"For sale: baby shoes, never used."

The title is a six-word short story by Ernest Hemingway.

Writing a story a week is a much harder task than I anticipated. In a rare moment of extreme self-confidence, I assumed that once I sat down to write and really focus on characterization, dialogue, etc, that I would be able to flesh out my story idea into something worth reading. But then again, if it were easy, I would have done it months ago.

A.O. Scott wrote about the short story in a recent New York Times article, Brevity's Pull - In Praise of the American Short Story. He cited Raymond Carver (my literary namesake), Flannery O'Connor, and John Cheever as examples of excellent writers known for short stories, not novels. While the article seemed incomplete - he mentioned few female writers (where was Alice Munro? Jhumpa Lahiri? Joyce Carol Oates?) - it did have some interesting things to say the form's place in today's portable society:

The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity. The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith. And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention?