Short Story Overview.pdf - Short story For the Gershwin...

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Short story For the Gershwin piano and violin piece, seeShort Story(music).Ashort storyis a piece ofprose fiction, which can be read in a singlesetting.[1]Emerging from earlier oral storytellingtraditions in the 17th century, the short story has grown to encompass a body of work so diverse as to defy easy characterization.At its most prototypicalthe short story features a small cast of named characters,and focuses on a self-contained incident with the intentof evoking a “single effect” or mood.[2] In doing so, shortstories make use of plot, resonance, and other dynamiccomponents to a far greater degree than is typical of an anecdote, yet to a far lesser degree than anovel. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel, authors of both generally draw from a common pool ofliterary techniques. Short stories have no set length. In terms of word count there is no official demarcation between ananecdote, a short story, and a novel. Rather, the form’s parameters are given by the rhetorical and practical context in which a given story is produced and considered, so that what constitutes a short story may differ between genres, coun- tries, eras, and commentators.[3]Like the novel, the short story’s predominant shape reflects the demands of the available markets for publication, and the evolution of the form seems closely tied to the evolution of the publishing industry and the submission guidelines of its constituent houses. [4] The short story has been considered both an apprentice- ship form preceding more lengthy works, and a crafted form in its own right, collected together in books of sim- ilar length, price, and distribution as novels. Short story writers may define their works as part of the artistic and personal expression of the form. They may also attempt to resist categorization by genre and fixed formation. 1Length See the articlenovellafor related debate about length. Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic.A classic defi- nition of a short story is that one should be able to read it in one sitting, a point most notably made inEdgar Al- lan Poe'sessay"Thomas Le Moineau (Le Moile)" (1846). Interpreting this standard nowadays is problematic, since the expected length of “one sitting” may now be brieferthan it was in Poe’s era. Other definitions place the max- imum word count of the short story at anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000. In contemporary usage, the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no shorter than 1,000 and no longer than 20,000 words.Stories of fewer than 1,000 words are sometimes referred to as “short short stories”,[5] or "flash fiction.” As a point of reference for the genre writer, theScience Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Americadefine short story length in theNebula Awardsforscience fictionsubmis- sion guidelines as having aword countof fewer than 7,500.[6] Longer stories that cannot be called novels are sometimes considered “novellas” or novelettes and, like short stories,
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