Talk:Short story

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The short story, as a form in writing, is prose writing of less than 20,000 words (and usually more than 500 words) which may or may not have a narrative arc. If it is more than 20,000 words it is a novella or a novellete

[and then some more numbers]

Where are these numbers coming from? Who is the authority on how long a short story is? Surely "short story" is really a very vague term, and an attempt to codify its length is a bit artificial, isn't it? Furthermore, what do you call one if it's less than 500 words (some of Kafka's are that short)? I think I'll just rewrite the opening to this article if nobody else does - the only reason I bring it up here is because it's survived since at least last September, so I wondered if it might make more sense than it appeared to. --Camembert

In the Scifi/fantasy/horror field short story is normally defined as sub-7500. -Imran
The numbers are clearly presented as ballpark figures. Marketability has historically defined a short story. Old Weird Tales magazines advertised "Three Full Novels Within" when the texts only covered a total of fifty pages. Salinger's "Inverted forest" appeared in Better Homes and Gardens as a "novel" but it was only forty five pages long. And Lethem's book THIS STATE WE'RE IN published just this past year by McSweeney's Books was a fifty page hardcover that made no claim as to what kind of story it was, long or short. No body has ever seriously tried to define these terms. Kafka called his short short stories fables, sometimes sketches. Irving referred to Rip Van Winkel and all of the others in THE SKETCH BOOK as "sketches and tales". This is one of those cases where we all agree there should be an entry (The Short Story) but virtually anything you say about it would be an opinion, including there lenghth which defines it AS a short story as opposed to something else. --Trimalchio

Contents

[edit] Famous short stories: Halo, by Bill Gates

Come, now, this can't be serious. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.235.83.248 (talk) 12:12, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] History needs cleaning

The history section is rather informal and wandering.

Let me see.*Looks at history of discusion.* I dont see annything that is "Too much." *Looks at history of article.* O_O HOLY CRUD! -darkmewham

[edit] really, really short stories

Is there an article on even shorter stories ? (other than haiku)

the 100 Words project "All daily entries must be 100 words in length. Not "approximately" or "almost"--but exactly 100 words. Proust noted that poets often create their finest work under the tyranny of rhyme. So it goes with 100 Words." http://www.mirabilis.ca/archives/000073.html http://100words.net/

stories that are exactly some power of 2 in length -- 2 words (!), 4 words, 8 words, 16 words ... the 256 word story being the most common http://www.storybytes.com/info.html

Micro Fiction, in which each story was no more than 250 words. The World's Shortest Stories, limiting each story to exactly 55 words. http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Andy/Nanofiction.html


Quick Fiction is a literary journal, founded in 2001, featuring stories and narrative prose poems under 500 words. http://quickfiction.org/


I vaguely remember some short of short literary form of some exact number of words (I forget exactly) that was supposed to be a hobbit hobby ...

What about the phrase "short short story"? e.g. http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/shorts.shtml, www.shortshortshort.com, and quite a few books with this in the title... There is a wikipedia stub: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_short_story

[edit] More

I removed the paragraphs on Alfred's Chronicle and Bede's History as both of those works are historical and not fiction, and despite their status as early books of length they really have no place in this discussion.

Also a bit of the sentence on printing (do we need to know what Defoe did for the form without citing any examples? or other authors?) and tried to clean up a bit of the first section, regarding length. There are enough definitions on what constitutes a "short story" that 1-20,000 words should satisfy most everyone. More than 20,000 and you're looking at a novella.

I so sarded going through anything else. --Wangoed 01:49, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] A Christmas Carol

I removed the link because by even Wiki's def., it is a novella- at over 28,000 words. I went to an online site, copied and pasted into word, and hit word count. Someone may want to cite it in novella entry.Iago Dali 01:01, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

I also removed Billy Budd. I love Melville, but at ~23k it deserves to be in the novella section. Iago Dali 14:13, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm somewhat okay with this removal even though a case could be made for these being examples of longer short stories (I've never been a fan of the novella genre). Still, if you are taking them out please insert the info on the novella page. If you don't, I'll do it when I get a chance.--Alabamaboy 14:37, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps you should add both titles under novella as adding links seems to be controversial these days. While I can go along with such nebulousness, Wiki itself seems to believe 20k is the ss limit, in numerous entries. Red Darwin 15:40, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Where do such rules come from anyway? Red Darwin 15:41, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Links Limits

