How to Analyze Short Story Plot

Video Transcript

"Okay folks, in this clip I'm going to teach you how to analyze a short story plot. This is something that'll come in hand if you're creating your own short story, obviously, or if you're just reading someone else's material and wanted to give them the best critical analysis that you can. Analyzing a short story plot is a lot different than analyzing a full length long story plot. Why? Because in a short story, there's a lot less time to develop a situation or a scenario than there is in a, obviously a full length novel. They have a lot more time to develop their characters, the world that they live in, the circumstances, you know, surrounding the events that take place. In a short story, it's usually more meant to be an excerpt from a much bigger story. That's one of the best things to look for, honestly. See how well they captured a moment set within a bigger moment. When you're analyzing the plot, a bad short story will move from the first act to the third act, and even have three acts to begin with, and do it in a really rapid, quick-fire pace, that kind of makes you feel like you just watched something go through in fast-forward. That is not a good thing. If someone's going to sit down to write a really good short story, it needs to be a really detailed glimpse into a much bigger picture. That's really what you're going to look for here. Almost like you're reading a chapter out of someone's much larger story. It ought to be very vivid, it ought to have a lot of movement to it within, in and of itself. It shouldn't just be, you know, a vague, you know, can't understand like what in the world caused the character in the story to do this and this and this. I mean you can't just leave a hundred percent of the story up to interpretation. That has to be very clear why events within the short story transpire, but it's not important necessarily to understand the fullness of it. Like the, like where the character came from before this moment and where he ultimately will go after this. It's just meant to be a snippet, to look at it as a very detailed snippet. You should feel satisfied with the story in and of itself, and yet at the same time, maybe curious to know more after it's done. A good short story is like a brief little excerpt into someone's life or into a much bigger picture. A moment that maybe stood out in the person's larger story. Like in a big full length novel, there are a lot of different beats. You know, in the writing world, beats are considered to be moments, or specific events that, you know, are different from one to the next, and the way the story moves along is from going basically from beat to beat to beat. An emotional change, or a physical change, that is when beat is considered, and in a short story, basically what you would be examining is maybe one of those beats, two at the max. And they're connected, but there's obviously a much bigger picture to consider. So, when you sit down to analyze a short story, think of it in terms of just a single beat in a much larger tune, and try and look at it from that perspective: to analyze it in such a way that you can see the bigger picture without needing to know the bigger picture. And that is basically how you analyze a short story."