Short stories

Suzie Eisfelder

Many, many moons ago, when I was much younger than the age I profess to be, my family were having a conversation about the shortest story in the world. Now I’m not able to comment on the validity of this but the shortest story we came up with was “And the sun sank slowly in the west.” That was the whole story. Whether it’s true or not is totally irrelevant at this point but it was fun. Someone in the family did mention it was a real story.

Technology has moved on dramatically since that time and we have so many stories of differing lengths. The latest I’ve found is Hellnotes and they’re canvassing science fiction, fantasy and horror stories. They pay roughly $1 per story but it has to fit within a tweet so a maximum of 140 characters. I have noticed novels are getting longer and longer with a lot of them being serialised so you end up with a large number of bricks which you have to wade your way through. I’m not convinced that longer books are better as some of them have an awful lot of fillers and as I read them I wonder why the author has enlarged on that particular point to quite that extent. I’ve heard many complaints about the length of the later Harry Potter novels and there is so much in the last book they’ve had to make two movies out of it. So, I can’t help but wonder how Twitter Fiction will go. Will we get back to the short stories by masters of horror, such as Edgar Allan Poe, and will we then end up with better fiction or will something else happen? I can’t imagine what could happen but if we get better fiction then the end result is good. It’s certainly going to be interesting to find out.


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