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Updated: May 1, 2025
=Problems of Short-Story Construction.= The initial problem of the writer of short-stories is to find out by intellectual means the one best way of constructing the story that he has to tell; and, in order to solve this problem, there are many questions he must take up and decide.
The economy of means that it demands can be conserved only by rigid restriction of structure; and the necessary emphasis can be produced only by perfection of style. The great masters of the short-story, like Poe and Hawthorne, Daudet and de Maupassant, have all been careful artists: they have not, like Thackeray, been slovenly in structure; they have not, like Scott, been regardless of style.
The point to be remembered, therefore, is that the two different types of brief fiction are to be distinguished one from the other not by comparative length but by structural method. Bearing in mind this limitation of the subject, we may proceed to a further study of the strict short-story type.
"Single Narrative Effect."= Because of its succinctness, this sentence needs a little explanation. A narrative effect necessarily involves the three elements of action, characters, and setting. In aiming to produce a narrative effect, the short-story, therefore, differs from the sketch, which may concern itself with only one of these elements, without involving the other two.
Novel, Novelette, and Short-Story The Novel and the Novelette The Short-Story a Distinct Type The Dictum of Poe The Formula of Brander Matthews Definition of the Short-Story Explanation of This Definition: 1. "Single Narrative Effect"; 2. "Greatest Economy of Means"; and 3.
While the Novel cannot get on without love, the Short-story can. Since love is almost the only thing which will give interest to a long story, the writer of Novels has to get love into his tales as best he may, even when the subject rebels and when he himself is too old to take any interest in the mating of John and Joan.
=Style Essential to the Short-Story.= And this leads us to the general consideration that even a perfectly constructed story will fail of the uttermost effect unless it be at all points adequately written.
A boy, if he loves his father, usually wants to follow in his professional footsteps, and in the case of Richard, he had the double inspiration of following both in the footsteps of his father and in those of his mother. For years before Richard's birth his father had been a newspaper editor and a well-known writer of stories and his mother a novelist and short-story writer of great distinction.
It follows that the novelist requires an experience of life far more extensive than that which is required by the writer of short-stories. The great novelists have all been men of mature years and accumulated wisdom. But if an author knows one little point of life profoundly, he may fashion a great short-story, even though that one thing be the only thing he knows.
=Definition of the Short-Story.= On the basis of these theories, the present writer essayed a few years ago to formulate within a single sentence a definition of the short-story. Thus: The aim of a short-story is to produce a single narrative effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis. =Explanation of This Definition: 1.
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