How to Read and Write a Short Story (and Why You Should)
- David Salariya
- Aug 1
- 7 min read
For Readers of Short Stories - and Writers Chasing the Magic of Compression (Beyond Neoprene)
In the Beginning Was Six Words
I’ve stood in the house where Ernest Hemingway was born, Oak Park, Illinois. An almost-too-respectable American home, perfectly preserved. You can still sense the stiff linen and maternal expectations. But what stayed with me wasn’t the legacy of the great man. It was a story from his childhood: how his mother dressed him and his sister identically, in skirts and hats, calling them “my sweet Dutch dollies.” She even held his sister Marcelline back a year at school so they could be raised as near-twins.
It’s tempting to say Hemingway spent the rest of his life overcompensating: war correspondent, bullfighting enthusiast, heavy drinker, big shooter, declarative minimalist. But it also hints at something deeper: his instinct for omission. The famous iceberg theory, what lies beneath the surface carries the real weight.
His most quoted story, of course, is six words:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
It probably wasn’t his invention, but no matter. It’s become the gold standard for what a short story can be: emotionally charged, devastatingly brief, and entirely open-ended. It says almost nothing, yet leaves a crater.
That’s the power of the short story. It isn’t just a small novel, or a sketch. It’s a machine built for suggestion, a glint of something buried. It doesn’t need to explain itself. It trusts you to feel it.
What is a Short Story, Really?
Hemingway mastered it. So did Munro, Carver, O’Connor, and others who knew how to get in, strike a chord, and vanish. A short story is the literary equivalent of turning a corner and finding something astonishing, but only if you're paying attention.
And in an age of digital blur and attention deficit, that makes the form more vital than ever.
Long before he became a monument to himself, the young Hemingway was quietly forging a voice out of post-World War I, disillusion and emotional repression. His first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), is revealing, not quite fully formed, but already dangerous.
In Up in Michigan, he offers a deceptively spare account of sexual violence, now read — with necessary discomfort, as a case study in consent erased. Out of Season becomes a portrait of marital breakdown and miscommunication, set against a misaligned Italian backdrop. The poems veer from crude to crystalline, but already bear his hallmarks: tight compression, postwar bitterness, and a rejection of sentiment.
Champs d’Honneur alone, all crosses and choking soldiers, distils the horror of mechanised war in four stanzas. Even in his twenties, Hemingway was practising omission as a kind of truth-telling. And it shows.
It’s easy now to parody Hemingway’s influence, but at the beginning, he wasn’t posing, he was cutting. These early stories and poems show the scalpel in his hand. The open wound would come later.
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
It’s barely a breath. But inside it: grief, longing, a domestic ghost. It’s a masterclass in suggestion - and a parable for the short story form itself. This isn’t just flash fiction; it’s emotional origami. Hemingway may not have penned this infamous six worder (the attribution is debated) the idea that what’s left unsaid carries the real weight.
Short Stories Are a Form, Not a Warm-Up
Short stories aren’t training shorts. They’re not just warm-ups for novels. They’re their own wild, glorious format, quick to read, slow to forget. Writers from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Zadie Smith have embraced the form not just as a detour, but as a discipline.
Fitzgerald sold dozens of short stories to magazines before The Great Gatsby. Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize writing short fiction almost exclusively. Joyce’s Dubliners is more psychologically penetrating than many full-length novels. And George Saunders shows that the short story can be surreal, satirical, and socially urgent all at once.
In other words: this is not a minor form.
Why Write a Short Story?
Because the short story is:
A focused experiment. Try voice, style, surrealism — without committing three years to a novel.
A distillery. Every word must earn its place.
A meditation. You can explore a theme without elaborate plot machinery.
A bootcamp. Want to sharpen your dialogue, setting, character? Write short stories. They don’t forgive sloppiness.
How to Read a Short Story
Like poetry, short stories often refuse to explain themselves. They ask to be explored.
Try this:
Read it twice.First for the surface. Second for what’s submerged.
Watch the ending.Good stories rarely “wrap up.” Instead, they shift. A character sees the world differently. Or you do.
Feel it.Let it hit you where it wants to, heart, stomach, back of the neck.
Logic comes later.
What Makes a Short Story Work?
