A very short story has a big job to do in a small space.  If you try to write a very short story the way an ordinary short story writer would, beginning at the beginning and telling the story one event at a time until the end, you will run out of room.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s give it a try.  Here’s the first 140 characters of an ordinary short story.

Todd got his first car for his sixteenth birthday.  After he had opened all the other presents his father reached into his jacket pocket and…

Satisfying, isn’t it?  Okay, maybe not.  There isn’t enough space to let the story develop naturally.  But there are ways to transcend the limitation of space and convey as much meaning as a longer story.  Let’s try “Todd” again, this time as a vss.

The intersection was too busy and too steep for learning to drive a stick.  Or it would have been if he hadn’t already started.

This story starts in the middle, at the point where our hero has gotten himself into trouble.  The short story would have taken a few hundred words to get here.  The vss went straight to it.  The vss had to leave out some of the details: the father, the sixteenth birthday, even the name of the protagonist.  (Sorry, Todd.)  However, we can guess the details.  The driver is probably young if he is just now learning to drive a stick, and the car must be unfamiliar.  Maybe it’s new.  We can also guess how the driver must be feeling – anxious to find the right coordination of hands and feet to get the car into gear, and knowing he’s gotten himself into a risky situation.

A short story would continue from this point to describe what happens next.  Maybe he’ll crash the car, or maybe he’ll get the hang of it and make it through the intersection.  He’ll become a man, or he’ll wear a body cast, or maybe both.  The vss can’t stay long enough to tell what happens.  The reader has to decide.

By starting the story in the middle, right at the point of difficulty, the reader is able to take in the entire story from beginning to end, filling in details as needed.  Dear reader, Todd’s fate is in your hands.  Treat him gently.

Here’s another.

Melanie asked Dad if she could mow the lawn now that Angus had a broken leg.

Again the story starts in the present at the point of tension and allows us to see enough to guess the past and future.  Melanie and Angus are probably brother and sister.  Melanie has wanted to mow the lawn but Angus has monopolized this chore.  (Why does Melanie want to do it?  Is it a riding lawnmower?)  Then, somehow, Angus broke his leg, and now Melanie sees her chance to take over.  Dad is caught in the middle.  What will he do?  Will Melanie get her way?  Will Angus fight back?  The story doesn’t say.  The author has done his job by showing the reader three characters and the conflict they will have to resolve.  The rest is up to the reader’s imagination.

We all love music, don’t we?  This musical story starts in the heat of the action.

He wondered how the professionals covered a drumset in flames.

How do you suppose it started?  How will it end?  Remember this story if you ever doubt that art is a harsh mistress.

So: a useful technique for fitting the most story into the least space is to start at the moment where the trouble begins.

And, every now and then the best place to start is after the trouble is over, as in this story.

He shut his locker and noticed how his glove arm was tan down to the wrist. Maybe it had been a good season after all.

What happened?  Too much losing?  Fighting among the players and coaches?  Weariness from weeks of riding the bus?  The author doesn’t say.  Instead he lets us imagine the problems and puts us at the end of the story, when the player gives them a different meaning.  We don’t see the moment of conflict, but rather the moment of resolution.

Stories by Charlie Close.

Other Articles in This Series

Introduction

Use Familiar Contexts

Small Choices Make a Big Difference

Don’t be Afraid of the Ordinary

Go for Emotion

Metaphor

Appeal to the Senses

The Implied Character

Surprise

Misunderstanding

About the Author

Charlie Close is a writer of very short stories. His mainstream stories are published on Twitter at @CharlieClose, and his romance stories can be found at @apinchofpassion. He is the author of Burning Embers and Other Stories of Marriage, Work, and Family, ISBN 978-1598588187. Visit Charlie’s blog at http://charlieclose.com

Welcome to “The Art of the Very Short Story”, a series of articles I’ll be presenting about a new art form that is just beginning to take off.  Even though many people are writing vss now, not much has been written about them.  I’ve developed ideas about vss as an active writer and I am publishing these articles to make a contribution to vss theory and practice.

For the purpose of these articles, a very short story as any story of 140 characters or fewer in length.  I’m choosing this limit because that’s the maximum length of a posting on Twitter, the most popular place today for publishing vss.  Another good definition is any story of one to four sentences.  Another is a story that can be recited in the space of a single breath.  They all come out to about the same size.

