... them); reading one author has led to the discovery of another, and this has been going on non-stop since February. Short stories have become fashionable. As I browse new titles in book stores, I see ... gives it a sense of continuity that readers can appreciate. Perhaps what's happening to the short story genre has been happening all along; I just haven't been paying much attection. But ...

... a kind of practice for the big day when they will finally write a novel. Short stories may seem like building blocks to the novel, but their structure is actually quite different. When you're starting ... a stretch of unhurried backstory or pretty description. So as you can see, novels and stories can have very different plot, character, and pacing. These are crucial things to remember ...

The Best American Short Stories, of all the annual story anthologies, seems to have the biggest following among readers. The series has been around in one form or another since 1915 and has published short fiction by pretty much all of America’s best-known (and many more lesser known) practitioners of the form. The series’ ...

... day, Allison Brennan blogged about writing short stories versus novels: Readers, do you like reading ... concisely, but I'm not satisfied reading or writing just short stories or novels. I think the scope of a story should determine ... story is often better than a novel for showing the immediate effects of a single event. A short story allows you to give the event its due while a novel would force ...

So the other day I was in the bookstore flipping through the new Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold—and notice I said flipping, not buying, a ... , The New Yorker again, The Southern Review, and again and again with The New Yorker.Detecting a pattern? None of the stories interested me, so I didn't buy the edition. However, more surprising than the low quality of the ...

... idea where a story is going, rather than just starting with an idea and running with it. But when it comes to short stories, this is even more important. I need to know how it begins and ends, and I need some idea of the middle (compared to ... a blurry cat photo. >_< Each short story is also slightly different. Some need every detail planned out, others need two or three strong images and I ...