How Long is a Short Story?

Sometimes regarded as a minor form the short story can be as lyrical as a poem and as rich in human insight as a novel. So what exactly makes a story 'short'?

Welcome Readers, to the fourteenth issue of ‘What’s the Story’?

These days I’m (pre)occupied with the annual Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge. It’s my first attempt at this project whose goal is to write 50,000 words in a month. In principle that means writing 1,700 words a day with a view to building a daily writing habit. While I might not reach the daily count I have clocked up about approx. 8,000 since last Wednesday.

Day 3 of nanowrimo - written on a bus journey

My friends tell me I’m mad to be attempting it but that’s nothing new.

So, what’s in a word count? For sure, not every word is the right word and the right one is often hard to pin down. Fifty thousand of them may not a novel make but they’re a start, especially, if like me, you think as you write or write before you think (this is sometimes inelegantly described as ‘pantsing’ – writing by the seat of your pants).

When I began writing in earnest I wrote short stories, many of which were published in journals and anthologies. However, all along I had the notion that I must write a novel. My first two attempts were failures and have long since been consigned to the great shredder in the sky. I persevered stubbornly until I had one published. The next one went nowhere and the one after that I published last year.

Seeing my frustration with this agonising slog my father said I should write more short stories but being pig-headed and arrogant I wouldn’t rest till I had a novel under my belt. The trouble, I realise, having published two, is that, naively, I had regarded the short story as somehow being a warm-up for the novel. I imagine that is like saying a sprint is good training for a marathon.    

Over recent weeks I have renewed my appreciation of the short story form, prompted in part by instructive and informative discussion of the form in George Saunders’ Story Club here on Substack. The other impetus to my revisiting the form was the annual short story competition run by the Irish national broadcaster, RTE. This year there were 1,700 entries and ten shortlisted stories. These are available to read or listen to on RTE Short Story Award Shortlist.  I commend them to you for their variety and flair.

A couple of weeks ago a writer friend sent me back to Samuel Beckett’s hilarious story ‘Dante and the Lobster’:

Now the great thing was to avoid being accosted. To be stopped at this stage and have conversational nuisance committed all over him would be a disaster.

For Hallowe’en I sat down with Sheridan Le Fanu’s nightmarish ‘Green Tea’. I have to confess I laughed, or at least smiled wryly, when I had finished. There is a macabre comedy in the story which I had not grasped first time around.

For a book club meeting I read a volume of stories by the Sicilian writer, Maria Messina, Sicilian Girls, each one a vignette of the situation of women in Italy a century ago, anticipating the territory covered by Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Claire Keegan’s stories are so popular that Faber and Faber has published a very slim volume, So Late in the Day, containing just three, in time for the Christmas spree. Yet, some years ago, publishers complained that a collection of short stories was a hard sell. That was obviously never the case for Alice Munro.

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Why this ambivalence around the merits and marketability of the short story? Does it reside in the word ‘short’, which is so often a pejorative term as in short change, short measure, shortcoming, fall short, short circuit? Do readers feel cheated by the short story? And how short is short? The average word count is often an arbitrary number fixed by editors of magazines, online journals and competitions.

In The New Yorker stories are ‘typically’ between 2,000 and 10,000 words, which is generous. The RTE short story competition, like most other competitions and publications, requires between 1,800 and 2,000 words. These limits, however, are a matter of expediency, dictated by the space and time available to the publisher. It can be, and has been, reasonably argued that Ulysses is a short story, and in an online discussion of Louise Kennedy’s, Trespasses, participants agreed that it too could be described as a short story. Conversely, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding is a series of interlinked short stories that might be considered a novel. Ditto Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which is sold as a novel.

If brevity is not the soul of a short story – despite the moniker – what is?  Joyce preferred the term ‘epiphany’ referring to a single transformative event in the life or self-knowledge of the protagonist. His collection, Dubliners, traces the arc from childhood to maturity, the boy in ‘Araby’ becoming Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’. Both characters are shamed into recognition of their pride and vanity, the boy when he overhears a flirtatious conversation, Gabriel when his wife tells him of the boy who died for love of her. The pivotal event in Ulysses is the encounter between Bloom, mourning his dead son Rudi, and Stephen in search of a more worthy father than the bowsy Simon Dedalus.

Photo by Vincent Guth on Unsplash

One of the readers of What’s the Story? alerted me a while back to Donald Barthelme’s 1966 story ‘The Balloon’, for which I am grateful. It is surreal, fantastical and has been interpreted in many ways. For our purposes the large, beautiful, balloon which stretches over a large swathe of Manhattan might be the amorphous form of the short story:

It was suggested that what was admired about the balloon was finally this: that it was not limited, or defined.

. . . more and more people will turn, in bewildered inadequacy, to solutions for which the balloon may stand as a prototype, or “rough draft,”

One of the great satisfactions of the story is the openness of its form. This in turn makes re-reading a delight because a good story, like a good poem, will yield new meanings or apprehensions on each pass. Trying to extend a short story to a longer form is rarely successful. For example, while I enjoyed Jennifer Egan’s standalone story, ‘Found Objects’, I found myself wearying of the cleverality of the subsequent stories/chapters that made up A Visit to the Goon Squad.  (Egan would counter my comment by pointing to the rave reviews and prizes the book garnered. I wonder had it been sold as a collection of stories would it have attracted the same attention?)

Being of indeterminate length a story can be experimental (like Barthelme’s) or have the scope of a novel, without some of the longeurs of that form. My copy of Borges’ stories in English is titled Ficciones as if to avoid the embarrassment of the term ‘short story’, although there is technically no reason not to use that designation.

Joyce’s epiphany is only one definition. When I first read Munro’s stories I was frustrated by their vague endings. Re-reading them made me realise that is part of her skill. She does not hammer home a point or wrap up the characters’ lives in a neat parcel. We are brought into a moment in their lives and must assume they continue after we have turned the last page. Perhaps the real epiphany is in the reader, who puts aside the story feeling somewhat altered, moved, enlightened.

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It is often thought that writers in a new state prefer the short story form, as if it is equivalent to an infantile stage in human development. This is the reason cited for the proliferation of short story writers in the early years of Irish statehood (also for the number of books dealing with childhood experience), Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, Padraig O Conaire, Liam O’Flaherty, and, of course, James Joyce. But novels, poetry and plays were being written at the same time, and later generations have given us many talented short story writers such as William Trevor, John McGahern, Bernard MacLaverty, Julia O’Faolain, Maeve Brennan, Kevin Barry, Claire Keegan.

While many esteemed novelists have started out writing short stories, (Nadine Gordimer, Ian McEwan, John Updike) and others have oscillated between the two, the forms should be regarded as separate and distinct just as fiction and drama are. After all, Chekhov is as beloved and famous for his stories as for his plays.

What I have learnt the hard way is that there is no shame in writing a short story. It is not a lesser form or preliminary sketch for a novel but a wonderful medium in itself. For the rest of this month I will pursue the NaNoWriMo project in short sections approaching each as if it might be a standalone story. There I feel more at home, particularly because of the freedom the form offers to play with or bend convention, a strategy that is far more difficult to sustain, while keeping the reader on board, over 80,000 or 100,000 words. In this instance the constraint of a word count makes for a creative tension which I’m hoping will be productive.  

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Thank you for reading ‘What’s the Story?’ Don’t forget to tell your friends about it!

Is anyone else here taking up the NaNoWriMo challenge? If so please share your experience here, and if not tell us what you think of the short story form.