You might think that one breath is too small a space to write an interesting or complete story.   Okay, maybe you wouldn’t think that, but your friend Steve, who has traditional ideas about storytelling, would.  Let’s try out a vss on Steve and see what he thinks.

The real job, they were told, was not to be window washers at the Victoria’s Secret Building after all, but something even better.

“Ah-ha!” says Steve.  This thing isn’t a story at all.  It has no characters, unless you accept that “they” are characters.  And nothing happens.  The only verbs, “were told” and “to be”, are passive.  No story Steve has ever heard of has no actors and no actions.  Case closed.

What Steve says is literally true, but it isn’t literarily true.  A person is reading this vss, not a computer, and a person can see more than is written explicitly on the page.  What can we tell from the vss by reading between the lines?

• There are job-seekers, at least two of them.
• They are probably young men since they have shown up for a low-status job where they hope to see women walking around in lingerie.
• They are probably not very smart since everyone knows there is no such thing as the Victoria’s Secret Building.
• There is someone who told them an obviously-false story about the window-washing job.  That person, whoever he or she is, probably has a reason for lying to the young men and does not have their best interests at heart.
• Therefore, whatever the “even better” job is, it is likely to be even worse.
• And because the young men are stupid, they will probably go along with it.
• And things will end badly for them.

All this information is conveyed in one sentence.  The story starts in the middle and it implies what must have happened before and what will happen next.  What the author wrote, combined with what the reader can guess, form a complete story with distinct characters and a beginning, middle, and end.

Steve might point out that each “probably” and “likely” in the above description stands for information the vss left out.  We don’t know who is offering the job or his (or her) motivation.  We don’t know anything about the poor dupes or the particulars of what will happen to them.  If the job of a story is to tell the reader what happened, then this one falls short.

I can’t argue with Steve that information is left out, and if a story can be a story only with all the facts included, then this vss isn’t a story by that standard.

What I can argue, however, is that Steve’s standard is not the only one.  Perhaps Steve would agree that a Norman Rockwell painting tells a story, or the photograph of the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima, or a Far Side cartoon.  Each of these combine the author’s skill in deciding what to show and the audience’s ability to infer what is missing from what is present.  They give the audience an emotional response just as strong as if all the details were included.  By this standard, “Victoria’s Secret Building” works as a story.

A good vss can be as satisfying as longer stories for both readers and writers.  For a reader, a vss can show a moment in time with clarity and punch without messing around with pages of description and dialogue.  To work, a vss has to win you over in the space between two blinks of an eye.  It invites you to use your imagination in collaboration with the author’s.  It is short enough to memorize and you can read several in a single sitting, each as different as two snowflakes.

For a writer, a vss gives you the chance to convey an entire scene in just a few words.  Do you want to sharpen your writing skills, no matter what form or genre you work in?  Write vss.  It requires you to choose exactly the right details and precisely the right words, and remove everything else.  To get the most out of the small space you will learn to look for nuances and multiple meanings, and your work will become both more economical and more fluid.  Each story is complete in itself and you can write several at a sitting.  A vss provides immediate gratification if it works and can be discarded without regret if it doesn’t.

In future articles I will look at other vss, both to show readers how to read them and to offer writers practical ideas for how to write them.  Much of what appears in the articles will start out to answer the question, “How do I fit a real story into a small space?” However, I believe you will also see that the techniques I describe can be used to improve any writing.  Learn them reading and writing very short stories, then use them wherever you go.

Stories by Charlie Close.

Other Articles in This Series

Start in the Middle

Use Familiar Contexts

Small Choices Make a Big Difference

Don’t be Afraid of the Ordinary

Go for Emotion

Metaphor

Appeal to the Senses

The Implied Character

Surprise

Misunderstanding

About the Author

Charlie Close is a writer of very short stories. His mainstream stories are published on Twitter at @CharlieClose, and his romance stories can be found at @apinchofpassion. He is the author of Burning Embers and Other Stories of Marriage, Work, and Family, ISBN 978-1598588187. Visit Charlie’s blog at http://charlieclose.com