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This is partly a reaction to reading Tina's story in WotF V29. But I've found it to be true in general.
I found several of OSC's short stories to be brilliant and then come in a little flat at the end. About 3/4 of WotF V28 stories left me feeling that way. Tina's story was one of the most brilliant I've ever read in style and exposition. The ending ... meh. The first story in V29 has exactly the same problem.
I've not found this to be an issue with novels or movies, and not poetry (also a short form).
What's the deal with short stories and endings? (Or am I delusional?)
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Everything's gotta work in a short story, and sometimes the resolution of things just can't be fitted into a small amount of words.
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The short story form also allows for a greater variety of denouement types than the novel form. An ending in either in terms of denouement is the final outcome of a main dramatic complication. Conflict resolution is a common complication outcome for novels. Revelation, reversal, personal growth, inspirational, and joke outcomes, to name a few outcomes that a novel may not singly sustain over the whole or appeal to readers but that a short story might.
The shorter form doesn't allow for as much emotional buildup and, hence, payoff as a novel. The complication being satisfiable in either, but of a higher order emotional magnitude in terms of antagonism, causation, and tension in longer forms.
Short story denouements do not need to resolve a conflict in the same sense that novels do. They only need to satisfy a complication, albeit a comparatively minor complication compared to a novel's. Five thousand words is only a half hour of reading time and not the ten or more hours invested in reading a novel. Reader payoff expectation is proportional to time invested reading.
When a short story's complication outcome may be ambiguous or open-ended and still satisfactorily pay off, a novel's outcome ought to be irrevocable and unequivocal for reader satisfaction and payoff.
Like sketches, vignettes, and anecdotes, which short stories oftentimes are also one of or more, though with the dramatic structure complication features of longer forms, besides other organizing principles, like chronology, most significant factors to least, or closest to farthest, or general detail to specific detail, a short story is but a snapshot of a brief span of time, a limited number of personas, a limited setting, a proportional complication, a narrowly construed theme, and limited events.
Myself, I feel like writers misunderstand the restraints of the short form; the constraints are not as fully realized as they ought to be for a best practice. Though maybe because reading budgets for short stories are tight, they and their forms appeal to readers with tight time budgets and, therefore, they prefer telling writing.
Short story voice tends to be more telling, more summarization and explanation (diegesis and exigesis, respectively), than showing: imitation (mimesis). The container is smaller and the content often doesn't fit into it, so writing shortcuts are taken to shoehorn content into the container.
In order for a short form's emotional buildup, satisfaction, and payoff to feel complete, a complication must be narrowed more than many writers accomplish. This is like writing a book report or other essay composition. Focus is crucial. A satisfactory five-paragraph book report (500 words ~, high school writing and reading course and End Of Grade composition test standards) about, say, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird must focus on one narrow theme and not the many or even per se a main theme, since doing so would result in either a longer paper or an incomplete development of any single point.
Comparing a fully satisfying short story's dramatic features with a less satisfying story's is one exercise that can build writing skills. Dissect one of each and compare and contrast their methods, voices, and structures.
Intriguingly, a well-crafted short story may transcend its container's limitations. In writing, narrow focus on exacting specifics, a tightly focused dramatic complication, has a paradoxical characteristic of attaining perhaps nearly universal relevance, meaning, and appeal for audiences.
Edited to add: And struggling writers oftentimes may have the basics of beginnings, middles, or endings well in hand, but not all three. Ending shortcomings credibly are the most likely, since they come last in many writers' processes. A treatment is to return to the ending and develop it in proportion to beginning and middle acts.
One way I gauge a writer's progress is how well the three acts balance and support one another. Maybe the beginning is strong and the middle sags. The ending probably won't live up to the beginning, either. Strong beginning and middle, lackluster ending, further along on the Poet's Journey. Lackluster beginning, stronger middle, powerful ending, writing probably focused more on the latter acts than the prior acts, but nonetheless strong facility with endings.
quote:Myself, I feel like writers misunderstand the restraints of the short form; the constraints are not as fully realized as they ought to be for a best practice.
Basically, this. Most people actually don't know how to write a short story. They think it's more about word count, and don't consider the actual craft of attempting to write this sort of form.
What's even worse, in my mind, is the proliferation of flash fiction, which is even more difficult to do successfully than short stories. But because so many magazines want shorter and shorter pieces of writing, many more people are writing shorter and shorter stories which, in my opinion, almost never work.
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