Short Fiction That Changed Everything: Five Stories Every Writer Should Know and Why

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The short story is the form that most rewards study because its constraints force every decision into the open. A novelist can bury a structural mistake under three hundred pages. A short story writer has nowhere to hide. The stories that have most influenced the form over the past century share the quality of making everything visible while feeling effortless, a trick that becomes more impressive the more you understand what it requires.

Raymond Carver's Cathedral from 1983 is the first story most contemporary writing teachers assign and for good reason. Its demonstration of how a character can change without the author telling you they have changed, through action rather than reflection, remains the cleanest available example of showing not telling. Carver wrote a later version called So Much Water So Close to Home that some prefer but Cathedral is where the method is most purely demonstrated. Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find asks questions about grace and violence that fiction is uniquely positioned to explore and does so with a compression and a tonal control that makes every sentence earn its place. Alice Munro's Passion, from her 2004 collection Runaway, demonstrates what can be done with time in the short form: decades compressed into moments, the cumulative weight of decisions made in an afternoon. Jorge Luis Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths is the story that most directly influenced how contemporary writers use structure as meaning rather than simply as container. And Ursula K Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas uses the thought experiment form to ask an ethical question so cleanly that the story is now required reading in philosophy courses as well as writing programmes.

Each of these five stories is available free through university library systems, the Borges and Le Guin being in anthologies widely held even in small libraries. Reading them once for pleasure and then immediately again with a pencil asking how does this do what it does produces more writing education than most workshops.

Fiction | The Guardianwww.theguardian.com