The outsized power of a great short story

In ninth grade, Ms. Hayes, my enthusiastic, whip-smart English teacher with expectations to match, handed out an unassuming packet a few pages long: “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. We read the short story aloud, one student picking up where the last left off, all of us relieved by the simple language and unconvoluted plot. Normally, she handed out a sonnet or free-verse poem that most of us couldn’t understand, let alone analyze its deeper meaning.

The story began innocuously: Residents of a small agricultural town gather in a public square for the annual “lottery” draw. Children play and collect stones while the adults make small talk, bored and eager to get it over with and “get back to work.” The story’s structure matches their indifference, moving with a calm nonchalance.

That composure begins to fracture when Tessie Hutchinson draws the marked slip. She clutches it, trying to keep anyone from seeing the consequential black dot in its center, until her husband pries it from her hands. The crowd turns on her with startling speed. Neighbors and friends begin to take stones from the pile, and the purpose of the lottery suddenly becomes clear: a ritual in which the townspeople sacrifice the person who draws the marked slip to ensure a good harvest. At that moment of awareness, and as quickly and matter-of-factly as it began, the story ends.

None of us saw it coming, and that was the first time I experienced the strange power of a short story.

The “unity of effect”

“The Lottery” is as famous for its reception as it is for its story. When it ran in The New Yorker in 1948, it provoked an intense backlash. The magazine, and Jackson herself, received hundreds of letters, many from outraged readers canceling their subscriptions.

The story’s theme is uncomfortable, disturbing even. By depicting a seemingly civil town, only to reveal its citizens participating in such a barbaric ritual, Jackson examines how tradition can be used to justify cruelty and how social pressure can lead us to accept and commit acts we would otherwise condemn.

Still, I’d guess it wasn’t the plot so much as the delivery that unsettled so many people. Jackson goes for the kill with a practiced deftness. Readers receive the final blow as both startling and inevitable. The ending doesn’t offer them an outlet for their outrage — or the recognition of the uncomfortable truth beneath it all — except, evidently, The New Yorker mailbox.

Since then, I’ve read many short stories: Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Alice Munro’s “Runaway,” Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies,” Junot Diaz’s “This Is How You Lose Her,” and, more recently, Lauren Groff’s “Brawler” and Camille Bordas’s “One Sun Only.” Each one is about wildly different people in different places, from a spy’s impossible choice in a labyrinth of time to a marriage unraveling in rural Canada. But they share qualities beyond their length, characteristics I’ve come to admire and find equally, if not more, necessary than those of the novel.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what the power, the je ne sais quoi, of the short story is. Most writers reach for analogy. Lorrie Moore described the short story as “the noise in the night life itself, surprising and not entirely invited.” Alexander Chee says it’s “the one-night stand of the soul,” while Rahul Mehta describes it as “a secret whispered quickly, and in the dark.”

Edgar Allan Poe came closest to a concrete description that bridges form with effect: A short story, he wrote, is something that “can be read in one sitting,” a quality that allows it to “deliver a sense of the fullest satisfaction.” This brevity, Poe argued, lets a short story achieve what he famously called “the unity of effect,” an uninterrupted emotional experience.

The short end of the stick

The short story’s own history is full of reversals, revivals, and arguments about its worth. In the early- to mid-20th century, short stories were a staple of mainstream reading. They ran regularly in magazines like The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic, which paid generously and turned writers like J.D. Salinger into household names. While these publications continue to publish short fiction today, and while many writers regard and revere the form, it has become something of a literary underdog. Short story collections are acquired by publishers far less often than novels, they rarely crack bestseller lists, and they compete for a fraction of the major prizes. Even among those who admire the form, there’s a persistent sense that the short story is a kind of apprenticeship for the novel.

This neglect is a little strange because the short story might be one of the forms best suited to our busy lifestyles. You can absorb one over coffee or on a commute, in a way a novel rarely allows. And in a culture already organized around snappy, complete units of attention, the short story arguably satisfies the same appetite for a quick hit — without the superficiality many associate with TikTok videos. That’s not to say short stories are easy; quite the opposite. They demand sustained attention in exchange for real reward. But the reward arrives within a stretch of time many of us can spare.

It seems we have decided that length is a proxy for impact and quality and that a short story can’t offer what a novel does. A quick look at Goodreads, an online forum where readers discuss books, turns up frequent complaints that short stories lack character development or plot or that they leave readers hanging without a proper resolution.

That is true; however, these are only flaws if you judge the short story as though it were a mini-novel, straining toward novel-scale ambitions. In reality, it’s an entirely different form, one that deserves judgment in its own right.

