Short Stories Obituary

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Photo Credit: online pic.

Apprenticeship. Short stories used to be an apprenticeship for fiction. Bricklayers, welders, plumbers, masons, carpenters and other trades start off as apprentices, working under skilled craftsmen.    

Can you write? Writers used to test the waters with short stories. Some went all the way to the apex and wrote novels. Other stories were published in anthologies.

Why are you using the past tense? I’m saying used to, because magazines, the workshop that allowed writers to show case their short stories are gone.

I mean printed magazines. Magazines are not dead as such. They are now in digital form. Fingers are still the same tools for reading, but we no longer use them to page pages, if I can put it that way. We scroll or click on computers and phones.

Before we post an obituary, we must remember that short stories are a thought that plays out in two, three or four typed pages. The story ends at the end of the thought. Short stories are short bus rides that end when you ring the bell to get off.

Short stories are walking two blocks to the grocery store or a quick lunch because you must go back to work. They are 4 p.m. after a long day at work. Short stories are assessing the destruction after Hurricane Peter.

Short stories are the rainbow after the rain on a sunny day.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang. 

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