Short & Sweet, Reading Is Neat

Story interests me more than about anything in a movie. That's always where it falls short, or where it really grabs me. That's true for everyone, or should be. What's interesting is how you can wind up getting ahead of the plot, and know things before the movie tells you. If things are good at the end of the second act, that may mean a sad ending. Also, as I think Orson Welles may have said, whether it's a happy ending depends on when you end it. If you know how long the movie is, you can start to work that out in your head.

That's true with books as well. If you have the whole book in your hands, you can see by the number of pages on your right whether there's so much time left that things may get bad or good before it's through. When you're thinking like that, it's hard to keep things a surprise until you cross that bridge. That's true for novels, anyway. Something that you don't get in a movie is the equivalent of collected short stories. Those are great fun.

Perhaps harder than the Great American Novel is the Great American Short Story. It's hard to be concise. What it's easy to do is to conceal the length of the short story because of how it's buried amidst however many other stories in the same tome. The particular story that you're reading may be longer or shorter, with the others in the collection being longer or shorter to make up the difference. The mystery of how the stories all end endures in this way.

A bit tricky is how you choose to end your reading sessions when you are reading short stories. It's the same as when an author is irregular in how they apportion the chapters by word count. You have to be flexible and say that you'll read some twenty pages, allowing for the last story to put you a little further along than you meant or to leave you a bit short. That's my way, anyway. It's what I would recommend if you're going to take up some short stories. If you do, you can't go wrong with Roald Dahl. His are great.