“Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.” (Sergio Aragones)

“Life's too short to deal with other people's insecurities.” (Anthony Hopkins)

Some writers think that a short story is a novel that has been written by an author who didn’t want to do all that work of writing 70.000 words or more. It is not. A short story has nothing to do with size. Like women say: “Size doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is that it moves.” A novel and a short story should both move you, but each moves in a different direction.

I write novels. I don’t know much about writing short stories. I’m learning how to do it. This bundle is my test-paper, my exam, and you, the reader, are the master who decides about the result. There is no better exercise than real life. Learning starts the day you leave school.

I know one thing about short stories: I know how to tell jokes. A joke is a short story too. With humour, you can get away with everything.

Every book has two sides. What do you say? The top and the bottom? The front and the back? The inside and the outside? Are you trying to be funnier than I am? OK, you’re right in one thing: better writers pick better words. I should have said: ‘Every story has two dimensions.’

‘Story’ is here a better word than ‘book’, since a story can also be told and a book can be filled with empty pages. ‘Dimension’ is here a better word than ‘side’. Sides are opposites, while dimensions (like width, height and depth) add a whole new set of choices, of opposites, to the situation.

The two dimensions of every story are: content and form, genre and style, what you say and how you say it. The choice between the word ‘book’ or the word ‘story’ doesn’t give more information; it just gives other information, it makes the message clearer. Style, vocabulary, construction of sentences is all ‘form’, a way to say it.

Humour is not a genre, it’s a style. Imagine the news opening with this message: “President Whatshisname has decided to raise the taxes, to beat the economic crisis.” The reporter has this stern face, wears glasses and a suit, to give a sincere impression. We believe him. We’re all happy that we voted mister Whatshisname for President. Even in a crisis, President Whatshisname knows what to do. Now imagine the same message, exactly the same words, but the reporter wears a T-shirt and laughs out loud when telling you the news. We start to think… Raise taxes to beat the economic crisis? We’re in a crisis because people lose their job, because prices of labour go up and income goes down, because we don’t spend enough to pay for the labour others deliver. The government should lower the taxes, to give labour a better chance in competition…. Raising taxes will make things worse instead of better. President Whatshisname must have lost his mind. How can this reporter laugh about it? Ah, it’s easy. Humour is when the impossible crisis just got worse. Democracy gives us the right to pay for the stupid mistakes of the people we trusted not to make stupid mistakes. The only thing we can do is laugh about it…

Do you understand the importance of style? The same message causes a different effect.

It should be clear that, being a non-native writer in the English language, I can never score points in form, in style. My vocabulary is poor, I have no experience with the language, which makes it hard to build proper sentences or avoid grammatical errors, and I never took classes in creative writing or classic literature. Hell, I even have to look up in my dictionary how to write Shakespeer Shackspear Shakespeare.

My only escape is content. The only exception where I dominate form is: I know how to tell jokes. If you tell a joke and people laugh about it, it’s a good joke. If not: you can always blame the content, you can always blame the joke for not being funny. With humour, you can get away with everything. That’s why I write humour.

Let’s go back to the short story. A joke is a short story. I’m a novel writer, but I know about jokes, so I know about short stories too.

Novel writers have to deal with lots of details: development of characters, rich environments, interesting backgrounds, great plots, points of view, choice of narrator, etc. etc. Every one of those elements can kill your novel if you don’t do it right. Readers are ruthless. They demand perfection or they will close the book. I’ve never had one reader who told me: “Your story is awful, but I like how you use the ; and the , in your text, so I finished it until the end.”

Short stories are easy. I’ll give you one more example (Clipper was a reliable programming language from the DOS-era):

In the year 1999, a Clipper programmer suffered long working days. Windows Oh Oh was the dominating operating system, the millennium was coming fast, the clock ticked, the millennium bug had to be killed efficiently before the start of the new year 2000, but with all those successful Clipper-programs and all those companies depending on them, there was a lot of work for him to do. His working weeks went from 50 hours to 60, to 70, to 100 and after working during the whole Christmas holidays he was totally worn out. He decided: “I’m out. I don’t want to do this anymore. I go to a clinic and let myself freeze. I have the money to do it and when I wake up, in 2002 or 2003 or so, the whole millennium problem will be over and I can go back to normal again.”

So he said and so he did. He went to the clinic, they put him in the freezer and his next experience was that he woke up, in the middle of lots of lights and people in green overalls watching him.

“Hello. How do you feel?”, one doctor asked.

“Hm. A little cold, but not bad, not bad at all. What day is it?”, the Clipper programmer asked.

The doctor said: “You’ve slept almost 8.000 years. There was a little problem with the software that should have waked you up, a small millennium bug that wasn’t solved in time. But don’t worry, everything will work out fine. We have world peace now, no famine, no pollution, no unemployment, no poverty, no diseases and a clone of Bill Gates is President of the known universe. You’ll like it here. There’s only one tiny little problem left, so we’re all happy that you woke up in such a good health: the year 10.000 is coming fast, the clock is ticking, every company depends on updates of their Clipper programs and you’re the only Clipper programmer left…”

This is the core of the short story: you describe a situation, you push the reader gently in a certain direction and at the last line you punch him into the opposite corner, as hard as you can. The punchline is the secret of the joke. The surprise is the secret of the short story.

You can see the same effect in the short story about the two friends who meet in Paris. The reader limps on the idea that friendship is a wonderful thing until the last paragraph, the note, which gives an unexpected twist to the story. We don’t care about the lights of the Eiffel Tower, we don’t care about the characters of Donald and George, and we don’t care about the name of George’s wife and dog. All those things might be important if this were a novel, but in a short story, you can get away with almost everything, as long as your punchline, your surprise, hits your reader on the chin.

But you already knew that.

You’re an experienced reader.

There’s no surprise here.

So this is a lousy short story.

I should have stayed with writing novels…