This week I read a short article called, “Surprise! The Role of the Unexpected In Short Stories” by Amor Towles. If you have not read his books, you are missing out. I enjoyed A Gentleman from Moscow and The Lincoln Highway. He served as a judge of this year’s O. Henry Prize – The Best Short Stories 2024 Winners. He states: “For a variety of reasons, surprise is less significant in our experiences of the novel. After all, the description of the book is typically included right there on the dust jacket.”

Think back to the last time you read a short story. Here are some of my favorite short stories. I have taught most of these stories, or I am teaching them right now. 

• “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe
• “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell
• “The Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin
• “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner

*Spoiler Alert- I still remember reading “The Lottery” in school and being horrified by the “probable impossibility” of townspeople stoning a selected member of the community to bring good luck to the upcoming harvest. Stoning to death! Such a surprise in that story when reading for the first time. 

When we are reading the first sentences of a short story, we are usually in the dark. Unlike novels, sometimes we do not know where or when the story is taking place. We don’t know the characters. We don’t know the narrator. We don’t know the tone. With a well-told story, the more ambiguous, the better. As Towles points out, “Our discovery of each of these elements as we read the story will provide its own little jolt of surprise.”

The author of a short story must choose carefully, like a poem, the words. This brevity has been described as “closely observed moments.” Towles defines this perfectly: “We experience surprise differently in the novel than we do in the short story because of textual dilution…We can be surprised by a turn of events, by something a character says, by an allusion, an image, or a word. But a novel is made up of a plethora of actions, hundreds of images, and tens of thousands of words.”

Sometimes, we forget about short stories! Once I find an author that I enjoy immensely, I search to see if they have a short story collection. I can check it out at the library or order the collection.

What makes a great short story? What is that “probable impossibility” that makes a short story unique?

Evocative Setting: The setting can be a living, breathing character that shapes the characters and drives a plot. Take the short story “The Thing In The Forest” by A.S. Byatt. The forest is described in this beautiful, creepy way. As readers, we are not sure what is coming next, but we can infer it must be something scary or evil. Byatt writes:

“They begin to hear the small sounds that were there. The chatter and repeated lilt and alarm of invisible birds, high up, further in. The hum and buzz of insects. Rustling in dry leaves, rushes of movement in thickets. Slitherings, dry coughs, sharp cracks…creepers draped with glistening berries, crimson, black and emerald, little crops of toadstools, some scarlet, some ghostly-pale, some a dead-flesh purple, some like tiny parasols…and some like pieces of meat protruding from tree trunks.”

A Distinctive Narrative Voice: The narrator is our witness. Can we believe the narrator? Is the narrator reliable? The narrator shapes our beliefs about the characters. Have you read The Tell-Tale Heart? This vicious narrator is unreliable and desperately tries to convince his audience that he is not insane. He is one of Poe’s most iconic narrators, and this story has been analyzed over and over to understand his technique. 

Theme: The short story has many more elements, but the last one I will write about is theme. The theme or themes in a short story require the reader to draw connections and see a larger message. It’s the takeaways you would want your readers to discuss for years. Each sentence should be compelling. Readers will feel connected to the characters (or horrified) in some way even if they have not experienced the events in the story. 

Some of my favorite short story collections:

• The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr
• The Anthropocene by John Green
• Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Lakota Way by Joseph M. Marshall III
• Table for Two by Amor Towles
• The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

Think about your next book club read. Maybe choose a short story collection.

What is one of your favorite short stories? Could be a favorite your grandpa told you, or even a fairytale!