Turn to a novel if you want the chance to escape into another life, grow slowly attached to characters and worlds, and perhaps even enjoy a neat-and-tidy resolution. Short fiction won’t provide this, and it shouldn’t be expected to. Instead, the short story writer must be precise and committed, wielding the pen like a scalpel and using the page not to take a broad look but to cut deeply and precisely to reveal places the novel — for all its sweeping breadth — cannot.

Reasons why short stories aren’t just “mini-novels”

Short stories deal with different territory

Whereas a novel can accumulate information about a character, even build whole worlds and complex plots, a short story has no such luxury. Its narrower focus lets it open to questions and experiences that are fundamentally unresolvable. Characters in short stories tend to confront the kinds of experience that defy explanation and do not become clearer with more context — the paradoxes in our behavior or feelings of ineffable joy, focus, or loss. Such brief, urgent moments are arguably the best and worst parts of living and are better reflected by a style that matches their precision and intensity.

In the first two paragraphs of “The Lottery,” Jackson tells us just enough: We’re in a small farming town at the height of summer, and the tight-knit community is gathering for some mandatory ritual. We get the names of a few townspeople, but not the name of the town, its location, the origins of the lottery, or any of the characters’ backstories. A novel-length version of the same premise would almost certainly explain the lottery’s origins and history, offer side stories about characters, and contextualize the townspeople’s complicity. A useful exercise, but a wildly different impact.

Short stories often resists a tidy ending

Even before reading a short story, the reader knows, owing to the literal length, that there is more to the world than can be told. The structure itself primes us to read differently, to immediately question what the author shows and pay as much attention to what the author omits. In a powerful short story, the ending loops back to the beginning, and the resolution is not so much closure but a new perspective, an understanding, of everything that came before. The author and scholar Charles May* describes this resolution as “aesthetic.” By giving us only the necessary context, a short story arrives at its truth by embodying the experience rather than explaining it away. It allows the reader to interpret its impact for themselves and draw a personal conclusion rather than a universal one.

We don’t know what happens after the first few people lob their stones. We don’t know whether the lottery will ever be abolished, whether the town will change, or whether anyone will question what they have just done. Jackson doesn’t give us those answers because they aren’t the point. The story ends not when its central problem is solved, but when its existence has become impossible to ignore.

Short stories force a precise, unique writing style

Junot Díaz wrote that the short story is “unforgiving as fuck,” and that to work, it requires “unnerving levels of exactitude.” The prose must be spare and precise, razor-sharp and multi-faceted, and able to perform more than one job at once — advancing the plot, revealing a character, establishing a rhythm, creating an image, or setting up something that will matter pages later.

Many of the names in “The Lottery” read as plain, but carry darker undertones once you look at them closely. Mr. Summers, who cheerfully runs the lottery, has a name at odds with the event he sets in motion. Mr. Graves, the postmaster who helps administer the lottery, carries his function in his name. Nothing is there by accident. At the same time, omission and implications move the story along — what Jackson doesn’t tell us about the lottery’s origins, its rules, and its purpose is as important as what she does.

The result is a mix of poetry’s compressed, lyrical quality and prose’s descriptive complexity. It’s incredibly difficult to master, but when it does, the writing becomes an aesthetic experience. “[S]entence by sentence, scene by scene, page after page, from first touch to last, you almost forget to breathe,” Díaz writes.

Short stories reflect our discontinuous reality

We like to imagine that our lives play out with the typical beginning-middle-end structure of a novel, building toward some kind of meaning or conclusion. But some of us may relate more to Alice Munro, often regarded as one of the best short fiction writers, who described her own life as a series of “disconnected realities” — a realization that pushed her toward short stories, even as she set out to write a novel.

Our lives are sometimes narrated by a version of ourselves we hardly recognize now, set in a place so distant to us we question whether it was ever real. Short fiction may be more faithful to the discontinuous way experience plays out.

As essential as a dream

In Heart of Darkness, the protagonist, Charles Marlow, grows frustrated as he tries to tell stories about his travels in the Congo, realizing there is a vast gulf between narrating a series of events and capturing the actual experience.

“Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” he pleads. “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream.”

A dream. That may be the best description of the form, something that opens up into a world undeniably real and fantastical all at once, something fashioned, as Lorrie Moore puts it, “from a frame of mind that is both familiar and strange, recognizable and startling as a pinch.”

Much like a dream, it illuminates from a new angle, teases awareness, and then, just as quickly, lets you go. And, for some reason we don’t understand, we need them.

* Author’s Note: A hat tip to Charlie May’s excellent “Why the short story is essential and seldom read,” to which this essay is most indebted to.

This article is featured on Big Think.