General Meaning of a Short Story

3. TECHNIQUES OF WRITING A SHORT STORY

3.1. General Meaning of a Short Story

The compact from of the short story requires different writing techniques to the novel. Reading and planning can form a foundation for success. The short story from as we know it today has developed from Greek mythology, Aesop’s fable, Chaucerian contemporary tales, French contes, Italian novellas, and Germany Novellen , then came the sketches of Washington Irving, the tales of Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, mark Twain, de Maupassant, Chekhov, and Henry James. In our time we have Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scoott Fitzgerald, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Jhon Updike, Jhon Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty—and there are all those talented new writers whose work vivifies and examines the realities of today. Burnett, On Writing The Short Story, 1983, 1 What is the short story? Is it only a truncated and incomplete version of the novel? Or is it a genre, that is, a category of art with a distinctive content, form, and style? This question has occupied a great many thoughtful practitioners of the forms, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, H. F. Bates eminent among them. Generally speaking these writers-critics do not think of a story as merely a work that happens to be short, but as a unique literary form, with techniques and effects that cannot be achieved through another medium. What are those effects, those techniques? Universitas Sumatera Utara One of the most useful answers can from Edgar Allan Poe in 1842 when the short story was in its infancy. He believed that the prose tale stood just below the lyric poem in the hierarchy of literary art. For Poe, the “unity of effect or impression” was of prime importance, but, he, felt, this unity could be obtained only in works that could be read ‘at one sitting’. For Poe, a novel not do have this unity, is incapable of achieving the “immense force derivable from totality” Poe believed the short story is different from the novel, and superior to it. It was not shortness but intensity of impact that Poe the romantic valued most highly Although Poe’s concern with the effect, particularly the effect he chiefly sought—terror, passion, horror—has had little influence on important writers of the short story, his views on singleness and unity are widely shared. The short story requires the reader’s utmost attention, a focusing of the mind on each detail in order to realize the final fullness of effect. The short story depends on concreteness, on sensual impression that deliver their meaning without waste. The action of a conventional short story id compressed within a short usually continuous time frame and space. The character, few in number, are revealed, not developed, the background and the setting are implied, not rendered, and the short story gets going as quickly as possible. Stone, Packer, Hoopes. The Short Story 1076, 5 What is a story? Erskine Caldwell defines it best as “an imaginary tale with a meaning, interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention, profound enough to express human nature, “It does not matter where the reader’s attention has been directed, so long as it is stimulated and held. Our only concern as reader is, to paraphrase Chekhov, Did it keep you awake? Did it shock? Did it amuse? Did it send Universitas Sumatera Utara you away feeling you have had an experience more absorbing than any in your own life? Katherine Anne Poerter defines the short story from the perspective of the writer: the short story presents “first a theme, then a point of view; a certain knowledge of human nature and strong feeling about it; and style.” Burnett, On Writing The Short Story, 1983, 2 As Elizabeth Bowen has said, the short story’s disadvantage is an “emotional narrowness”. XJ Kennedy told that “a short story is more than a sequence of happenings. A finely wrought short story has the richness and conciseness of an excellent lyric poem. Spontaneous and natural as the finished story may seem, the writer has written it so artfully that there is meaning in even seemingly casual speech and apparently trivial details. Writing in 1917, Herbert Ellsworth Cory said “the every technique of the short story is pathological, and titillates our nerves in our pathological moments. The short story is the blood kinsman of he quick-lunch, the vaudeville, and the joy ride,” No doubt the short story is one manifestation of the modern speedup, thought Cory’s rather shuddering vision of a world full of “pathological moment” is one that even Kafka might reject. However, he does touch on the short-story writer’s chief difficulty: how to be succinct without being shallow, how to create a single effect without creating a merely transitory one. Actually, do not have standard meaning about, what is a short story? Every letters have different meaning, H.B Jassin Inhdonesian Paus of Letters, defines “which tell a short story is should have introduction, conflict, and solution.” Hamid in Universitas Sumatera Utara Meaning of Short Story “a short story is should find from quality, that is how many words: between 500-20.000 words, have a plot, character and impression.” But according to Aoh, KH “short story is one of variation fiction or fabrication which often told short of prose metaphor.” And the other defines about short story. That means no one exactly, and also is not contradiction one of the others, near all of them is agree on one conclusion, that short story is short fabricated.

3.2. Characteristic of a Short Story