As there seems to be some quandary over links-- both number and essense, would it be wise to institute an upper limit on those here. These seem reasonable, but should perhaps ten or twelve should be all that there is? Red Darwin 15:46, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Word Counts

The entries for novel, short story, novella, novellette, etc. all seem to conflict in regard to word count. I realize others may feel this gives credence to the conflict, but is there any source--pro or con--that can be cited, so that all these genres can at least be in Wiki accordance? If someone then disputes the Wiki claims at least they will not be able to point to internal confusion. Red Darwin 15:51, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

The figures may overlap, but I think it just goes to show that the difference between a short story and a novella for example is more than simply word count. Emphasis on character development as opposed to story, or how it is written for example. Damien Shiest 04:07, 27 October 2006 (UTC)


Vegiville is an unusual village filled with clowns, vampires, and regular people. In Vegiville, the people are getting ready to go trick-or-treating. Even the slowest person in Vegiville is ready and his name is Vampire Dave. He has gotten enough packs of blood for snacks and emergencies. This is the 1000th annual celebration of Halloween. The mistakes always come from the scientist named Kristin who is afraid of clowns. One year, she made a pair of glasses that are not able to see clowns. This year she is going to make a potion, an anti-clown potion. She has to be very careful because if she mixes up the ingredients she will bring destruction to the village (by destruction it means that she will delay the celebration). The inventor, Andrea has made a statement that anybody who makes this potion will be helped to overcome this fear but the scientist does not know that. The scientist Kristin started making her potion. It was finished but she mixed up the cauliflower with the rewolfiluac. When she found out that the ingredients were mixed, she threw the potion in Queen Swirka’s underground home. The potion spilled on her daily cough medicine. When the queen’s servants and guests found out that she was drinking the poison cough medicine, they knew that the scientist made it but it was too late. The potion was started to make queen sleep walk to the graveyard to call upon the people who passed away and turned them into clowns to help whoever made this potion to overcome her/his fear. From the scientist’s clown tracking device she found that the clowns from the graveyard were heading toward her way. Her tracking device told her that they would be there at 10:00 P.M. and that is two hours away. She quickly stuffed everything in her shoe-size basement and blocked all the entrances and exits. She was staring at the tracking device to see where they are. She was also looking for her time travelling remote so she could leave this world, but the remote has disappeared. The clowns were here. They decided to go one in five minutes. The first one was Jenni, her friend that was in a car crash. She turned into a clown because she knew Kristin when she was ten. Jenni followed what ever she did. “ Please stop. I want you to go away. You know that I HATE CLOWNS! Anyway, how did you get in?” “ I came in the breach in the roof. The inventor that made that potion controls me to help you overcome this fear,” said Jenni. The next ghost came in and said she was Leah, a pen pal. Every one of them came after her because they were tired of waiting. They followed what ever the scientist did. They HAUNTED her. When she was cornered, she thought of a phrase that her father said, “fight your fear”. So she started fighting the ghosts. They felt the pain and the scientist did the punching continually. She made them fade away by forgetting about them and by making them hurt. They went in the jar where Dave store all his snack packs of blood and stole all his packs of blood because they wanted to live the 1000th annual celebration for Halloween. That made the Vampire mad and he scared them all away. He had to make the all over again. After that Queen Swirka had returned back fine. The scientist was never afraid of clowns. The village finally had a Happy Halloween celebration!

~ a student from bls, HR:227 (JSY) September 30, 2005

thank you for the cool story

[edit] Title formatting of a short story

I believe I learned in school that a short story's title is placed within quotation marks, not italicized. Before I go through the trouble of making this consistent in this article, is there any objection or other rationale? Not to be draconian, but consistency is helpful and avoids confusion. SidP 23:59, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

confirmed at: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(titles)#Quotation_marks

[edit] Examples

Why was Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" arbitrarily removed? What makes the current selections worthy and not that one? It's all subjective, but of course "The Call of Cthulhu" was discussed in university literature classes I attended, not just sci fi conventions. There's no reason to remove viable examples important to well-known genres.

[edit] Examples 2

Is Brokeback Mountain a short story? Haven't read it but it seemed quite a big book.

