Why the short story exists

One of the beauties of the short story is the way it allows you to tell stories which would not exist but for the genre.

What do I mean? Well, a story came into the Global Short Story Competition overnight which illustrates the point perfectly, dealing as it does with the interaction between two people on a bus trip and the way the experience profoundly effects one of them.

It’s an episode, a fragment of a life, and deftly told in just under 1,800 words. Wouldn’t work in a novel, or at least not on its own, but works beautifully in a short story. It’s why the genre was created.
Plenty of time to enter this quarter’s competition (closing date October 31, first prize £100) at www.inscribemedia.co.uk

John Dean