on short stories

From An Audience of Four: Writing for Yourself and Others Allen Hibbard C. Stories

“Short stories in particular often seem to be about . . . complicatedly difficult things,” Richard

Ford writes in his fine introduction to The Granta Book of American Short Stories: “What final

difference does it make if you act one way or another; what’s your whole future worth once a

deed’s been done; is what I did good, bad or somewhere in the middle; based on what I read in

this short story, how should a person act in other such situations? How do people actually feel in

comparison with how convention tells us they feel?” (xiii). After noting his preference for

stories that make ample use of language and strain his credulity, ones he could not imagine

writing himself, ones that take him into a world he otherwise would not have known, ones that

take unpredictable and surprising turns, ones whose events matter like life and death, he boldly

asserts:

I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace

out there there exists an urgency—a chaos, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which

can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found,

this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being

readers. (xx-xxi)

Ford’s compelling remarks suggest why this genre has been so popular. From the consumer’s

point of view, short stories are meals we can eat in one sitting, an attribute ascribed to the genre

by Edgar Allan Poe. What parameters must a story fit within? “Length itself is problematic,”

Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

(which I have often used for classes). “No more than 10,000 words? Why not then 10,500?

11,000? Where, in fact, does a short story end and a novella begin? (Tolstoy’s “Death of Ivan

Ilych” can be classified as both.) . . . My personal definition of the form is that it represents a

concentration of imagination, and not an expansion; it is no more than 10,000 words; and, no

matter its mysteries or experimental properties, it achieves closure—meaning that, when it ends,

the attentive reader understands why.”

We might also ask, on the other end, how short a short story can be? Lately very short

stories—flash fiction, sudden fiction, micro fiction or micro stories—have enjoyed a good deal

of popularity. These short forms depend upon compression and condensation. How much can

we pack into a small amount of space? What can we do within these restraints? One story I

have taught with great success, “That Settles That”—by Terry L. Tilton and published in 1909,

was submitted and won a prize for a contest for stories limited to 55 words, collected in The

World’s Shortest Stories, ed. by Steve Moss, and included in Bedford Introduction to Literature.

Tom was a handsome, fun-loving young man, albeit a bit drunk when he got into the

argument with Sam, his roommate of just two months.

“You can’t. You can not write a short story in just 55 words, you idiot!”

Sam shot him dead on the spot.

“Oh, yes you can,” Sam said, smiling.

The story raises questions about what constitutes a word, as well as what exactly happens in the

end.

For both reader and writer, the short story draws our attention to matters of time. Stories

take less time to write than a novel; they also often (but not always) cover a shorter span of time.

Very often, we think of a short story as encompassing the most important day, event, or even

minutes of a person’s life. We become aware of how a moment can radically alter the course of

a life (e.g., Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour”). Some stories, though (like novels), cover large

expanses of time. or how a character traverses a longer span of time. James Baldwin’s much-

anthologized “Sonny’s Blues” and Annie Proulx’s “The Mud Below,” for instance, cover

decades—moving closer to novel, often with flashbacks and disjunctive chronological shifts. The

former tells the story of an older brother’s relationship with his younger brother, an African

American young man who struggles with addiction, alienation and incarceration in his quest to

find a meaningful place for himself—as a jazz musician; the latter follows the life of Diamond

Felts as he decides to become a rodeo rider, moving rather nomadically around the western

plains, riding bulls and coupling with women along the way, haunted by questions about his

absent father.

The narrator of Mark Budman’s story “The Diary of a Salaryman” covers about 40 years

of his working life—from first job, till retirement, in roughly 300 words. The story’s brevity, and

repetitive qualities, emphasize how quickly a life can go by, and how work can force us into ruts,

how children grow up and produce their own children. The lessons or effects are similar to those

of Gary Snyder’s memorable poem “Hay for the Horses,” in which the narrator recounts a short

story of pitching hay with an older man who tells him:

"I'm sixty-eight" he said,

"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.

I thought, that day I started,

I sure would hate to do this all my life.

And dammit, that's just what

I've gone and done."

We can easily find ourselves in ruts. Time passes, within the blink of the eye, and there we are,

still in the same place, unless we think consciously and find ways to make changes. (Is Snyder’s

poem a story? We might ask.)

I have managed to write a number of short stories, a handful which were collected and

published in Arabic under title “Crossing to Abbassiya,” in Damascus in 1994 by Dar Mustaqbal

(Realm of the Future), then republished in the spring of 2021, by a publisher in Jordan, under the

title Line in the Sand and Other Story. The title story of the first edition, written decades ago and

set in Cairo, has enjoyed a bit of life, reprinted in anthologies and circulating in Arabic and

Hungarian as well as English. It begins: “Mustafa Abd el-Salaam set out that morning, very

pleased with himself.” It ends: “And their bursts of laughter rose, for a moment or two, above

the shrieks and screams.” If I know where a story begins and where it will end, I can connect the

dots. I just need to sit down and write the story. It might take just a morning, or a weekend, or

months.