The Short Story Conundrum

"Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short' Henry David Thoreau. The short story has always perplexed me, I must admit that there are very few that I have actually had the time or inclination to sit down and read, and I find that if I am about to invest some time in a story and its characters, I want a good few hundred pages, not just a few. I would now like to stand corrected. I have not suddenly taken to reading short stories, nor have I had a knock to the head and all my previous decisions have been made the polar opposite, but I have had the painful task of actually writing a short story. One of my new years resolutions for 2010 was to submit some of my own work, whatever it may be, to magazines or competitions. It has taken me 6 months, and a good few false starts but last friday I hit the send button on an email submitting my very first (well 3rd really but the first was crap, and the second really just looked like a long chapter) short story into the open world. I am not expecting to win this competition, I wasn't even really expecting the email that confirmed that they received my story so I have put it out of my mind (which is an obvious lie but I'm not about to get into that now) for now, but it was a very enlightening experience. This short story took me a good few weeks to write, the idea was very simple, and I didn't have a long list of characters to fill in the details but it still took me a while to find the confidence to write. I am a soul of very little confidence at the best of time however the prospect of a completely new genre being submitted to some fancy writing people to chose if its good enough terrified me and was a very good reason for the numerous thoughts i had about jacking it in. I now have a great, great, great respect for short story writers, more so that the novel writers, they have hundreds of pages to get their thoughts across, to come up with a feasible beginning, middle and end and to sort their characters out with some sort of resolution. Even with the restricted parameters of the short story, you still have to get all of those things into very few pages. I have a big problem with my stories, I write in chapters, I write the beginning, middle and end, but it fits into the bigger picture, I cannot just restrict it to a small scale. Anyone who can do that, with a nice finality to the end of the story, is my hero, and I shall bow down to you all if you can do that. I think I might read some more short stories now, delve into the smaller world, and learn a little bit more about the craft, you never know, one day I might write another one.