What Makes a Good Short Story free essay sample

Short story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing we can be sure of – the present moment. ’ This is a quote from short story writer Nadine Gordimer; referring to how the art of short story writing is to get straight to the point and write everything as it is. This is an art and those who cannot perfect it should admire it instead. Edgar Allan Poe – ‘In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the pre-established design; and by such means, with such skill and care, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it†¦ a sense of the fullest satisfaction. ’ Edgar Allan Poe is saying that no time should be wasted at the start of the short story and that the reader should be taken directly into the action, wasting no time in describing the layout, but leaving that to be unrevealed later on in the story. We will write a custom essay sample on What Makes a Good Short Story or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page A short story doesn’t necessarily have to be a short read. A short story is a snippet of a person’s life that goes into great depth of detail and grasps the reader’s attention and imagination from the very first word. A great example of earning the reader’s attention in the first sentence come from R. K. Narayan’s ‘A Hero’, where the first sentence is ‘For Swami events took an unexpected turn. ’ Because of this you know there is going to be a twist in the story, but you don’t know when and this sets up the whole story as throughout it the reader is thinking about what is going to happen next and they can’t be sure how the story is going to end. This is a great way to keep the reader interested throughout the story and makes a change to those predictable stories, where you can guess the ending before you’re even in the last paragraph. Unlike a novel writer the writer of a short has the freedom to take time to describe and create a clear picture of the scene he’s trying to set. This therefore means that the use of adjectives and colours are essential tools for the writer, helping to describe each and every smallest detail of the scene creating a world, in which the reader can join in and see with their imagination. When reading ‘A Hero’ we can just picture the second sentence where ‘Father looked over the newspaper he was reading under the hall lamp’. This is because of the description of where he was and father like most fathers is sitting there with his arms outspread reading the newspaper, and most people would be able to relate this to a member of their family or someone they know, making this sentence easier to picture. This sentence also suggests to the reader that the father is quite overbearing, checking up on his son, even when reading the newspaper. This is easily relatable to the reader as most people have an overbearing sibling or parent in their life, and can therefore picture the character and scene with little effort. The nature in which the story is written can have a great effect on setting the mood for the story. The short story itself should bring out all the emotions of the reader, using humour and other techniques. The emotions should be changed quickly from one to another, thus giving a short story its gripping effect. R. K. Narayan perfectly uses the reader’s emotions and changes them in an instant, from scared and sad to happy using humour. He does this in lines 102 to 106 in ‘A Hero’, with the text ‘He realised that the devil would presently pull him out and tear him, and so why should he wait? As it came nearer he crawled out from under the bench, hugged it with all his might, and used his teeth on it like a mortal weapon†¦ ‘Aiyo! Something has bitten me. ’’ This is describing the moment when Swami was scared for his life as he thought the devil had come into where he was sleeping, to kill him, but it was actually a burglar. With the burglar screaming ‘Aiyo! ’ it brings a smile to the reader’s face when at first it showed concern. This is an example of changing the reader’s emotions in a matter of a few seconds and it has a positive effect on the feelings towards the story. The story has to have a fast pace to it, meaning that there are no slow starts or moments of the book where the reader can put it down. This means that there should be something humourous, exciting or out of the ordinary that will keep the reader gripping the book and hoping that the story will never end. R. K. Narayan uses irony cleverly in his short story to keep up the fast pace and to keep the reader smiling. The best example of irony R. K. Narayan uses is the actual title of his short story, ‘A Hero’. This is due to the fact that throughout the story there are two examples of boys who are not heroes, but are quite hilariously the opposite: cowards. At the start of the story Swami’s father reads to him an article from his newspaper, reading ‘News is to hand of the bravery of a village lad who, while returning home by the jungle path, came face to face with a tiger’ and then the article goes on to describe the fight the boy endured with the tiger and his flight up a tree, where he stayed for half a day till some people came that way and killed the tiger. This boy was by no means a hero, but a coward who just survived his encounter with a tiger by climbing up a tree and with luck some people came along, who managed to kill the tiger. The second example of his not-so-much ‘a hero’ was Swami himself, where in the extract used earlier he was forced by his father to sleep in his office, away from Swami’s grandmother. Whilst being petrified in his father’s office a figure came into the room, who Swami was convinced was the devil, coming to kill him. As it came nearer he crawled out from under the bench, hugged it with all his might, and used his teeth on it like a mortal weapon†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ This figure cried out in his hysterical screech of ‘Aiyo! ’ and was then caught by Swami’s father, cook and servant who dived on the intruder. ‘Congratulations were showered on Swami next day. His classmates looked at him with respect, and his teacher patted his back. ’ He was treated as such ‘a hero’ as the intruder he had bitten into the flesh of was ‘one of the most notorious house-breakers of the district’. This is ironic, because although it is true that he had helped to catch ‘one of the most notorious house-breakers of the district’, he had acted out of fright rather than out of heroism. This effective title