A short story is an optical illusion: the hag and then the young beauty and then the hag again, the hag eyeballing you uncannily, the beauty always turning away. A short story is the fin cutting the ocean’s surface that lets you feel and fear the shark beneath a novel’s the entire Atlantic. A short story is a single instrument upon which any piece of music may be played a novel is an orchestra, every song and every sound. It’s like talking to someone who won’t stop doing impressions. As a teacher (as well as a writer), I love metaphor, which might not speak well of me. When I teach, I’m always striving to explain what a short story is, usually by comparing it to something it surely is not. What I don’t know about short stories could fill a book. A diorama in a natural history museum, with painted backgrounds and half a moose and forced perspective. A magic trick (the sort performed by stage magicians, not sorcerers). A nautilus shell, a string of boxcars, a filmstrip, a scene viewed the wrong way through a telescope, a pond, a snow globe. A ticking bomb that must be allowed to explode. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.Ī love affair, or a blow to the solar plexus.
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