What a short story is

A form without a fixed length

The short story has no single agreed length. A general reference work gives typical word counts of about 1,000 to 4,000 words, with some stories reaching 15,000. Fiction shorter than about 1,000 words is sometimes called a short short story or flash fiction. These figures describe common practice and should be read as ranges: they are not rules that a magazine, publisher or reader is bound to follow, and different bodies draw the lines in different places.^[1]

The oldest practical test is not a word count but a reading time. Edgar Allan Poe, reviewing Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, said that the short prose tale requires from half an hour to one or two hours to read. His point was that a work finished at one sitting can keep what he called the unity of effect or impression, which he thought could not be thoroughly preserved in a work that has to be put down and resumed.^[2]

A general reference work places the classic one-sitting definition in Poe's 1846 essay The Philosophy of Composition. The sources consulted here therefore point to two different Poe texts for the same idea. This guide takes the wording from the review of Hawthorne, which was read directly, and treats the essay as a second place where the idea is credited to him.^[1][2]

Length categories used by prize bodies

Awards need exact limits, so their rules give the clearest published figures. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, which administers the Nebula Awards, defines a short story as fewer than 7,500 words, a novelette as at least 7,500 but fewer than 17,500, a novella as at least 17,500 but fewer than 40,000, and a novel as 40,000 words or more. The bands exist to decide which category an entry belongs in.^[3]

These bands belong to one award for science fiction and fantasy, and the Nebula rules apply them to that prize. The sources reviewed for this guide do not establish a single international standard, so readers should not assume that every magazine, competition or publisher uses the same limits. A work counted as a novelette by one body could be classed differently by another.^[3][1]

Below the short story sits flash fiction. A general reference work puts the usual boundary at stories of fewer than 1,000 words and notes that the same material has also been called the short short story. As with the larger bands, the boundary is a convention used by editors and readers, and the sources do not fix it by any formal authority.^[1]

Where the novel and the short story part

Poe argued that length shapes what a writer can achieve. In his review he held that a novel, because it cannot be finished in one sitting, cannot keep the single impression that a shorter tale can. He asked the writer to conceive a certain unique or single effect first, and then to invent incidents that serve it. In his words, no word should be written whose tendency is not toward the pre-established design.^[2]

Frank O'Connor gave the form its own book-length study, The Lonely Voice (1962), which discusses eleven writers, one to a chapter, from Turgenev to Mary Lavin. Many critics regard it as the first lengthy examination of the short story as a form. Its best-known term is the submerged population group, which O'Connor used for people left on the fringes of society for whatever reason.^[4]

Critics do not agree on what a story must contain. The same reference work records that Somerset Maugham wanted a definite design with a plot, while Anton Chekhov favoured a slice of life and thought that a story should have neither a beginning nor an end. Because critics have taken both positions, a definition that insists on a rounded plot reflects one school of opinion, not a settled rule.^[1]

Frames, collections and linked stories

Many short stories reach readers inside a larger structure. Boccaccio's Decameron, thought to have been written between 1348 and 1353, contains 100 tales told by ten young people who have left plague-stricken Florence. A general reference work notes that both the Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are composed of individual short stories set within a larger frame narrative. In such a book the frame supplies the unity, and the individual tales can be read separately without losing their sense.^[5][1]

A modern collection can also be held together without a frame. James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) sets its stories in Dublin. In a letter to his publisher, Joyce said he chose Dublin because that city seemed to him the centre of paralysis, and that he presented it under four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life, with the stories arranged in that order. Each story can be read alone. Whether such a book is best read as a set of stories or as a single work is a matter of critical judgement.^[6]