It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.
The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!
I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry.
The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.
You can get away with stuff in a one-page story that you can't get away with in a book.
Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.
