After the first week of Story Lab’ing we discussed many aspects of what a story is, and the elements that make them up. With a particular focus on short stories, looking at both Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” as an example and Brander Mattew’s “Philosopshy of the Short Story” as a text to examine them as a way of writing and how they differ from a traditional novel sized text.

One aspect that we touched on in class was [INSERT FRENCH WORD HERE], a french word meaning “flourish at the end” and how short stories often manage to pull off a satisfying ending more often and better than longer types of storytelling.

I agree with this, and upon reflection found that almost every short story I have ever read ended on either some grand reveal (often incredibly dark or twisted) or something else equally as likely to snap the reader back to attention and provoke an internal (sometimes external) “Ah haaaah” and a wide grin of understanding.

I think that short stories can pull of these flourishes better than novels or films because they are much more focused and having a twist or game-changing reveal at the end of a 4000 word story has multitudes less threads to wrap up than a 400 page novel or 2 hour film. Revealing something shocking about a character who has had a few lines of description and only existed in readers minds for a few short minutes feels less jarring and arbitrary than doing the same to a character who has had paragraphs upon paragraphs of description and countless chapters of growth.

It may even be that having a flourish or twist at the end has become such a common trope in the short story (especially Dahl who reveals in the twisted ending) that readers have come to accept and expect it, thus question isn’t should it have been there, but rather how well was it done.

I will definitely try to have a [INSERT FRENCH WORD HERE] in my 800 word Short Story due next week.