Unlike a novel, which spins out a web of human relationships and
behaviors at a more or less leisurely pace, a short story tends to be
a record of a "significant episode" in the lives of the
characters. If we can imagine the lives of the characters beyond the
physical bounds of the short story itself, we could say that, having
experienced an epiphany of sorts during the story, they go on to lead
lives that are more insightful. The task of the artist who creates the
short story is to commune with the reader through his characters, and
transmit the latter's epiphany and insight to the former. By contrast,
a novel ends at a resting place, a quietus that mitigates the
ever-present spiritual agony of the characters, and hence the reader.
Both the reader and writer of a short story bring their individual,
mundane humanity to the table in this communion, influencing the
physical form of the exchange on the part of the writer and the
expectations and critical "feedback" on the part of the reader. The
third participant in this communion is the story itself, which has an
ideal life all of its own.
A physical feature such as the length of a story is, then, ideally
determined by the natural length of the ideal narration for that
particular story, and physically determined by the skills and life
experience of the reader and the writer. Thus, each individulal story has
a "right" or ideal length, which cannot be known a priori, but can be
recognized in retrospect by the adept reader, after the story has been
given physical form by the skilled artist-writer.
Most Telugu short stories, however, are physically short for the wrong
reasons. Primarily it is because the writer is inadequate as an
artist--he is in insufficient sympathy with his characters to
understand them in depth. To such writers, the short story is often a
mere vehicle for polemic for which the characters (and hence the
readers) are stereotypical stick figures, about whom nothing much
needs to be said. The mirror image of such a writer is the reader who
fears real understanding, preferring instead a familiar diet of
hackneyed homilies.
So, this reader's advice to the writer is: "Please listen to your
story and make it as long as it says it needs to be, because I, the
reader, am with you in that story and need the story to tell me about
myself."