Why Short Stories Deserve As Much Love As Novels

In October 2007, Joe Hill, horror writer and son of Steven King, published a collection of short stories called 20th Century Ghosts. Among these stories, one story, “The Black Phone,“ became a movie adaptation in 2021. The events of the short story ended with the first movie, but now, there’s an upcoming sequel. This sequel feels completely unnecessary.

In the recently released trailer, the main villain asks the protagonist, “Did you think our story was over?” When it comes to sequels, this line  begs the question “Why not end the story?”

The ending of the first movie completed the story well. But as with many other things, people tend to think that with stories, more is always better. For this reason, some people see short stories only as stepping stones for writers to “get their names out there” before they write novels or as the potential for a longer (and therefore “better”) story, in the form of novels or movies.

One of the reasons so many dismiss short stories is that since they’re shorter than full-length works, people perceive them as “easier” to write. In my first year of college, one of my professors said that short stories can take up to a full year to write, but some of the students scoffed at this notion. Truthfully, this confused me too. But what we didn’t realize then is that since short stories use so few words, each word must be precise and purposeful. 

When writing a short story, an author must carefully craft each moment to reveal a snapshot of a character’s life and imbue symbolism throughout to convey a broader message.

Don DeLillo’s “The Itch” perfectly exemplifies this practice. The short story centers on a recently divorced man struggling with abnormal itching after experiencing a series of bizarre events. Readers can interpret this “itch” as grief, sexual frustration, a curse, or a sense of dissatisfaction with a dull, modern world. 

Likewise, the frighteningly brilliant young girl in Truman Capote’s “Miriam” can stand for mental illness, a personification of death, or a vision of freedom that the story’s other character, a 1950s housewife, never had. You can read short stories multiple times through different lenses and have a new experience each time you read. 

Short stories aren’t as popular as novels, possibly because they’re less difficult to sell. Marketers can more easily come up with tropes and taglines for novels than they can for short story collections. “Enemies-to-lovers,” “found family,” and “slow burns” don’t fit full story collections well. A collection of short stories may contain a central theme, but it’s far harder to market a theme than it is to market a familiar trope. Authors may have to reveal less about their short stories as well, especially if they include plot twists or shocking endings.

This can lead people to feel unsure of what kind of book they’re buying when they purchase a short story collection, which may lead them not to buy at all.

But many short stories have abrupt, “unsatisfying” endings for a reason. Many well-known short stories, like Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” and Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” take place in a day (or even a few hours). A novel-length work can’t convey the brief ecstasy of summer on a rainy planet or the instant it takes for a relationship to falter. The short story medium also haunts the reader by leaving the rest of the characters’ lives to the imagination. 

People have valid reasons for preferring novels to short stories, but short stories are vastly underrated. Let’s not devalue certain works just because they’re “short.” Each medium serves important functions for authors, and we should celebrate them all.

Featured Photo by Chris Kursikowski on Unsplash.