By Saeed Ibrahim
According to Australian author Frank Moorhouse, a short story is like a beautiful handmade toy — a specialised craft requiring talent, originality, creativity and skill. Not surprisingly, many of today’s successful writers have used this medium to launch their professional careers. And for good reason. Short stories have helped them hone their writing skills, develop the writing habit and inculcate a sense of discipline in their writing schedules.
Contrary to what some editors and publishers believe, there is a growing market for the short story. Modern technology has offered a tremendous boost to the short story genre. The short story today can be made accessible to readers in a much quicker time frame and at a much lower cost. With so many online magazines, it’s now cheaper to produce and distribute more short fiction than ever before. This flexibility makes it possible to download a short story on a website, on a mobile phone or on a tablet; and a short story can be read and enjoyed anywhere and anytime – during a lunch break, in a doctor’s waiting room, on a short journey or a commute, or even whilst waiting in a queue!
From the reader’s point of view there are several other advantages to a short story. One of the major strengths of the short story lies in its brevity and compactness, providing a punch that is so different from a novel. The theme of the story, the setting, the plot, the characters, the conflict, the turning point and the resolution are all contained in a short space. And it is precisely this compactness that makes this form of writing so appealing. A short story provides a quick and easy read from start to finish in a short period of time, and often in a single sitting. In the words of Neil Gaiman, “Short stories are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.”
Apart from that, because of the media overload in today’s world, our attention spans are shrinking. This is why it is important to condense the message in a short and concise form that catches the attention of the reader and stimulates his curiosity. They could be a way towards inculcating the reading habit. They are great for reluctant readers, slow readers or anyone intimidated by books.
The lasting power of the short story is so well illustrated in the fact that many famous and successful films and television series were based on short stories. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for instance, was an award-winning film inspired by F Scott Fitzgerald short story of 1922 and released 86 years after the original story was written. Malgudi Days was made into a television serial of 54 episodes and four seasons and had become a household name in India. It was inspired by a series of 32 short stories written in 1943 by celebrated author, RK Narayan.
So if you are an aspiring young writer, the short story would be a good means of kick starting your writing career. We all have a story inside us waiting to be told. And who knows, that yet to be written masterpiece may well find its way to a block buster series on Netflix!
Saeed Ibrahim’s family saga, Twin Tales from Kutcch, and his book of short stories, The Missing Tile and Other Stories, have had successful runs both in India and overseas. He continues to write newspaper articles, travel essays and book reviews for various Indian and international publications.
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