Short story

The short story is a form of short fictional narrative prose. Short stories tend to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Because of their brevity, successful short stories rely on literary devices such as character, plot, theme, language, and insight to a greater extent than long form fiction. Famous modern English-language short stories include The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, The Dead by James Joyce, To Build A Fire by Jack London, and A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner.

Length

Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic. A classic definition of a short story is that it must be able to be read in one sitting. Other definitions place the maximum word length (or number of words in the story) at 7,500 words. In contemporary usage, the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no longer than 20,000 words (at one extreme) and no shorter than 1,000.

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Stories shorter than 1,000 words fall into the flash fiction genre. Fiction surpassing the maximum word length parameters of the short story falls into the areas of novelettes, novellas, or novels.

Related Topics:
Flash fiction - Novelette - Novella - Novel

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