A special awareness of the author-audience relationship
characterizes the short-short fiction genre. Narrative theory
and reader-response criticism has taught us that all forms
of written fiction require the reader to concretize the
worlds, characters, situations, and events implied by the
author's text. Reading is a constant process of filling
in "gaps with essential or likely events, traits and
objects which for various reasons have gone unmentioned"
(Chatman 28). This process has a special significance in
short-short fiction, a genre that asks readers to contend
with more frequent and larger "gaps" in the text
than do short stories or novels. Because of the limitations
imposed by its brevity, a short-short requires the reader
to make a relatively large number of inferences during the
reading experience. The text of the short-short usually
contains much less information (or much less written information)
than a typical longer work. Therefore, one of the first
challenges faced by the short-short writer is efficiency:
how he can best stimulate the reader with a limited amount
of information.
We often refer to Hemingway's very short fictional pieces
as models of compact and efficient writing, especially heavily
anthologized works like "Hills Like White Elephants"
and "Indian Camp." In Death in the Afternoon,
Hemingway advises, "If a writer of prose knows enough
about what he is writing about he may omit things that he
knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough,
will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though
the writer had stated them." This is Hemingway's theory
of omission, famously completed by: "The dignity of
movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it
being above water." Omission-or, more accurately, selective
omission-has particular importance for the short-short writer.
It suggests a principle by which he can pare down his fiction
to its most compact shape, but still retain the core content
he means to convey to the reader.
This strategy of omission, however, also creates some
of the trickiest challenges the short-short fiction genre
poses. How does the short-short writer decide what to
omit from a fiction? What are the things "he [the
writer] knows"? How precisely does the reader feel
those same things when the author doesn't write them?
If those things should be left out of a fiction, what
should be left in? These questions can be best answered
by the writer's own experience as a reader. His guiding
principle in the practice of omission is a sense of what
the reader will find familiar in a piece of fiction.
1While the short-short has become an
increasingly popular fictional form, it remains difficult
to categorize. The short-short resembles both the short
story and poetry, but doesn't fit neatly into those categories
or, indeed, any other. Of course, when we attempt to study
or judge the success of a short-short fiction, the model
to which we most often refer is the short story. We approach
the short-short as a miniature version of the short story,
and our assessment of a particular short-short piece is
often based on how effectively it creates a narrative.
We must realize, however, that short-short fiction is
extremely protean. It takes on forms and shapes of all
sorts, many of which do not need narrative to succeed.
Short-shorts can be character sketches, vignettes, anecdotes,
parables, fables, experiential fragments, even questionnaires.
It may be true that the best short-short fiction is story-like
(i.e. has narrative), but we would be mistaken in assuming
that the ability to tell a story is requisite to the success
of a short-short. For this reason, I use the word "fiction"
to describe short-short pieces throughout this paper and
avoid the word "story."
2The style of short-short this paper describes is in length
somewhere between one and five pages (usually 1000-2000
words). Works that number only a paragraph or two tend
toward prose-poetry, and those longer than six pages start
to move into the realm of the short story. The short-shorts
I'm looking at generally have more prose language than
poetic and structurally tend to appear fairly conventional
on the page.
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