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Short Stories, a la Shmoop. Let’s say you’ve got about 200 hours to

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kill.

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A novel might be a nice way to pass the time.

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At least until someone comes to rescue you from that desert island.

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But what if you’ve got some big plans this evening…

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…and you just need a smaller dose of fiction to while away the minutes?

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Short stories are little nuggets of literature…

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…chewable tablets of plot, character, theme and setting…

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…that take all the best parts of novels and shrink them down into pocket-sized morsels.

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You know how the smaller versions of candy bars are called fun-size?

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Yeah, it’s like that. However, short stories aren’t merely…

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shorter.

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Writers haven’t zapped full-length novels with a shrink ray and miniaturized the darn

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things.

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Short stories are their own animal. Rather than taking chapters and chapters to

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flesh out characters and develop plot…

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…short stories don’t have that luxury…

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…so they generally have a very different purpose than novels do.

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They usually center on a single incident or event…

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…and are intended to reveal something significant about human nature…

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…or at least get us thinking about it.

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Many short stories revolve around an epiphany…

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…an ah-ha! moment that occurs when a character realizes some essential truth about the situation,

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or just about life itself.

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Maybe they just discovered the meaning of life…

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…or maybe they realized that they look better with the red lipstick than the pink one.

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Either way, the physical, emotional or spiritual journey the character has been on finds some

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sort of resolution.

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And you can always be sure that there’s something pretty deep going on below the surface.

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In other words… it’s not about the lipstick. Even those stories without a recognizable

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epiphany follow a common plot arc.

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Our protagonist starts out upholding the status quo…

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…until something or someone upsets the balance.

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You’ll find that conflict is much more entertaining in fiction than in real life.

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Once that conflict has been introduced…

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…the character must deal with it, sometimes successfully and sometimes… not so much.

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In the aftermath of their actions, there is usually a bit of denouement, or resolution.

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It’s sort of like the cool down after an exhausting workout.

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The greatest or most successful short stories are often anthologized…

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…in other words, they appear in anthologies, or collections, that either highlight the

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best stories of that year…

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…or of a particular genre…

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…or of all time.

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Better make sure your bookshelf has been reinforced if you purchase that one.

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Novels are great for the beach… or for your desert island…

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…but short stories are a great way of mixing things up and satisfying your short attention

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span.

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Which, incidentally, is why we’re going to wrap this video up now…

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…before you get bored and start looking up cat pictures.

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