An Argument for Short Stories

Short stories are not as popular as novels, they say. Anthologies are less profitable and sell less well. Yet, anthologies sold pretty well in the past — as did short stories in general. Most of the Sherlock Holmes canon is in short-story format, so is all of the Father Brown canon. Authors like Dorothy Sayers or Margery Allingham did both short stories and novels about their heroes as well. The question is do anthologies sell less well because people aren’t interested or do they sell less well because there’s not many of them around and people therefore flock to other formats? After all, with the rise of e-books, where the page number doesn’t matter, novellas have risen to success as well.

Every type of story — novel, novella, short story — has its own challenges and advantages. A short story allows for less window-dressing, for less additional stuff.
Usually, a short story has only one plot thread, while novellas and novels can — and usually will — have several. This means that a short story can focus much more on a specific theme or motive, because all will revolve around a specific plot line. Where a novel could never consist of only three scenes about a specific theme, a short story can do that.
In a short story, control of the language is far more important than in a longer story. You have less words to work with, so every word counts for much more than in a novel. That is challenging in the beginning, but it can be very satisfying in the long run. The little perfection of a well-told short story can be immensely satisfying for both the writer and the reader.
A short story is more ‘on point’ — which some people love and others don’t. On the other hand, a short story has far less detail and doesn’t allow for too complicated a plot, either. As mentioned above, every word counts. So does every scene. A short story is generally ‘tighter’ than a novel or novella, having more action and development in less space.

One thing about short stories, though, is not to be underestimated: they’re short. This means that if you’re travelling a lot, if you’re commuting to and from work every day, for instance, you can have a small ‘snack’ while you do that. You can read one story in an anthology much faster than a novel of similar length to the anthology. Even if all stories focus on the same characters, each of them is contained and includes a full plot arc from beginning over middle to end. Reading one or two stories during the commute means not having to wonder about what will happen next in your novel, because you’ve read the end of those stories already.
Those short stories can be connected by a story arc, but they can be read fully in a much shorter time than a full novel. Novel series also contain a story arc running through all of them, after all. It’s not just something for a set of short stories, but it is something which can be applied to them as well.

Short stories are not to be underestimated, either. Many people think that you should ‘start’ writing with short stories, because they are not that long, then slowly expand to novellas and novels. As a matter of fact, a novel or novella is far more forgiving when it comes to writing than a short story is. A short story is tightly crafted, making every word count, creating a very dense experience for the reader.
Just because something is shorter that doesn’t make it easier to write. If you have ever composed a telegram (or, more modern, a Twitter tweet), trying to say as much as possible with as few words as you can, you will know what I mean. Sometimes, a short story is far more challenging to write than a four-hundred-pages novel.

Today, it’s possible for everyone to publish their short stories, either as anthologies or simply as shorts. With e-books and self-publishing, the way is wide open. The bottleneck of the publisher who doesn’t want to publish anthologies can be averted.
When you publish a set of stories, it doesn’t necessarily have to be an anthology, either. Epistolary stories are bigger stories told through an array of short stories. That’s a format I have discovered recently and which has proven useful for a few ideas I had before, but couldn’t really fit into a novel or novella format. Sometimes, different things which happen need to be seen in a more isolated way than a chapter of a novel (or even a part) or a novella within a set of several. A short story can be a very good choice there.

A short story is also a very flexible format. It includes everything from a piece of flash fiction with about 500 words up to a longer story with a little below (or even above) 20,000. 20,000 words are already a lot and can craft a much more impressive and powerful narrative than 500 — but in the hands of a master, a five-hundred-word flash story can be just as powerful.
It’s easy to focus on very short narratives and think everything which can’t be put into two or three scenes is too big for a short story, but that is not the case. 20,000 words are a lot — well used, they can give a lot of depth and a lot of action to the narrative. They can certainly give you a story of about 15 to 20 scenes, too (the average scene I write is somewhere between 800 and 2,000 words), and 15 to 20 scenes can tell a long story.

In the end, what you prefer to read or to write is up to you. All I’m saying is give short stories a chance. Try them out, see where they lead you, whether you love reading them and whether you enjoy writing them. If you do, don’t let others pull you away from them. There’s a place for a lot of different media on the market.