5 Short Short Stories Every Writer Should Read

to be a good writer you know you have to write a lot but also read a lot and this can be a problem in today's hectic world where everything is going on all at once and finding time to read finding energy to read finding the attention to spend to read can be a ton of work not to mention find time to read and write so if you were to like pick up a novel right now how many months might pass before you finish it I'm lucky in that I'm an English teacher So reading is actually part of my job but I still have to squeeze and fight to find time to read stuff on my own the good news is that you don't need to read War and Peace how thick that thing is you don't need to read War and Peace to get something out of your reading that can help you with your writing you can find techniques to help you as a writer from Reading one single well-written short story a short short story at that so if you want a place to start here are some suggestions these are five short stories they're all well known pretty well known relatively well available should be able to find them in any anthologies you can probably find most of them if not all of them for free somewhere online pretty easy to find and I've taught these stories to my English class and my creative writing class and I've seen eye-opening revelations in both of those classes from reading these stories and I read them over and over again myself to help with my own writing so even though these are very short stories whatever genre you write whether you're writing short stories or flash fiction or novels or novellas or screenplays or mini screenplays TV shows whatever your genre of Storytelling you're going to find something to help you in this little collection the first story on my list is one you might have heard of it's by Ernest Hemingway it's called Hills like white elephants and this is a story that I give to both my literature classes and my creative writing classes relatively early in the year but one Hemingway's A good author to introduce early on but for another it really does help in terms of creative writing it helps my creative writing students to see an example of a writer who can write about an important subject about two people talking about an important subject with nobody naming that important subject it teaches writers how to not be on the nose if you're reading like a writer you'll start to understand how to put two and two together by reading this piece it also does a very creative thing with a shifting point of view a generally objective point of view shifts at one point for the end of the story and that changes the entire perspective of the story so if you're reading carefully reading like a writer you should be able to get a lot out of films like white elephants Hills like white elephants by the way just to sum up the story it's two people a young man a young woman young married couple on vacation in Europe having a conversation at a train station and the conversation gets somewhat heated over the topic of their conversation which again is something that they never name one sampled from the story The Girl stood up and walked to the end of the station across on the other side were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro far away beyond the river or mountains the shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees and we could have all this she said and we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible again highly recommend Hills like white elephants you can find it just about anywhere guys enjoy that one the next short short story on my list is Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin and this is a wonderful story for teaching you how to use dramatic and situational irony Rheumatic irony is when the reader or the audience knows something that the character or at least one character in the story does not know so we know something that the characters don't that's dramatic irony that plays a big role in Story of an Hour as does situational irony which is the irony of surprise basically it's when your expectations have been built up to be subverted in some way to be in some way Twisted not the subversion of expectations that we see nowadays where basically it tries to violate everything you've come to expect but where you're set up to expect a certain thing to happen and something very different happened is that was set up subtly underneath right the opposite of what you expect happens and it makes sense in retrospect looking backwards but looking forward it was a complete surprise It came it didn't come out of nowhere but it did surprise you that's the situational irony and again Chopin uses both of these by the way in Story of an Hour the whole thing starts with the death of woman's husband supposedly dies in a train crash and they have to break the news to her and the whole story is about her reaction to this news it was like what elephants have been written in the 1920s or 30s I believe uh Story of an Hour would have been written around the turn of the 20th century around 1900. from Story of an Hour there was something coming to her and she was waiting for it fearfully what was it she did not know it was too subtle and Elusive to name but she felt it creeping out of the sky reaching toward her through the sounds the sense the color that filled the air I'm moving a little later on into the 20th century we have the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes thank you ma'am this is again a very simple straightforward realistic story of a boy who tries to rob a woman of her purse on the street at night and it doesn't exactly work out for him the way he expects what you can really learn from this story and again it's only about three pages long two and a half pages really short story but this story has a character Arc its main character the boy who does a stealing he has a whole Arc that you can follow this can show you how to create a character Arc create a character change in a learning moment for a character in a very short time span in a single scene essentially it's about two scenes is what the the story is made up of there's one real scene that covers the meat of the story and that's where the character goes through his entire Arc so read it for that nothing else sweat popped out on the boy's face