Short Story Essay: A Successful Short Story’s Key Ingredients

The distinguished short story writer Mary Lavin once said, “I don’t think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories, but I would like to be a detective and there is a great deal of detection in short stories.” Not having everything neatly and obviously presented is a trait within every great short story. What captivates the reader’s attention in a fascinating short story is not the literal meanings of the words, but the figurative ones. As Mary Lavin stated, the reader must search for the hidden meanings, rather than have them explicitly provided. This is why people read short stories: they want to figure it out by themselves. A memorable short story holds the biggest ideas in the fewest possible words by including theme, symbolism, and great character development.

Deep, complex themes are vital to a successful short story. A short story must be like a spider web, all ideas interconnected underneath the surface to support the main concept that the story is presenting. The Last Lesson, by Alphonse Daudet, is not very long, but holds many elements of theme. This shows that often the most captivating themes in a story exist within the fewest words. The Last Lesson deals with the topic of the Franco-Prussian war, when the small town of Alsace is annexed by Germany. The protagonist, a little boy, hates French school, but once he realizes what life is like without it, he also recognizes that he has been taking it for granted. 

The Last Lesson is a perfect example of theme because the story never says outright that Little Franz misses school once it is over, but the author portrays this feeling by telling the reader about Franz’s internal conflicts. Franz gives a little insight into the theme once he has heard from his teacher it’s his last French lesson. “I wished now to have the lost time back, the classes missed as I hunted for eggs or went skating on the Saar!  My books that I had always found so boring, so heavy to carry, my grammar text, my history of the saints—they seemed to me like old friends I couldn’t bear to abandon.”

Symbolism must be integrated into the theme as thread goes through cloth. There is a symbiotic relationship between the figurative language of a short story and the overall picture those symbols portray. A good short story packs in so much symbolism that it should be read multiple times to understand the full meaning.  Flowers, by Alice Walker, contains many elements of symbolism and the reader must use this rereading approach to fully interpret what is going on. Short stories are short in the amount of words on the page, but each word has multiple meanings. This is why short stories are absorbing, and involved on a figurative level. The notable poet and short story writer Raymond Carver once said, “It’s possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things — a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring — with immense, even startling power.” To read a short story is to pull back the layers of an onion, one by one. Each layer is a piece of symbolism that, when deciphered fully, reveals the heart of the story. 

Great character building is the third, and possibly most important, mark of a successful short story. To achieve full potential in a story, the author needs to show how the character reacts to certain situations, and not explicitly state that character’s traits or motives. A “less is more” approach works best for character building; the character must show the reader who they are by their actions, and not tell the reader who they are. A character must be appealing to read about, the character must be complex, and the short story must show how they change. A boring or static character is an unsuccessful character, and then the story runs the risk of losing its reader.

A fascinating character must have an internal conflict with themself, like Peyton Farquhar in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. Peyton Farquhar is hanged because he is a slave owner, but he also loves his family more than anything. Although Peyton dies in the end, his conflict within himself was resolved because he got what he deserved. This is why this story is so successful; because the internal conflicts that the characters deal with are what readers enjoy reading. No one likes to read a boring story with a dull, predictable character. It just isn’t interesting. 

Superb characters are tough to write because the difference between a flat character and a substantial one can make or break the short story. A character with substance has layers and hidden characteristics embedded in their personality that are implied by the author. These are the greatest characters, because they mimic real people’s traits, and they bear the spark of life. This is what captivates the reader. 

A memorable short story is exactly that: something that sticks in the reader’s head for a long time. To achieve this, the story must resonate with the reader. The story must include a fantastic and complex underlying theme, symbolism that adds depth into the story for the reader, and last, but certainly not least, extraordinary character development. It must have so many layers that the short story is loaded with nonliteral concepts for the reader to ponder even after they have finished reading the actual text. As Karen Russel aptly stated, “In short stories, there’s more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it’s almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.” Short stories are the epitome of imaginative and profound writing.  But what makes good short stories unforgettable is that they do all that in the span of a few short words.