[edit] Famous short stories

Previously, this article's lists of famous short stories were fairly disorganized. I've tried to improve this by combining notable famous stories into one list; I've included a link to each story's wikipedia article and a link to an online text version of each story. I've also alphabetized the list by author. What do the rest of you think of the content and the format of this list? Personally, I think we should try to keep the list fairly short. Also, I'm not 100% happy with the formatting I've come up with: a bulleted, linked list with links to (online text) in parentheses. Is there a prettier way to present this information?--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back 08:59, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chekhov?

Pretty nice article thanks, though methinks it could be longer :). Just wondering if the omission of Chekhov was deliberate, and if so, why so? I'm no literararian so no idea which of his stories is the 'best' to put on here, but even the article on him (Anton Chekhov) here (wikipedia) hails him as the 'apotheosis' of the genre, so I'm figuring he should get a mention in the short list. I would do it myself, but, erm, I wasn't sure how to do the linking and suchlike. He should def be there though.

[edit] Short stories from blogs

Can wikipedia also sumarize the contents of short stories on Internet Blogs (it does sumarize Fan Comics,like "Grim tales from down bellow"). New Babylon

[edit] new aurtuor

i'm working on a new storybook for kids ages 10-13, non-fiction. do you think it would be successfull?

Sir aaron sama girl 00:02, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't the place for this.--SUIT 23:09, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] the shor story

in a world where novel s arecosidered great literature one must ask if the short story still has a future ,if the old fables are just simply out dated and that the inventivness of big books has now shadowed the once noble short story.Novels shoud be considered when chossing something that will be used to teach hsstudents .As a writer I belive that iam considered a ant among giants [my colleagues].Since i started writing my story people have been increaseingily saying the short story is dead ,that an there no moneyin writing them.is this true[link title —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.152.227.226 (talk) 17:32, 7 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Famous short stories

This section seems entirely arbitrary - what criteria, if any, is being used to determine what should and should not be in this section? Proto::► 13:29, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

The section is a sampling of famous short stories. If one opens different literary anthologies (world lit, sci-fi, and so on), these stories will be in them. There's is nothing NPOV about listing those stories which general scholarship has deemed worthy of being noted. To address your concern, I changed the head to "A selection of famous short stories." Unless you can state why this is NPOV, the tag should stay off.--Alabamaboy 01:38, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
Do you have any evidence to back up this broad and sweeping assertion that it's these stories specifically, and not any others? Unless you can prove it's not NPOV by producing a reference, the section is suspect, surely? Proto::► 10:16, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Hence the word "selected," but if you prefer we could use the word "sampling." I can produce a reference showing that almost all of the stories on that list (except for a few obscure ones like the "The Mortal Immortal" by Mary Shelley, not sure who added that to the list) is reprinted in a literary anthology of note. The list doesn't pretend to be the end all and be all of important literary short stories; instead it is a "selection of famous short stories." Instead of labeling the entire section NPOV, say which stories either shouldn't be on this list or which stories should be added and state why. The article is not complete without providing a few samples of famous short stories. How is that NPOV? While it would be easy to grab a world literary anthology and list all the stories they list, I prefer the way this list has been developed--by editors here adding and subtracting stories until a consensus develops. But if you prefer the list to be from one anthology (or combined from several), let me know.--Alabamaboy 17:40, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Garfield and Friends

Why does the reference to the Garfield and Friends episode keep getting deleted? It's there for disambiguation purposes. Anthony Rupert 05:17, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

The reason was explained in my edit summary.--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back 06:53, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
I read that edit summary, but did you see my point? It's there for disambiguation purposes. If a user wants to create a new article but they do a search and then discover that the name they want to use is already in use, most users then usually use an otheruses template to disambiguate their new article from the other article with the same name. In short, if you think my point doesn't apply, then you must feel the same way about everything (and I mean everything) in the disambiguation category. Anthony Rupert 15:43, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Sure, but we all must use sound judgement when weighing the relative likelihood that a user would search for the obscure page you are trying to disambiguate. If the likelihood is extremely low, then the dab statement adds needless and distracting clutter to the page. I recommend you seek a third opinion.--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back 15:49, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Disambiguation makes articles less obscure, you know. And how is one good faith line at the top of an article considered clutter?
And when you say "sure", do you mean you don't see where I'm coming from, or you do see my point but you just don't agree? Anthony Rupert 03:53, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree with The Fat Man Who Never Came Back.--Alabamaboy 01:39, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citations!

