What I look for in a short story (why I stick with them year after year)

Finding your golden collection of short stories can take years. Here's what I look for in a short story because I know that if they have these features, I'll use them year after year.

Length

I consider:

• Logistics!  For juniors, can it be printed onto 1-2 pages (without having to make things ridiculously small)?  Saving on the photocopying budget necessary evil. Senior stories are generally longer, and because of the more serious nature of senior assessments, length isn’t a biggie for me (but it hovers in the background, for sure).

• What will the students in this class cope with?

• If I need to, how would I break this story up (for reading or activities)?

Symbolism

A good old symbol in a short story is gold because:

• Students find these relatively easy to write about (and connect with the main idea).

• They help students understand metaphorical meanings (ideas) because they can ‘see’ them.

Visuals

I think we all love a story we can visualize.  Look for fabulous descriptions, full of colours, textures, shapes and objects.  These are the next best thing to Netflix!

On the flipside, stories with strong visuals lend themselves to visual activities.  For example:

• Are there symbols, images, events, characters that students could depict visually?

• Is there an element of contrast that students could springboard from with visual representations?  See freebie on the right for an example of how I did this with quotations for Witi Ihimaera’s short story, The Seahorse and the Reef.

• Are there clear ‘before’ and ‘after’ elements that students could show visually – eg: in a poster, with a Venn diagram?

• Are there clear key events (turning points) that could be mapped on a visual flowchart?

• Is there are setting or ‘journey’ that could be drawn?  The carpet in Roald Dahl’s The Wish and the bike journey in Patricia Grace’s Beans are fabulous for this.

• Could the main idea be depicted relatively easily in a visual form?

Are there metaphorical elements that would be fun to represent visually?  (These can usually be easily tied in with the main idea.)  Eg:  I LOVE Patricia Grace’s short story, “Beans” where a couple of quotations include:

• “I know my face is about the colour of the club house roof”

• “And some of the paddocks are all ploughed up and have rows of green just showing through.  All neat and tidy, and not much different to loo at from the coloured squares of knitting my sister does for girl guides.

• The lemons on our tree are as sour as sour, but I take a big bite because I feel so good.  It makes me pull awful faces and roll over and over in the grass, but I keep on taking big bites until the lemon is all gone, skin and everything.

Structure

I look for a story that has strong structural features such as:

• A clear link between the beginning and the end.

• Contrast (In the first half the infatuation was fun; in the second it was an evil obsession.)

• A journey with clear stages.

(For more on structure see our freebie on the left.)

Juicy Excerpts

I love a story with rich excerpts I can pull out to plonk in the middle of a page for annotation (close reading - analysis)  For example: 

• A punchy turning point or a clear and clever description of a scene or character is gold, especially if it has:

• Fabulous vocabulary that’s emotive, packed with connotation or illustrating contrast/juxtaposing ideas.

• Figurative language.

• Colloquialisms (slang, idioms, cliches).

• A clear link to the main idea.

• As mentioned under structure – it can be powerful to take the beginning and end of a story to find the links between them.  Placing excerpts of each side-by-side on a page in landscape format, then annotating to find ‘matches’ is a visual and kinaesthetic way to find these links.  From there, you can generally spot the main idea!

Click to watch on YouTube :)

Clear Literary Elements

Short stories are a great way to help students understand key literary features so that they can better understand what we focus on in longer text studies (eg:  novels, films, podcast/streaming series).  These include:

• Plot structure (see structure further on in this post)

• Characterisation

• Setting

• Symbolism

• Main idea

I love students making notes about each of the elements, all on one page. We put the main idea in the middle, then around it we note things from each of the elements that illustrate that idea – specific evidence/quotations included.

Strong messages without the ‘yuk’

In my opinion, students from rough homes don’t need to read about misery as well as live it.  Choosing stories like this doesn’t make us ‘enlightened’ teachers, it just seems ‘woke’.   You can find stories about the challenges in life without reliving what two students in your class actually lived through this morning.  It’s for this reason that I love stories like:

• The Paper Parcel by Owen Marshall. (No, this one doesn’t pass my ‘length’ test but it’s a great one to read to students and then pull excerpts from to pop in the middle of a page for annotation.  It’s hilarious, but you really feel for the humiliation the character faces!)

• The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

• Examination Day by Henry Slesar

• Everyone Was There, e Hoa by Tayi Tibble (strictly an essay, really)

• The Wish by Roald Dahl.

If I can find a story that celebrates fun in life, happy days!  My favourite for this is Beans by Patricia Grace. (THAT story is a serious box-ticker for me!)  Beans ends with “I don’t want to miss a thing in all my life” and “He’s full of beans that boy of yours.  Full of beans.” The main idea being that we should find the beauty and fun that’s all around us and enjoy life.  The observations, energy and joy of the boy in the story is infectious, I tell you!  Isn’t that what students need?

I want stories we remember for the rest of our lives.  Ones that come to mind when you’re in the middle of something because the message relates to your situation.  Ones that my students might even tell their own children about in twenty years time.  (Yep, a lofty goal, that one!)

Connection to Wider World Context(s)

Context is king.  It’s the thing that sparks what I call the ‘Literary Flow’ (see freebie on the right).  Context could mean:

• The context (values, rules, challenges etc) of the story’s setting AND/OR

• The context of the author (values, rules, challenges etc of their own world).

If I can find a story with a strong context then I know I can elevate students’ critical thinking and discussions (Eg: “What does this suggest about our world now?”  “What’s all over the news at the moment that relates to this?”.  I can draw on context when we move into:

• The main idea.

• The audience.

• The author’s purpose.

Click HERE to see our short story resources!

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