Īs William Boyd, the award-winning British author and short story writer has said: They may also attempt to resist categorization by genre and fixed formation.
Short story writers may define their works as part of the artistic and personal expression of the form. Flannery O'Conner emphasized the need to consider what is exactly meant by the descriptor short. Sukumar Azhikode defined a short story as "a brief prose narrative with an intense episodic or anecdotal effect". In his stories, Chekov does not round off the end but leaves to the readers to draw their own conclusions. It should just be a "slice of life", presented suggestively. This view of the short story as a finished product of art is however opposed by Anton Chekov who thought that a story should have neither a beginning nor an end.
EASY ENGLISH SHORT STORIES WITH BIG IDEAS FULL
Hugh Walpole had a similar view: "A story should be a story a record of things happening full of incidents, swift movements, unexpected development, leading through suspense to a climax and a satisfying denouement." Somerset Maugham thought that the short story "must have a definite design, which includes a point of departure, a climax and a point of test in other words, it must have a plot".
Some authors have argued that a short story must have a strict form. Wells described the purpose of the short story as "The jolly art, of making something very bright and moving it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or profoundly illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen to fifty minutes to read aloud." According to William Faulkner, a short story is character driven and a writer's job is to ".trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.” A classic definition of a short story is that one should be able to read it in one sitting, a point most notably made in Edgar Allan Poe's essay " The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). ĭetermining what exactly defines a short story has been recurrently problematic.
The short story is sometimes referred to as a genre. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella/short novel, authors generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques. Short stories make use of plot, resonance, and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser degree. The short story is a crafted form in its own right.