Part Two—What are Short Short Stories?
Short short stories have also been called "sudden," "flash," "micro," "postcard," "skinny," and "minute" stories. I choose to use the title short short stories for this unit as that moniker has been around for hundreds of years—think Aesop's Fables (Shapard and Thomas xii). Authors such as Kafka, Chekhov, Borges, and Hemingway have written short short stories. One of Hemingway's forays into the sub-genre uses only six words. It reads, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" (Earle). This has since spawned an off-shoot of short shorts that rigidly adheres to word counts such as "nanofiction" in which no more or less than 55 words must be used and 69ers using 69 words.
Word count is the ultimate test of whether a piece is a short story or a short short story. Short short stories have been tagged to have a maximum of up to 1,999 words. Short stories generally have 2,000 words and up (Answers.com). The minimum is widely agreed upon as no fewer than two words (Earle). For this unit, the word count range will be 500 to 1,000 words. This will allow students to write a substantial amount for those who are wordier, while keeping true to the form.
Still what is a short short story? Irving Howe writes in Short Shorts that the stories can be distinguished, not just due to number of words, but because they are, "fiercely condensed, almost like a lyric poem" (ix). Short short stories pack two-tons of explosives in their brief span. They show a slice of a pie, but in that slice, the best is jammed in. The story does not have time for full character development, elaborate plots or description, and extraneous words. Every word, phrase, and sentence must be absolutely important to the flow of the story. Howe also notes that a writer of short shorts must "be especially bold. . .[and] There's often a brilliant overfocussing" (xiii-xiv). The writer must place the reader in the story within the first line. Nothing else will suffice. Still not sure? I will elaborate further.
Roberta Allen in her book, Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes attempts to define short short stories with, "Almost every author of short shorts seems to have a particular way of defining them. Even the qualities of brevity, unexpectedness, and intensity, which I present here as the unique qualities of the very short story, may not be agreed upon by all those who write them (11-12)." Allen is correct in that one of the difficulties of defining short short stories is that there is no canonical description.
However, Charles Baxter in his introduction to Sudden Fiction International feels that not being able to define short short stories is what makes them unique. He states, "I have the liberating feeling that the form of the very short story is far more mysterious, more multi-faceted, than I have made it out to be. . .they are between poetry and fiction, the story and the sketch, prophecy and reminiscence, the personal and the crowd. As Stuart Dybek has said, no one is sure what they are or even what to call them. Which means that, as a form, they are open, and exist in a state of potential" (25). The rawness, the creativity, and the uniqueness that short short stories can enflame is what sets them apart and will interest students in trying to craft such stories.
Ultimately, the best way to understand what is a short short story is to begin reading them. There are many e-zines on the Internet that specialize in publishing only short short stories. I have included their websites in the additional teacher resources section of this unit. I also recommend reading the following short short stories, many of which can be read on the Internet through Google or Yahoo. They are excellent for use in the classroom. My favorites include: "The Nincompoop" by Anton Chekhov, "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche, "Blindsided" by Don Shea, "Space" by Mark Strand, "August 25, 1983" by Jorge Luis Borges, "A Sick Collier," by D.H. Lawrence, "Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood, and "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid.
Finally, I would like to clarify a few general writing guidelines for short short stories that all the definitions include. They are: the piece must use an economy of words (in this case 500-1,000), there must be a beginning, middle, and end arc, and something dynamic must happen. I want to also include Allen's insistence that poetic elements such as: compression—realizing that less is more, significant details/images—use of metaphors and similes, sculpturing—pruning words, phrases, and sentences, and careful word choice needs to be included. I feel the addition of poetic elements will be more challenging for students as well as create the opportunity to either teach new writing skills or reinforce them.
Marriage of Short Short Stories with the Episodic Format
While I was familiar with short short stories, I discovered the idea to use them in the classroom through the National Writing Project's book, Breakthroughs: Classroom Discoveries About Teaching Writing. In the book, Pen Campbell and Dan Holt write that they successfully use episodic short short stories in their high school and college classes. The format especially intrigued me as Campbell and Holt note that short short stories, especially when used in an episodic fashion, show, "similarities. . .[with] the nonlinear communication that is becoming more and more prevalent in our digital age. Internet sites, magazines, and even textbooks present a mosaic of information on each page, encouraging a randomness of order through which students move with increasing adeptness" (83). While the format of a short short story may seem challenging to students, the economy of words due to text messaging, IMs, and e-mail is something they are already willingly and unconsciously undertaking. However, they are winging it—writing without any guide or rules, stringing along a story.
Campbell and Holt have developed a set of more rigid guidelines, from which I will borrow a few to add to the previous list (economy of words, beginning-middle-end arc, something dynamic happens, and use of poetic elements) in order to provide a more comprehensive set of guidelines for students. The additional guidelines are: pieces should vary in length, the works need to be chronological, a unifying element such as a motif must be present in all the pieces, and the stories are bound together through the use of a central theme (Ibid). I would also like to add my favorite writing rule, which is: once all the rules are mastered, then it is time to break them. I have created a sample assignment sheet that includes all of the rules for this portion of the unit, and labeled it Appendix B.
The Campbell and Holt article can be accessed through the National Writing Project's on-line archives of the journal, "The Quarterly." Go to National Writing Project's main website, choose "Publications—The Quarterly," select 2001—Volume 3, and the entire article is available. I recommend reading the examples of episodic short short stories included in the article. They are excellent for use in the classroom.
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