… a very long poem. At least mine are, I hope. -Sherman Alexie
… a line drawing; every part is there to add to the whole and no unnecessary strokes are present. -Unattributed
… an iceberg: nine-tenths of its meaning is submerged. -Ernest Hemingway
… a stone thrown into a pond. -Ali Smith

… a wagon wheel: the spokes must be connected to the hub, or graceful movement is impossible. -Mary Gordon
… a knife—strongly made, well balanced, and with an absolute minimum of moving parts. -Michael Swanwick
… a sniper’s bullet. Fast and shocking. -Jeffery Deaver
… a slap in the face. It must immediately sting, make itself known at once, and it must leave a red mark for hours to come. -Martin Booth
… a commando operation. You have to get in quickly, set your charges, and get out, leaving the reader to be caught up in the blast. -Michael Chabon

… Quarter horse racing … Novels are like Thoroughbred racing. -Marian Bray
… a motorcycle - very exciting, very fast and dangerous, but I wouldn’t want to ride one across Europe. -Jonathan Carroll
… an airplane: it has many parts and flies only if it built with a careful eye on science and engineering. -James Wallace Harris
… a child’s kite, a small wonder, a brief, bright moment. - Sean O’Faolain

… a time-capsule. -Clive Barker
… a snapshot. -The Writers Bureau

… looking through a keyhole. A novel is a 360-degree panoramic window. -Matthew Klam
… lighting your way through a dark cave with a tiny birthday candle. -“Avi”
… being in a darkened room, [and] a novel is like being in a darkened field. -Dan Chaon
… a kiss in the dark from a stranger. -Stephen King
… a kick in the teeth in the dark from a stranger. -Cory Doctorow

… having an infatuation, while … a novel is like having a marriage. -Lan Samantha Chan
… engaging in a brief affair, [and] writing a novel is more like a marriage. -Sarah Edgson
… something you could do in a fit of passion … Writing a novel is more like a marriage. -Mary Morris
… a weekend guest, [and] a novel is like a divorced relative staying with you. -Lev Raphael

… screaming out loud. -Isabel Allende
… a dream; it follows its own rules. -Isabel Allende
… an arrow that has one shot … while a novel is like embroidering a tapestry. -Isabel Allende

… a tightly argued summation in a trial, whereas a novel is the whole case. -Michael Dorris
… a revelation, [and] a novel is an evolution. -Unattributed

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There is no technically convincing theory of the short story — it is technically a genre, not a form, but resists the definitions that usually cluster around both. There is the defining length (an unedifying fifty-page range), there is the short story’s lonely voice from a submerged population (Frank O’Connor’s famous hypothesis) and there are various “slices of life” ideas and notions of literary apprenticeship … All of these convey what happens sometimes — what happens a lot — but in lieu of a truly winning overriding theory, we should rely perhaps on simple descriptions, in which case the more the merrier. Let me throw some inot the pot. Many that I’ve heard — and used myself — are fashioned as metaphors comparing shorter and longer narratives, attempting to define the one through its relationship to the other. A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. A short story is a weekend guest; a novel is a long-term boarder. A story is a brick; a novel is a brick wall. And my favorite, the assymetrical a short story is a flower; a novel is a job.

… Unlike novels or poems, but more akin to a play, the short story is also an end-oriented form, and in the best ones the endings shine a light back upon the story illuminating its meaning with both surprise and inevitability. If a story is not always, therapeutically, an axe for the frozen sea within us, then it is at least a pair of brutally sharpened ice skates.

— Lorrie Moore, Best American Short Stories 2004

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Patenting a simile for the short story may be every author’s birthright, but one would hope authors recognized the lack of originality behind, and resulting from, the impulse. Strangely, though, even the most original writers can lose their taste for novelty when writing about the craft of the short story. Even if their language remains lively, their metaphors wry, their voices charming and assertive, they end up offering facile, unadventurous, ideas. What is a short story? Something compact and pure, a poem by way of story, a universe in miniature, etc.

William Boyd, in his ruminations on the genre for the Guardian, runs through the obligatory SAT analogies for novels and short stories — orchestra vs. string quartet, epic vs. lyric poem, backward vs. forward movement — but, at least, pushes further and proposes seven categories of short stories “[subsuming] all the species of the genus.” Now if only the categories displayed a consistent logic; in their current incarnation, some describe structure, others content or style, and one category inexplicably combines prose-poems and “the mythic.”

But, then again, Boyd (rightly) refuses to valorize the short story for its lack of commercial prospects (its ‘pre-capitalism’ innocence / marketplace virginity). “The popularity of the short story - indeed its very availability - has, more so than in the case of the novel, always been somewhat at the mercy of commercial considerations,” Boyd notes.

Lorrie Moore arrives (correctly or incorrectly, I don’t know) at a different history for the short story in her introduction to 2004’s BASS.

Having long lost its ability to pay an author’s rent … the short story has been freed of its commercial life to become serious art, by its virtually every practictioner. As a result, short or long, a story lies less. It sings and informs and blurts. It has nothing to lose.

Honest writing, of course, is not dependent on genre but on talent. Or, perhaps I’m not understanding what Moore means by “lying” in fiction; is it something different than bad or “unconvincing” writing? Or is “lying” just commerce’s business partner, threatening art’s purity by way of a forced binary?

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Sadly, the introduction’s opening showcases a Moore who could be capable of enlivening the wan ‘short story discourse’ :

For some reason it seems that everything I hear now is untrue. Or at least no more true than its exact opposite. It seems that no matter what one says about reading and writing, or about short stories and novels, a hundred exceptions support the opposite case. Short stories are for busy people or short attention spans: Well, then why can a reader duck in and out of a novel for ten-minute intervals but not do so succesfully with a short story? People don’t read anymore: Then why are books being published — and sold — at record number? There is no literary community: What are all these writing programs and reading series and book-groups-in-the-middle-of-nowhere? Perhaps all these assertions occur because, too often, and more and more, writers are asked to speak about their approach to their craft (that alarmingly nautical phrase), and what has resulted may be simply the desperate, improvised creative-writing yack of good people uncomfortably far from their desks.

Unfortunately, she then backs down, and provides readers a first-hand look at what goes wrong when writers write on writing:

Nonetheless, opportunities such as this introduction encourage implausible pronouncements and sweeping generalizations, and though I am not easily encouraged, I am surely immune from nothing — a lesson learned from literature.