and he began to struggle Mrs Jones stopped jerked him around in front of her put a half Nelson about his neck and continued to drag him up the street when she got to her door she dragged the boy inside down a hall and into a large kitchenette furnished room at the rear of the house she switched on the light and left the door open the boy could hear other rumors laughing and talking in the large house some of their doors were open too so he knew he and the woman were not alone the woman still had him by the neck in the middle of her room the next piece we're diving back into the 19th century with the celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain and with the celebrated from Calaveras County does is for one it kind of shows you how to tell a story as if you were telling a story like a verbal story and it does a great job with character voice also character dialect really to write and dialect you want to be dialects that you understand Mark Twain was a master of dialect because he lived in so many different places and he talked and talked to and knew so many different people they had a lot of different dialects down pat most of us don't have other dialects down pat we tend to stereotype when we do other dialects so it's not necessarily going to be the best book to learn dialect from but character voice making characters sound different from each other you will really learn a lot of that from reading the celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County you'll also learn how to use character voice and the dramatic irony coming from a first person narrative to create humor in a story this whole story is framed by one narrator telling a story told to him by another narrator so we have our main character narrator who writes in a pretty formal way pretty educated elevated way introducing how he heard the story from this character named Simon Weir and then he tells us the main body of the story and Simon Wheeler's voice and Simon wheeler is a character he sounds very very different than our narrator Simon wheeler backed me into a corner and block hated me there with his chair and then sat down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph he never smiled he never frowned he never changed his voice from the gentle flowing key to which he tuned his initial sentence he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity which showed me plainly that so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story he regarded it as a really important matter and admired its two Heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse I let him go on in his own way and never interrupted him once and just to get you give you a little taste of what Simon wheeler sounds like well there was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley in the winter of 49. maybe it was the spring of 50. I don't recollect exactly somehow but what makes me think it was one or the other was because I remember the big fool weren't finished when he first came to the camp but anyway he was the curiousest man about always betting on anything that turned up you ever see if he could get anybody to bet on the other side if he couldn't he'd change sides anyway that suited the other man would suit him anyway just so as he got a bet he was satisfied so we've got a pretty interesting narrator telling us about an interesting character telling us about another interesting character it's quite a framing device these are all various techniques you can pick up from Twain and then last but certainly not least we have Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart and I teach this story every year I love this story it's one of my all-time favorite short stories I read this uh to my son as a bedtime story when he came to visit me one time when he was about seven or eight years old I got a call from his mom a week later telling me that he hadn't slept in a week thanks a lot for reading him The Telltale Heart my bad but it is that kind of story so from Poe you will learn again you'll learn a lot about voice about narrative voice and about dramatic irony in narrative voice because the narrator the first person narrative The Telltale Heart does not understand things the way you or I might understand them I understand the world the way we understand the world and so dramatic irony there building up of suspense building suspense adding that element of fear creating that mood of pure Terror at the same time we're mixing humor in with dramatic irony which leads us to one of my all-time favorite lines from any work of literature if you still think me mad you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body so I hope that gives you a good heads up for where you might start for reading short stories reading fiction that's going to help elevate your writing down the road and make sure you're reading closely and reading like a writer and trying to apply the techniques you're learning as you're using them each of these stories I just recommended can be read in 20 minutes or less even if you're not a very quick reader and each one if you read them carefully read them several times ideally and mark them up you read them with a careful eye they will make you a better writer hope you enjoyed this guys if you have any of your own suggestions for short stories or short Works to read that might help one write better please leave them in the comments below and if you have any other suggestions for things for me to review for topics for me to touch on please though leave those in the comments below as well and like the video subscribe to the Channel all of that good stuff and until then good luck good writing and good reading peace foreign [Music]

Channel: Creative Writing Corner

Views: 111,157

Keywords: creative writing, fiction writing, screenwriting, scripting, storytelling, wordcraft, wordplay, character, setting, mood, theme, novel writing, writer's block, drafting, revision, writing, write, writer, author, short stories, story ideas, how to write, authortube, tone, diction, syntax, style, voice, plot, story structure, setup and payoff, fixing writing, write better, playwriting, poetry, poetry writing, songwriting, publishing, self-publishing, pov, story writing, dialogue writing, essay writing

Id: KnLierBwyQA

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023