This article is in desperate need of in-line citations. Most of this can be questionable, such as the history and origins of the short story. At one point, a name is mentioned as the first professor of dramatic literature which is too specific to not be cited. Frankly, this article can't be taken seriously without lots and lots of references.
As far as the list of famous stories, it really is arbitrary and it's hard for any Wikipedia editor to be a definitive authority on what should or should not be included. My suggestion would be to have a "See also" link to the Short Stories Category and leave it at that. More notable short stories are listed throughout the article and I'd be comfortable with that serving as "notable" examples. Thoughts? --Midnightdreary 12:47, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Repeated text

This article constantly repeats itself, most notably, the first paragraph of the article and the first paragraph of the 'length' section. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.64.106.21 (talk) 05:14, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] False "Famous Short Story"

"Rugrats go to Stalingrad" by Draco Malfoy doesn't exist. Draco Malfoy is a character from the Harry Potter novels, and the title of the story is obviously ridiculous. Can someone delete this from the "Famous Short Stories" section? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.0.73.69 (talk) 10:41, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Gross Omission

How is it possible to have an article on the short story without any mention of Guy de Maupassant? Eliezg (talk) 09:56, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 4 wives

THE 4 WIVES


There was a rich merchant who had 4 wives. He loved the 4th wife the most and adorned her with rich robes and treated her to delicacies. He took great care of her and gave her nothing but the best.

He also loved the 3rd wife very much. He's very proud of her and always wanted to show off her to his friends. However, the merchant is always in great fear that she might run away with some other men.

He too, loved his 2nd wife. She is a very considerate person, always patient and in fact is the merchant's confidante. Whenever the merchant faced some problems, he always turned to his 2nd wife and she would always help him out and tide him through difficult times.

Now, the merchant's 1st wife is a very loyal partner and has made great contributions in maintaining his wealth and business as well as taking care of the household. However, the merchant did not love the first wife and although she loved him deeply, he hardly took notice of her.

One day, the merchant fell ill. Before long, he knew that he was going to die soon. He thought of his luxurious life and told himself, "Now I have 4 wives with me. But when I die, I'll be alone. How lonely I'll be!"

Thus, he asked the 4th wife, "I loved you most, endowed you with the finest clothing and showered great care over you. Now that I'm dying, will you follow me and keep me company?" "No way!" replied the 4th wife and she walked away without another word.

The answer cut like a sharp knife right into the merchant's heart. The sad merchant then asked the 3rd wife, "I have loved you so much for all my life. Now that I'm dying, will you follow me and keep me company?" "No!" replied the 3rd wife. "Life is so good over here! I'm going to remarry when you die!" The merchant's heart sank and turned cold.

He then asked the 2nd wife, "I always turned to you for help and you've always helped me out. Now I need your help again. When I die, will you follow me and keep me company?" "I'm sorry, I can't help you out this time!" replied the 2nd wife. "At the very most, I can only send you to your grave." The answer came like a bolt of thunder and the merchant was devastated.

Then a voice called out : "I'll leave with you. I'll follow you no matter where you go." The merchant looked up and there was his first wife. She was so skinny, almost like she suffered from malnutrition. Greatly grieved, the merchant said, "I should have taken much better care of you while I could have !"

Actually, we all have 4 wives in our lives

a. The 4th wife is our body. No matter how much time and effort we lavish in making it look good, it'll leave us when we die.

b. Our 3rd wife ? Our possessions, status and wealth. When we die, they all go to others.

c. The 2nd wife is our family and friends. No matter how close they had been there for us when we're alive, the furthest they can stay by us is up to the grave.

d. The 1st wife is in fact our soul, often neglected in our pursuit of material, wealth and sensual pleasure

amy —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.217.59.156 (talk) 13:15, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] external link for "The Killers"

This is a link to the full text of Hemmingway's story "The Killers"

http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/hemingwaykillers.html

I tried to add it, but unfortunately XLinkBot reverted it, because it's a dumb robot.

- 38.97.106.165 (talk) 21:39, 27 February 2008 (UTC)