Third, the short story should be limited and compact. Every detail should have an end and a conclusion. Because the making of words and sentences. Because the
making of words and sentences as side as possible is a capability that should be possessed by a short story writer.
Fourth, the short story should make his reader confident, that his story is true, not just a fiction. It needs special skills, have concerns in the character, that they are
real, as a human being. Fifth, the short story should give ending conclusion. No more touched. That
the story has been ended. There are three main qualities that mark the short story as clearly different
from prose fiction that make it a “genre”. The first quality is, of course brevity. The second is, it power of compensating for the consequences of shortness and the third
is, the interaction of one to two. The beauty of the short story is that all its elements can be drawn to a single
point that shines with such brightness that all the past moments of the tale are bathed in light seen as a whole, as a radiance.
3.3. Elements of a Short Story
The elements of a short story are: 3.3.1. Theme
A short expresses the value of a writer and his conception of the human condition. In that sense, the whole story embodies his
theme.
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But thoughts and feelings that a writer embodies in a story are seldom very simple. Most stories cannot be reduced, like Aesop’s
Fables to a simple moral. A modern short story is not fertile soil in which to plant a sermon. Chekhov wrote to his editor.
“You upbraid me about objectivity, styling it indifference to good and evil, absence of ideals and ideas, etc. you would have me say, in
depicting horse thieves, that stealing horses is an evil. But them, that has been known a long while, even without me. Let jurors judge me
them, for my business is only to show them as they are… of course, it would be gratifying to couple art with sermonizing, but, personally, I
find this exceedingly difficult and, because of condition imposed b technique, all but impossible.”
Nor can a short story be translated into a philosophic treatise or a sociological tract. Weighty ideas need systematic presentation as free
as possible from the mess that is human being. Organized knowledge by its very nature deals in generalities, but fiction deals with the
specific person in the specific situation. And sometimes character can take on a life of their own—almost in defiance of their creator’s
intention. Still and all, as Chekhov well knew, serious reader demand
more than an accounting of events; they demand that these events in some way illumine their own lives—that events be shaped into a
meaning. After the pleasure or pain, excitement or perplexity caused
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by the story has receded, the raider if left with a residue, a distillation that we call its theme. Stone, Packer, Hoopes, The Short Story 1976,
23
3.3.2. Plot Plot is essential to fiction as the nerve that runs the length of a
caterpillar, directing its exertions and its progress toward its destination. Plot is a means of keeping our characters in motion and holding the
reader’s participation to the conclusion of our story. It is also the line on which to hang suspense, curiosity, drama, behavior, and the sense of
time’s passing. Without plot, it is unlikely a reader would care very much about following a story thought to the end.
Someone has said that plot shows the writer’s ability to think in several directions at once and thus keep his story moving. It also
indicates that the limits of our imagination have been extended beyond the point of known facts and events, which is the short story are
justifiably created whole from true happening, but in the telling events, to circle freely around the subjects so that he may use the fiction writer’s
privilege to judge characters he knows better than anyone else. Plot is about many things—character, imagination, irony,
logic, and nearly always about the unexpected. Plot frequently surprise
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not only the reader, but the author as well. And a good plot is fun for everybody.
What makes a good plot? Most important is consistency and logic in mood and point of view. We do not approach light,
inconsequential characters with solemnity unless our purpose is satire, or create a death scene in a mood of hilarity, unless we possess the great
gifts of a Mark Twain or a Rossini. Which is not to day that deeper meanings are not to be found in comedies, or that lighter moments are
not used sometimes for relief in tragic dramas. It was P. G. Wodehouse, the great humorist, who stated that the plot must determine
the mood in which a story is written, not visa versa. Plots, as said before, may come from memory, from subjective
reactions to experiences indeed, some feeling memory or emotion must be present in any fictional narrative, or from a provocative situation we
have been told gossip again or read about. Burnett, On Writing the Short Story, 1983, 14, 15 and 17
3.3.3. Character We engage in characterization almost every day our lives. We
tell our family or friends what happened at work or school, who said what, maybe why. Perhaps we mimic a voice or gesture; we may even
invent mannerisms to convey what we felt about a person. Yet common
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as characterization is, it is one of the mysteries of tale-telling. T. S. Eliot said:
“A ‘living character’ is not necessarily ‘true to life’. It is person whom we can see and hear, whether he be true or false to human nature as we
know it. What the creator of character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen sensibility; the dramatist need not understand people,
but he must be exceptional aware oh them”. What goes into living character? How does a writer create the
breath of life on a page with words? Perhaps w few notions will cast a little light the mystery. All that we have said about point of view touches
on character, for the way we seen the character determines the character we see.
Tone also creates character. If the author’s tone is contemptuous or humorous, the reader will likely see the character as
contemptible or funny. Everything about a character defines him and contributes to the
impact on us: looks, gesture, attire, social class, words spoken, views held, motives revealed, deeds done or not done. Some writers prefer to
tell about their characters. In collected impression, Elizabeth Bowen says, “Characters
must materialize—that is, must have palpable physical reality. They must be not only see-able visualizable: they must be able to be felt….
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Physical personality belongs to action…. Pictures must be in movement. Eye, hand, stature, etc. Must appear, and only appear, in play.”
