Elements of a Short Story
http://www.articlesdirectory.org/articles/27242/1/Elements-of-a-Short-Story/Page1.html
Tarang Bhargava
By Tarang Bhargava
Published on 21 April 2008
Short stories offer you plenty of freedom and self expression. They aren’t as length as other types of works and they can be about your own experiences and include your own opinions. As a result you will have fewer issues with credibility when it comes to verifying the information. You don’t have to do much research when you are talking about your own experiences in life.
Short stories offer you plenty of freedom and self expression. They aren’t as length as other types of works and they can be about your own experiences and include your own opinions. As a result you will have fewer issues with credibility when it comes to verifying the information. You don’t have to do much research when you are talking about your own experiences in life. Even if you are making up the short story you won’t need to do research.
Even with all this freedom though there are some basic elements to a short story that you need to cover. You want to keep the focus of the story on one plot and you want to have a limited number of characters involved. You don’t want to have several sub stories taking place that will unfold later on. This is more of an element that is saved for large novels. Short stories are precise and to the point.
A short story needs to have a beginning, a middle, a climax, and an ending though. You can make the introduction of the story very short but you need to make sure it captures the attention of the audience early on. If they don’t find the beginning interesting enough they may not continue reading the short story at all. The story should unfold into the middle of the story. You want the climax of it to come right before the end.
The end of the short story needs to wrap everything up into a nice and neat package. You will want to leave the reader with a conclusion to your short story. They shouldn’t be expecting to turn the page and find more from the point where you left off. Many short stories have an ending that leave the reader to process what they think about the topic on their own as well.
The length of a short story is quite varied. An average page of writing has about 500 words on it. Those readings that are more than 20,000 words may not be categorized as a short story. This comes out to roughly 40 pages but some are a little bit longer and still fall into this category. It really depends on where it is published. Some short stories are only a page or two long but that makes them more than just an article.
Even with all this freedom though there are some basic elements to a short story that you need to cover. You want to keep the focus of the story on one plot and you want to have a limited number of characters involved. You don’t want to have several sub stories taking place that will unfold later on. This is more of an element that is saved for large novels. Short stories are precise and to the point.
A short story needs to have a beginning, a middle, a climax, and an ending though. You can make the introduction of the story very short but you need to make sure it captures the attention of the audience early on. If they don’t find the beginning interesting enough they may not continue reading the short story at all. The story should unfold into the middle of the story. You want the climax of it to come right before the end.
The end of the short story needs to wrap everything up into a nice and neat package. You will want to leave the reader with a conclusion to your short story. They shouldn’t be expecting to turn the page and find more from the point where you left off. Many short stories have an ending that leave the reader to process what they think about the topic on their own as well.
The length of a short story is quite varied. An average page of writing has about 500 words on it. Those readings that are more than 20,000 words may not be categorized as a short story. This comes out to roughly 40 pages but some are a little bit longer and still fall into this category. It really depends on where it is published. Some short stories are only a page or two long but that makes them more than just an article.