Recent months have seen quite a few American writers entering our competition. That’s appropriate because, in the eyes of many, the short story has its beginnings in the work of an American writer.
As with all such things, there are competing claims as to the first short story writer. You could claim that Chaucer wrote them in The Canterbury Tales, that Aesop’s Fables are short stories, that Walter Scott’s 1827 tale The Two Drovers holds the claim.
However, most seem agreed that the ‘modern short story’ owes its being to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales in 1837. American writer Hawthorne took inspiration from shorter forms of writing and produced a story which can be defined as ‘a story capable of being read in one sitting‘.
Perhaps the best definition of the skill needed to produce a short story came from the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe, who, having read Hawthorne, said: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.”
In other words, make every word count.
On the subject of short stories, the July Short Story Competition is half way through at www.inscribemedia.co.uk
John Dean
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