A character can be reveled in the way others see him and his views of others. Characters in a story are only part of a whole; it is within
the whole context that we finally read the story.
3.3.4. Setting Setting is the place where the action happens can powerfully
focus the reader’s expectations. Without it, there would be vagueness, uncertainty.
Most story writers try to reader the setting swiftly, sparsely, or impressionistically, by slipping representative concrete details into other
part of the narrative.
3.3.5. Point of View As we come to read a short story, we usually notice carefully
who is telling the story whether in first or third person and how the story’s conflicts and characterizations might be affected by this point of
view. In reading a play, on the other hand, we are much more likely to transform the writer action into scenes that play out in our minds as they
might be acted on stage. Stanford, 2003, 56 Some writers believe that the second most important decision
they make, after selecting that “idea or memory or mental picture”
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Faulker identified as the source of a story, is point of view. Point of view is a term of art which refers to the relationships between the storyteller,
the story, and the reader.
Omniscient Point of View
The omniscient narrator is free to bring his own view a into the story.
Direct Observer
Almost the exact opposite of the omniscient is the direct observer.
The disadvantage of this method are obvious. Limited as he is to speech, gesture, action, and setting, the direct observer will find it
difficult to render subtly shifting psychological states or o provide a wide range of understanding and feeling. Complexity and subtlety can only
suggest.
First-Person Narration
First-person narration can avoid the sprawling quality of omniscience and the narrowness of direct observer. But it has other
limitations. Which this point of view, the reader is told what he knows by a
“person” who speaks in his own voice. The reader knows only what that person knows and when he knows it and tells it. The reader cannot
witness scenes the narrator has not witnessed, nor witness them from
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angles the narrator does not provide. He cannot be taken into other minds. But first person has a special authenticity and special vibrancy.
The reader feels in touch with a real person who cares about what he is feeling.
Third Person Intimate
Third person intimate provides a double vision. The reader not only observers the main character, he is also intimately involved the
character’s feelings and thoughts. This point of views creates tension between what the storyteller and the reader understand and what
character knows, between external action and internal reaction, between the grossness of gesture and the refinement of thought between that
really is and what the character thinks. Third person intimate can be flexibly adapted to a writer’s intention Stone, Packer, Hoopes. The
Short Story, 1976, 11, 12, 13, 14
3.3.6. Anatomy of Short Story After understand defines of short story, characteristic of short
and the element of short story, so we should ready to create a short story. Before write it we would knows the anatomy of short story or sometimes
it said structure of story. Generally the anatomy of short story, any kinds of point of view, and however a plot should have anatomy, they are is;
1. Situation the writer opened the story
2. Happening
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3. Affairs of peak
4. Climax
5. Anti climax
Or composition of short story, in the same manner as H. B Jassin could like this:
1. Introduction
2. Conflict
3. Solution
A good short story is which have balance in anatomy and structure of story. First weakness from beginner usually in this structure
of story.
3.3.7. Final Stages Most writers however, do put a story after the first draft, and
come back to it later. And sometimes it is better, after the final draft, to still wait a bit until you can read it through with totally impartial eye that
comes after some removal. It has been my own experience that one is seldom able to judge one’s own work successfully when it is new and
still raw from the paints of birth or glossed with the author’s euphoria at having given birth, perhaps the most ephemeral stage of all. Therefore, it
is usually advisable, even essential, to abandon your newborn for forty- eight hours, or for one hundred and fort-eight hours, as thought it were a
changeling you are no yet sure you wish to claim. Put it aside and do not
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trifle with it at this time. Neither embellish nor edit your story until it has had a chance to better, when your own mind and he strength of your
critical judgment will have been renewed. In the next stage, the day, the hour, comes when you will sit
down and read your story through without a pen in your hand, trying to see it as though written be someone else. You will have left it alone long
enough so that, as Sidney Cox wrote, “You will see not what you felt and thought as the time, but what is now on the paper.”
It is the next stage when you read it again that you will expand those passages needing to be amplified and rework those needing to be
improved. You will mark your passage freely, crossing out and throwing away with a clear head and cruel and ruthless disregard, excess verbiage
or rhetoric, passages which is should be cut, passages which are not right. Listen to your ears to the dialogue you have written: read it aloud,
attach it clearly to a face, a person, and always try to strip it to the essential of character, speech patterns, and development of the plot or
situation. Write fresh dialogue if the first seems stilted, or put in new dialogue where there was none before. Fill out you descriptions and
developments, or condense where you have been profligate; even, perhaps, add new episodes for emphasis and drama.
Then retype entirely do not ever follow the amateur’s way of saving scraps of old typescripts and pasting them all together, and read
the story again with your first corrections.
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Finally, study your story as a whole, as thought you were still another impersonal reader. Ask yourself, does it hang together in logical
developments? Are they right? Will the ultimate reader—and—editor— identify with your characters, or at least be so absorbed by their behavior
and thought processes as you written them that he takes both your story and your authority seriously?
Also, if we are good, we will find evidence that we are good; and if we are not, well have seen how others managed to succeed; or we
can give it up altogether. GOOD LUCK… Burnett, 1983, 70, 71, 72
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4. THE SHORT STORY
