Revisited: Reasons Why I Love Short Fiction

Earlier this year I espoused my views on why short fiction is so great in this post. I don’t want to just re-hash the same reasons I gave back in January, that’d be a waste of my time as a blogger and your time as a reader. But as the the title states, I do want to revisit my love for short fiction. I have been prompted to write this post because of my recent binge of short fiction reading, which has really reignited my love for this greatly under appreciated literary form.

A short story is a self-contained, miniature work of art. It is short enough to read in one sitting, giving the reader a unified experience that is unbroken. And like poetry, a short story demands a lot from each word, sentence and paragraph. The characters must be developed quickly and the plot must waste no time getting started. I find it somewhat odd, however, that most short fiction isn’t the action-packed work that we find in novels. There are no dramatic chase scenes or gruesome description of murders, at least not in the short stories I read.

During my recent reading of short fiction, I have gotten into the habit of reading one short story at night before going to bed. Or, if a story is really short (ie. only a few pages long), I might read two. There is something very satisfying in reading an entire short story in one sitting. When I close the book on the bookmark and turn off my itty-bitty reading light, I lay in bed and think about the story. I think about the characters. Were they well developed? Did I sympathize with them? One story I read ended with the two main characters committing suicide – a total shock to my more low-key literary instincts.

The plot in short fiction is usually structured differently than in novels. Most short stories span a long scene, or several short scenes. The endings can be rather vague and sometimes just end abruptly, with no real feeling of closure that comes at the end of a good mystery novel (for example) where all the loose ends are tied up and the main character/s go back to their tidy lives.

The characters of short fiction tend to be more like the rest of us, with their imperfections highlighted and magnified. I can usually sympathize with most characters; the good and the bad. Short fiction keeps the cast of characters, well, short! Since most of these stories span only a few thousand words, the story usually focuses on one or maybe a few characters. I recently read one story that followed a small group of teenage girls on their night out in a small town in Colorado. There was no "main character" in that story, rather each girl was different enough to offer something unique to the story as a whole.

While I don’t want this post to turn into a "Characteristics of short fiction" type of post, I’m afraid you might get that impression. But what I have outlined above about plot, characters and even the ability to read a short story in a very small amount of time is precisely what I love about short fiction.

Short fiction is like a small snack – something to hold you over until the larger meal (a novel?). In no way should the comparison to a simple snack diminish the literary and artistic merits of a short story. Even a snack can be a delicacy prepared by a world-renowned top chef. And similarly, a short story can be a work of art written by a literary master.

I can only hope that short fiction regains its former popularity with the reading public, and no longer delegated as a hobby of the literary elite. Given the fast-paced world we live in, I’m actually surprised at the low consumption of short fiction. What better way to spend that forty-five minute train ride into the city each morning than by reading a short story or two? I guess it’s still hard to get people away from those darned celebrity rag magazines and the morning news.

What do you think about short fiction? Do you still read short stories? Do you write them? Do you think the short story will die out or it will see a rebirth sometime in the future? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment!

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