Introduction to Short Story

A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting
and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the
intent of evoking a "single effect" or mood.
A dictionary definition is "an invented prose narrative shorter than a novel
usually dealing with a few characters and aiming at unity of effect and often
concentrating on the creation of mood rather than plot."[1]
The short story is a crafted form in its own right. Short stories make use of plot,
resonance, and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser
degree. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella (a
shorter novel), authors generally draw from a common pool of literary
techniques.
Short story writers may define their works as part of the artistic and personal
expression of the form. They may also attempt to resist categorization by genre
and fixed formation.
Short stories have deep roots and the power of short fiction has been recognised
in modern society for hundreds of years. The short form is, conceivably, more
natural to us than longer forms. We are drawn to short stories as the well-told
story, and as William Boyd, the award-winning British author and short story
writer has said:
[short stories] seem to answer something very deep in our nature as if, for the
duration of its telling, something special has been created, some essence of our
experience extrapolated, some temporary sense has been made of our common,
turbulent journey towards the grave and oblivion.[2]
In terms of length, word count is typically anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 for short
stories, however some have 20,000 words and are still classed as short stories.
Stories of fewer than 1,000 words are sometimes referred to as "short short
stories", or "flash fiction"

Length[edit]
Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is
problematic. A classic definition of a short story is that one should be able to
read it in one sitting, a point most notably made in Edgar Allan Poe's essay "The
Philosophy of Composition" (1846).[15]
Interpreting this standard nowadays is problematic, because the expected length
of "one sitting" may now be briefer than it was in Poe's era.
Short stories have no set length. In terms of word count there is no official
demarcation between an anecdote, a short story, and a novel. Rather, the form's
parameters are given by the rhetorical and practical context in which a given
story is produced and considered, so that what constitutes a short story may
differ between genres, countries, eras, and commentators.[16] Like the novel, the
short story's predominant shape reflects the demands of the available markets
for publication, and the evolution of the form seems closely tied to the evolution
of the publishing industry and the submission guidelines of its constituent
houses.[17]
As a point of reference for the genre writer, the Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers of America define short story length in the Nebula Awards for science
fiction submission guidelines as having a word count of fewer than 7,500
words.[18]
Longer stories that cannot be called novels are sometimes considered "novellas"
or novelettes and, like short stories, may be collected into the more marketable
form of "collections", often containing previously unpublished stories.
Sometimes, authors who do not have the time or money to write a novella or
novel decide to write short stories instead, working out a deal with a popular
website or magazine to publish them for profit.

History[edit]
The precursors of short story were legends, mythic tales, folk tales, fairy tales,
fables and anecdotes which were present in various ancient communities across
the world. These short pieces existed mostly in oral form and they were
transmitted from one generation to another in oral form. A large number of such
tales are found in ancient literature, from the Indian epics the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata to the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. The 1001 Arabian
Nights, compiled for the first time probably in the eighth century, is also a
storehouse of Middle Eastern folk tales and fairy tales. Emerging in the 17th
century from oral storytelling traditions and above-mentioned written works of
the ancient times (which themselves are based on oral traditions), the short story
has grown to encompass a body of work so diverse as to defy easy
characterization.
With the rise of the realistic novel, the short story evolved in a parallel tradition,
with some of its first distinctive examples in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. The
character of the form developed particularly with authors known for their short
fiction, either by choice (they wrote nothing else) or by critical regard, which
acknowledged the focus and craft required in the short form. An example is Jorge
Luis Borges, who won American fame with "The Garden of Forking Paths",
published in the August 1948 Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Another example
is O. Henry (author of "Gift of the Magi"), for whom the O. Henry Award is named.
Other of his most popular, inventive and most often reprinted stories (among
over 600) include: "The Ransom of Red Chief", "The Cop and the Anthem", "The
Skylight Room", "After Twenty Years", A Municipal Report, An Unfinished Story,
A Lickpenny Lover, Mammon and the Archer and The Last Leaf. American
examples include: Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, and Raymond
Carver. Science fiction short story with a special poetic touch was a genre
developed with great popular success by Ray Bradbury. The genre of the short
story was often neglected until the second half of the 19th century.
The evolution of printing technologies and periodical editions were among the
factors contributing to the increasing importance of short story publications.
Pioneering role in founding the rules of the genre in the Western canon include,
among others, Rudyard Kipling (United Kingdom), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Guy
de Maupassant (France), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (Mexico) and Rubén Darío
(Nicaragua).
An important theoretical example for storytelling analysis is provided by Walter
Benjamin in his essay The Storyteller where he argues about the decline of
storytelling art and the incommunicability of experiences in the modern world.[19]
Oscar Wilde's essay The Decay of Lying and Henry James's The Art of Fiction are
also partly related to this subject.
Predecessors[edit]
Short stories date back to oral storytelling traditions which originally produced
epics such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Oral
narratives were often told in the form of rhyming or rhythmic verse, often
including recurring sections or, in the case of Homer, Homeric epithets. Such
stylistic devices often acted as mnemonics for easier recall, rendition and
adaptation of the story. Short sections of verse might focus on individual
narratives that could be told at one sitting. The overall arc of the tale would
emerge only through the telling of multiple such sections.
The other ancient form of short story, the anecdote, was popular under the
Roman Empire. Anecdotes functioned as a sort of parable, a brief realistic
narrative that embodies a point. Many surviving Roman anecdotes were collected
in the 13th or 14th century as the Gesta Romanorum. Anecdotes remained
popular in Europe well into the 18th century, when the fictional anecdotal letters
of Sir Roger de Coverley were published.
In India, there is a rich heritage of ancient folktales as well as compiled body of
short fiction which shaped the sensibility of modern Indian short story. Some of
the famous Sanskrit collection of legends, folktales, fairy tales and fables are
Panchatantra, Hitopadesha and Kathasaritsagara. Jataka tales, originally written
in Pali, is a compilation of tales concerning the previous births of Lord Gautama
Buddha. The Frame story or frame narrative or story within a story is a narrative
technique which probably originated in ancient Indian works such as
Panchatantra.
In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to develop into written stories in
the early 14th century, most notably with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Both of these books are composed of
individual short stories (which range from farce or humorous anecdotes to well-
crafted literary fictions) set within a larger narrative story (a frame story),
although the frame-tale device was not adopted by all writers. At the end of the
16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the darkly
tragic "novella" of Matteo Bandello (especially in their French translation).
The mid 17th century in France saw the development of a refined short novel, the
"nouvelle", by such authors as Madame de Lafayette. In the 1690s, traditional
fairy tales began to be published (one of the most famous collections was by
Charles Perrault). The appearance of Antoine Galland's first modern translation of
the Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian Nights) (from 1704; another translation
appeared in 1710–12) would have an enormous influence on the 18th-century
European short stories of Voltaire, Diderot and others.