The Beauty of a Short

There is so much beauty in a short story. People think I'm crazy, but it's true! Just take a moment to think about all the character history the author has in his head and think about how he really wanted the story to end. Of course, you'll never know any of this. But that's the fun: the guessing. Does the dragon slayer live? Does the girl kill the guy who showed up in her house? Did those people really just get into a car crash and die?

Those are the questions I have at the end of amazing short stories. The ones where you want to throw something, anything, at the wall because they end in the most fantastic and frustratingly beautiful spots. People can die in less than three pages. They can fall in love, they can have an epiphany.

A short story with a crazy ending

And you don't have to know anything about the characters to appreciate the writing. You could have an anonymous character and still feel like a part of you dies when the last period is placed. Or maybe the author left off in the middle of a sentence. That's always fun!

Maybe my sense of fun is a little bit skewered.

Reading short stories is entertaining, but so it writing them. There are pros and cons to writing a short story. It's much easier to just come up with scenes of a character's life and highlight that one moment that makes for a good story. For a novel, you have to come up with a whole world and a whole plot, with a beginning, a climax, and an end (or a thrilling cliffhanger). The length of a short story is easy and can be done fairly quickly. Unless you scrap it seventeen times.

However, sometimes a short story feels too short. You want to fall in love with your characters and your world, to make them your best friends and your worst enemies. You can't develop them in a short story, or tell your readers about their strange obsessions with foreign cheeses, especially if your story is about fighting a unicorn.

But at the same time, sometimes you can't get attached to the characters, because they all die. This is tragic, but you can usually learn a lot when this happens.

A short story where everyone dies but you learn a lot (Disclaimer: everyone dies.)

And then, of course, there are the really really weird short stories when you have no idea what happened, and might be a little grossed out. There are probably exponential amounts of stories like these on the internet, but I haven't read any that come to mind. I'm sure you could learn from those too though, if you tried.

That's where the true beauty lies. When you read a short story and discover something about the world, or others, or yourself. When you are the one who falls in love and has an epiphany. That is what really makes a short story beautiful.