Defining the Short Story

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Defining the Short Story
Communication is an integral part of human life as people need to communicate different issues. Sometimes stories exist, and people have to share them through various communication ways. This also depends on whether the story is relevant for future reference. At the same time, creative people use stories to entertain and inform the world about different issues. In such cases, people use different types of story genres to record the stories. Among the genres are short stories, which have unique characteristics from the rest. This essay defines the genre of short stories and explains what is unique about them.
A short story refers to a prose piece of fiction that can be read within a single sitting. These stories often excite one feeling, reactions, or mood because they present one thing (Baldwin, 27). It is among the oldest artistic creativity that harbors stories of myths, heroes, legends, and community histories. Therefore, short stories are often short to allow their reading within a sitting.
As much as short stories have less than 20000 words, they have a unity that cannot be found in large pieces like novels. Short stories tell a complete story that is not interrupted. Unlike other genres, short stories begin a story of a certain subject or character and tell the full story without disruption. It fulfills the French three false unities of the drama of one action, one place, and one day (Matthews 16). For instance, in a short story, a description of a man who relocated to another country searching for a job is told in its completeness from the beginning to the end, without other side stories. In the case of novels and other longer literary genres, the story would be told on accounts of the person moving to another country, the stories about how authorities operate in the foreign country, or even a different feeder story of a family that goes through certain circumstances in the foreign country. These stories then connect the stories to build a larger narrative. It is, therefore, a strong point that makes short stories unique.
Another unique factor about short stories is that they cover a wide range of issues compared to long genres like novels, which often concentrate on love themes. As stated by the first factor, short stories often bring a sense of unity by tackling one issue comprehensively without having sub stories. The same factor gives short stories the freedom to comprehensively tackle different...