Short Fiction

What is short fiction?

By the 18th/19th century, the short story had become a popular form of reading entertainment (Charles Dickens’ To Be Read at Dusk, for instance); often these short stories were miniature novels, with plot and characters condensed into as few words as possible.

Towards the end of the 19th century, however, authors like Henry James and G.K.Chesterton saw its potential for another kind of storytelling – one that could give a glimpse of life rather than a fully plotted narrative, which meant a lot of the ‘new’ short stories could be written without a plot, i.e., they were ‘plotless’:

The short story was a popular medium for tales of the supernatural and the extraordinary as well as fables and descriptions of everyday life.

Between the late 19th century and early 20th, the short story developed an identity of its own and was taken up by writers, including:

• Rudyard Kipling

• Joseph Conrad

• James Joyce

Rudyard Kipling wrote over 350 short stories between the 1890s (Plain Tales from the Hills) and the 1930s (Limits and Renewals) and was considered to have reinvented and elevated the short story form. He combined the modernist realism style with traditional elements of suspense and plotting while deliberately leaving out crucial elements and details. This technique helps keep the reader questioning and wondering long after they have finished reading:

Joseph Conrad, like Kipling, combined the conventional with the experimental: he adopted the framed narrative, or story-within-a-story, a technique which he later used for many of his novels. This is first seen in his short story Karain: A Memory, about an adventurer haunted by his past and by the ghost of a friend he killed. The short story is the first in his Tales of Unrest (1898) and poses questions not just about memory but about Imperialism and colonialism.

With James Joyce’s The Dubliners (1914), the short story was propelled to the forefront of modern storytelling. Joyce introduced his concepts of ‘epiphany’ and an ascetic prose style. The stories include themes of childhood, growing up, and public life, and close with The Dead, which has been described by some as the finest short story in English. The story describes love, grief, and concludes with the main character experiencing the realization that all of us will one day be no more than a memory.

Short fiction in the 20th century

The tradition continued into the 1920s and 1930s with anthologies and collections of short works by various emerging or established authors, including:

• Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time, 1925)

• Somerset Maugham (Cosmopolitans: Very Short Stories, 1936).

• James Thurber (Fables for Our Times, 1940; My World – and Welcome to It, 1942)

Hemingway developed a very similar approach to Kipling’s, which he describes when he explains leaving out the real ending of his short story ‘Out of Season’:

Somerset Maugham was a travel writer and a novelist and playwright; his short stories were published in magazines like Cosmopolitan and The Smart Set.

He wrote in a clear and simple style about the exotic countries he visited. His collection The Trembling of a Leaf contained six stories of the South Sea Islands, and his plain, accessible writing combined with a sharp sense of humour made them an instant success.

James Thurber, meanwhile, was drawing cartoons and writing short stories for The New Yorker. His style was a combination of simplicity, easy charm and humorous realism in observing human nature, particularly in urban settings. He is probably best known for his short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1939), which features a hen-pecked, day-dreaming urban dweller during a brief episode in his life. The story has been adapted twice for the film (1947 and 2013).

Some of these stories might be just a hundred words long yet can deliver a distinct narrative and atmosphere. Those stories with fewer than 1000 words can also be called Flash Fiction.

Flash fiction

The term flash fiction evolved in the 1990s, although the form goes back to ancient times (think of Aesop’s Fables).

Difference between flash fiction and short story with examples

Flash fiction are short stories and they can be loosely categorised according to the length of the story:

• Short story (up to 7,500 words)

• Sudden fiction (just over 1000 words)

• Short short story/flash fiction (up to approximately 1000 words)

• Postcard fiction (between 250 and 500 words)

• Micro-fiction (up to 300 words)

The average short story hovers the 7,500 words mark. Works longer than this qualify as novellas, novels, or books.

Flash fiction online

The internet has helped encourage the growth of flash fiction, which continues to be an excellent tool for both published and unpublished writers. Flash fiction is a handy way of practising and building a writer's voice; it also helps writers make themselves known to fresh readers. Various online websites are dedicated to flash fiction, including Flash Fiction Online and Word Riot.

Microfiction has grown in popularity, with websites and magazines dedicated to the art of writing a whole story in less than 500 words, or as few as 55 words.

Perhaps the shortest type of microfiction is the six-word story.

Six-word stories

Although this poignant example of microfiction has been attributed to Hemingway, no direct evidence exists to prove it. Perhaps it was inspired by article headings and announcements from the 1920s and 1930s.

Hint fiction

The idea of six words telling a story inspired Robert Swartwood to put together a set of stories of maximum 25 words each. He called these stories hint fiction because they suggest or ‘hint at’ a larger, more complex story.

Several websites dedicate sections to hint fiction, including nanoism.net, narrativemagazine.com and monkeybicyle.net.

The six-word story has also led to the six-word memoirs challenge, set up by the online magazine Smith where people sum up their lives in six words. On Twitter, people can share #micromemoirs or important moments and memories from their lives.

Twitterature

Twitterature includes mini-sagas, six-word stories and #Twaiku (from TWitter and hAIKU). Twaiku is a haiku posted on Twitter, using up to 280 characters and 17 syllables.

Short fiction can take on many different forms and remains a solid basis for sharing experiences, philosophy and ideas, whether online or in print.