(Written by the author of the short story collection, Marriages are Made in India, published by Publerati.com, USA, in May 2012 and the novel, The Tailor’s Needle, published by Penguin India in December 2012)

It is so heartening to note that the Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to a short story writer. With Alice Munro acknowledged as worthy of the prize, the short story is likely to start breathing again. This was badly needed because there was a growing tendency among publishers to leave out short stories from the lists of books they accepted for publication in the last few years. Only those collections generally found the favour of publishers that came in a package with successful novels. Commercial considerations had begun to eat into the life of literary talent. But with this great insight of the judges for the Nobel Prize for Literature, literary talent is likely to flow in the right direction once again.

Why is the short story such a significant form of literature? This form can be considered the counterpart (in prose) of the pithiest form of literary expression – poetry. Like a poem, a short story slips out of the writer’s self in a moment when he has had an intense vision or experience that needs to be put into words. When the story is really good it is a soul revelation. It is the kind of concentrated expression which the novel can hardly claim to sustain. The best short story is therefore by definition short. There can be long short stories also but the longer they are the further they go from the purity of the genre. If a story is longer than 5000 words it can still be great but it will then not be doing justice to the single emotion that it is supposed to sustain. It will lack in its unity of expression. By this phrase I mean that expression which results from the whole being, the writer who has fully impersonalized his subjective experience. This kind of unity, between the internal and the external worlds of the writer, cannot hold on for too long. The best short stories will take the reader into the consciousness of the writer because in creative moments the right metaphors flow out of the consciousness of the writer. Metaphors can be considered to be as immediate as the consciousness itself. The moment an idea swims into the consciousness of a writer the creative mind finds its matching metaphor, symbol or image.

The short story writer does use narrative but that narrative is held together by the creative vision. Hence the role of extended plotting, that one finds in a novel, is much less present in the short story. With plot coming into the story in a big way there will be more craft. The craft of fiction is therefore more visible in the novel. In a short story there is more art and less craft. The novelist needs to keep up the endeavor to sustain the plotting for a much longer time than the short story requires.

The short story often requires a twist at the end, or the need to surprise the reader before he calls it a day because mere soul adventure will not be enough to satisfy his curiosity. For that the short poem is the medium.