which uses irony is very clever and is very good in giving the reader positive feelings towards the short story. The characters in the short story are an essential key to its success and the message or story that the writer is trying to get across. The reader wants to know everything about these characters; their characteristics, what hey look like, what they’re like as a person and how they can change the story in some way thus helping to keep the writer’s options open. Although the characters need to be interesting and keep the reader hooked by their imagination they have to also be realistic and in some ways relatable to the reader. This will help the reader to picture the character and hopefully they can relate them to a real life person they know, thus giving them someone to compare the character to and maybe picture them as. A character is usually shown through the dialogue and in the way the character behaves and what he does. An example of one of R. K. Narayan’s great characterizations is of the Grandmother of Swami. R. K. Narayan characterizes the Granny very well in ‘A Hero’. He does this by making her easily relatable to the reader, as he does with most if not all characters. He portrays the granny as the grandmother who loves her grandson very much and loves to treat him, but is also unintentionally embarrassing and occasionally annoying. He gives the reader a picture of what the granny is like in some of his sentences from lines 39 to 52; ‘Granny was sitting up in her bed, and remarked, ‘Boy, are you already feeling sleepy? Don’t you want a story? ’’, and this shows that she is very caring for him, like most grandmothers are. Another passage which helps us to picture her is ‘Swami threw himself on his bed and pulled the blanket over his face. Granny said, ‘Don’t cover your face. Are you really very sleepy? ’ Swami leant over and whispered, ‘Please, please, shut up, granny. Don’t talk to me, and don’t let anyone call me even if the house is on fire. ’ This shows how the granny’s persistence is annoying Swami as he doesn’t want to speak to her and this is relatable to the reader, as there have been times in everyone’s lives when they just don’t want to talk to anyone and there is always that person who keep s trying to talk to you. The book should always keep the reader’s mind at work, never letting them have time to think about anything but the setting, the scene, the characters and what they think is going to happen next and this brings it perfectly on to the most important part of short story writing. Don’t let the reader know what is going to happen next. Make them expect the unexpected. Keep them hooked at every word and every sentence from the very first word to the very final letter, because that is the key to a successful short story. To do this there must be a twist, something totally unexpected that the reader wouldn’t have ever guessed would happen. The twist could be humourous, there could be a moment of suspense building up to it, it could have been sad, but whatever the twist is the reader must not know how the story is going to end. The placement of the twist is absolutely vital to the story. There may be more than one twist during the course of the story, but your final or only twist should come in the dying pages or paragraphs of your gripping and well constructed short story, which uses so many techniques to keep the reader indulged until they realise that they’ve lost track of time and are late for a meeting or to take the dinner out of the oven. That is what I believe makes a good short story. In ‘A Hero’ the twist, in the story, is also very humourous as well as being unexpected. The night after Swami’s ‘heroic’ act of biting the notorious intruder the reader, as well as Swami’s father believes that Swami will become a grown up boy and will from then on sleep by himself and no longer with his grandmother, but the is what the conversation between his mother and father reads: ‘Where is the boy? ’ ‘He is asleep. ’ ‘Already! ’ ‘He didn’t have a wink of sleep the whole of last night,’ said his mother. Where is he sleeping? ’ ‘In his usual place. ’ By his grandmother’s side we can only assume and this is the humourous twist to the story, and it is not the most hilarious bit of writing known to man but it’s enough to amuse the reader and a great way to finish off the story, leaving the reader with a positive mood. R. K. Narayan as well as being a v ery powerful writer, bringing out all the emotions of the reader, has the ability to write from Swami’s voice, making the story very believable and very realistic. He really captures the reader’s imagination and he makes it as if Swami has written it himself. R. K. Narayan also uses the technique of placing a story within a story, which is very clever and quite hard to do, to make it fit in with the storyline. He does this at the start of the whole short story, where the father talks to Swami about the article he read in the newspaper, about the boy who survived coming face to face with a tiger. This technique also brings the reader further into the story, making their imagination wander and work almost twice as hard to picture it. It is a very powerful way of engaging the reader into the short story. R. K. Narayan really perfects the art of short story writing. His precision and detail whilst writing are what every writer dreams of mastering. ‘A Hero’ is semi-autobiographical, as the main character Swami, a 10 year old, cricket loving boy, who finds comfort sleeping by his grandmother’s side, is based on the child R. K. Narayan was when he was 10 years old. His success I believe comes from him writing about his own experiences. This helps him to picture the scene he is setting and describe it to every single tiny detail. A short story of his which I have studied is ‘A Hero’, a part of his series of books ‘Malgudi Days’. This is a series that he has written from his own experience about the life in India, changing the names of certain locations and people. In his short story ‘A Hero’ R. K. Narayan is very successful in portraying his main character of Swami. He is successful in portraying Swami as he writes from something he knows very well and that is himself. Writing from own experiences and things you know about well give you a great advantage in short story writing. R. K. Narayan is able to write about what Swami would say and how he would act so well, because it is infact based on himself when he was younger and this makes his portrayal of Swami so successful.