Yesterday I read One Dog Happy, a collection of stories by Molly McNett.  Her stories are brief sketches of life in the Midwest, full winters and deep summers and farms and malls and towns full of people struggling.  Struggle is huge in short stories, and hard for a writer to pull off.  But without a struggle of some kind, and its resolution (again,of some kind), a short story is just a glimpse of life, a Peeping Tom moment, touching perhaps but not memorable.

I’ve been reading a lot of short stories lately and I’ve only just fully realized the difficulty involved in writing a good one.  Short stories are tough because not only does the writer have to create that struggle but within the span of  ten or twenty pages, fully realized characters have to be presented, they have to rally against or through or under or over a situation (the struggle part), and they get through to the other side (the resolution).  Instead of taking time to set up a scene, introduce a few characters, raise the bar of life (or work or love or sex or death), and then let it ride, as a novelist can in creating a good story, the short story writer has to meet goals of character, situation, challenge, and growth within sentences, instead of chapters.  One sentence has to serve many purposes; there cannot be an errant paragraph, much less an extra phrase or a single-use sentence.  And all those multi-use sentences together have to add up to a full-bodied story, not a snapshot or a brief glimpse but a robust rendering of — you guessed it — a struggle overcome.  A story worth the telling, and the reading.

A few of McNett’s stories achieve the full-bodied kick of a good short story.  “One Dog Happy”  is a gem, and “Catalog Sales” and “Ozzie the Burro” are masterful in use of good and imaginative narrative.  McNett’s best stories have compelling characters in no-win situations who yet somehow come out better than we thought they would. And we care how they come out, because they are real for us, and they are struggling.  We all struggle, and everyone can use encouragement.  Stories that give good struggle and bits of breakthrough are encouragement.

The brave survivor in “Ozzie the Burro” notes, “Not everything should be of some use.  People should have useless things, and love them, and maybe try more to love everything that way.  Even their kids too, not because they made them look good by going to college.“  Good advice, yet a short story cannot just be pretty, or it is useless: it has to be kick-started into being and then fully alive, from page one to the end.

There have been real masters of the short story, the best being Anton Chekhov.  His stories are perfect, not a note or letter or a sentence out of place or out of order.  By the end of one of his stories we are full and we are changed and we are thinking, feeling, humming  along to the tune, grim or merry, that he set out for us.  Other good short story writers are Charlotte Perkins Gilman (I reviewed the wonderful stories in The Yellow Wallpaper), Edith Wharton, Leo Tolstoi, Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis, Edna O’Brien, and the wonderful William Trevor.