imaginative work is

designed to incorporate and make persuasive to the reader
All non-trivial works of literature involve a theme which is embodied and dramatized in the
evolving meanings and imagery
Example: John Milton’s Paradise Lost where the explicit theme of his work is to
“assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men”
A writing in which the theme is explicit and declared is referred to as “didactic literature”
Theme, subject, motif and thesis in a creative work are related but not equivalent terms