Have you ever read "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway? I read it when I was in college, and I didn't really like it, but it is a story that has since stuck with me. A short story is typically defined as a "snap shot" in time. Just one small moment captured forever in a few words. "Hills Like White Elephants" illustrates that principal perfectly. It takes place over the course of maybe twenty minutes, but you can infer a ton about the characters' lives and their relationship (Wikipedia calls this the "Iceberg Theory"). You even get all this elephant and licorice symbolism. You could talk about it for a week in class and not exhaust all the possibilites. Some short stories aren't really that short at all--like "the Yellow Wallpaper". Really, Charlotte Gilman? It was like fifty pages in my Norton Anthology. " Hills LIke White Elephants" I remember being only two or three pages, yet it encompassed so much more than "the Yellow Wallpaper" ever could.
I've tried to write a short story several times--and failed miserably. Maybe it's because I hold myself to too high of a standard. But Hills Like White Elephants is the only kind of short story that I can really relate to. It's the only kind of short story that I want to write. A snapshot into someone's desperately depressing life, and then back out again. Over a hundred pages' worth of drama packed into two or three. And all that symbolism, too. But I guess none of us can be Ernest Hemingway--at least not on our first try.