One central effect. Poe called it “the single effect”: one tone, one emotional punch.
A limited cast. No crowd scenes. One or two key characters.
No exposition dump. The story usually begins in media res. There’s no time for backstory unless it is the story.
Led by voice or image. Style can carry more weight than plot.
Quotes from an authors perspective
Edgar Allan Poe
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
Poe believed the short story should produce a unified emotional effect-no excess, no filler. He was a formalist before the term existed.
Anton Chekhov
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
While not strictly about short stories, this quote captures Chekhov’s ethos: show, don’t explain - perfect for the short form’s restraint.
Katherine Anne Porter
The short story is the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing. It demands complete conciseness.
Ernest Hemingway
The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
This sums up his “iceberg theory” beautifully. Most of a short story’s power lies in what it leaves out.
Alice Munro
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like.
Munro reframes the short story as space, not movement - which explains her layered, time-slipping narratives.
George Saunders
A short story works to remind us that the world is not as stable and logical as it seems.
For Saunders, the short story’s job is to destabilise, surprise - and often to provoke empathy through the absurd.
Joy Williams
A short story is a kind of biopsy. And like a biopsy, it often tells us the whole story.
This is razor-sharp - brief, clinical, but with the weight of diagnosis and revelation.
Zadie Smith
What’s exciting about the short story is how little room you have to manoeuvre. It’s like writing poetry: compression is everything.
Raymond Carver
Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.
”The voice of minimalist brevity. It’s practically a manifesto for short fiction.
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
To be a person is to have a story to tell.”Which is perhaps why the short story, more than the novel, so often captures a fleeting glimpse of that identity.
Lorrie Moore
A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
Brilliant analogy. Immediate, intense, and over before you know it.
Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.
Raymond Carver
Perfectly put.
Short stories aren't defined by genre - they invites ambiguity. The speculative and the supernatural are allowed to roam without fences. These are stories that raise questions, rather than solve riddles. And in an age of generative AI and algorithmic predictability, that’s something worth celebrating: a space where the story itself remains human, hand-crafted, and odd - your mind keeps returning.
Five Essential Short Stories to Start With:
Hills Like White Elephants Ernest Hemingway
Cat Person Kristen Roupenian
A Good Man is Hard to Find Flannery O’Connor
The Lottery Shirley Jackson
Escape from Spiderhead George Saunders
(And if you’re feeling brave:)"The School" – Donald Barthelme Read it here.
A Note on Barthelme’s The School
I have a dark affection for Donald Barthelme’s The School , a story that reads like Dr Seuss from the Addams Family library. At first, it’s a catalogue of comic calamity: trees, gerbils, orphans — all dead. The teacher narrates it with the weary detachment of someone filling out an end-of-term report.
But then: a child asks, “We require an assertion of value. We are frightened.” It cuts through the absurdity like a scalpel. The story ends not with resolution, but with a new gerbil. As if life, despite everything, just... begins again.
It’s funny, frightening, and deeply human. And it knows more about education than most syllabi.
Reading a short story is like standing in the middle of a painting. Writing one is like painting a miniature where every brush-stroke counts and of course in a short story every word matters - too obvious to write.
In uncertain times, we need short stories not because they offer neat answers, but because they ask the right kind of questions.
Want to Write One?
Grab a line, a setting, or a single object.Then ask yourself: What’s not being said?That’s where the story lives.
Want to Enter a Short Story Competition?
Here’s one to get you started: Galley Beggar Press Prize – 6000 words max.
And here's another: https://nerobookawards.com/new-writers-prize-2025/ 5000 Words
About the Author
David Salariya
David once wrote a short story so brief that no one noticed it.The ring was found, but the finger was not.
Since then, he’s written hundreds more — mostly disguised as publishing proposals, blog posts, and polite complaints to large publishers (mostly ignored). A lifelong admirer of stories that start in the middle and end without permission, he now divides his time between writing, painting, and wondering if that strange sound under the floorboards is narrative tension or just the pipes.
He founded The Salariya Book Company in 1989 to distil facts into fiction and truth into trouble, and is currently working on several books, one giant, and a detective agency run by sheep.
If he’s not at his desk, he’s probably standing in a bookshop muttering, “Well, this used to be a short story.”
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