What Makes a Great Short Story? 

Now that the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is once again open for submissions to Maltese writers, the National Book Council thought to raise the question: what are the elements that make a great short story? 

To answer this admittedly vast query, we reached out to creative writing tutors Aaron Aquilina (University of Malta) and David Hudson (Malta Society of Arts) and a leading local practitioner of the genre, Rita Saliba. While they paid tribute to the endless richness and potential of the short story form, neither did our three contributors hold back from acknowledging that there is something essential to the form, perhaps by dint of its very nature as a storytelling mechanism that privileges brevity. 

Rita Saliba, in fact, describes the short story as “a vehicle ready to take you on a journey”. “It will sometimes pull you back into the past; at other times it will seek to drag you along the trajectory of our current day,” Saliba says, adding that despite its inherent brevity, the short story has the potential to prop up interesting situations, evoke strong feelings and give rise to transformative realisations. She believes that a short story must be meticulously constructed and grab the readers from its very first lines, but that above all, “a short story should make for an enjoyable read, despite its brevity”.

Aaron Aquilina elaborates on the one thing that is difficult to contest when defining the short story – i.e., its very ‘shortness’ – by talking about how the genre has the potential to bend our idea of narrative time (“a concoction of transience and permanence, not necessarily balanced”). 

“Every writer knows that you can make eternity go by in an instant, or make an instant last an eternity,” Aquilina said. 

“When one hears that the hallmark of the short story is its brevity, it’s best to translate that sentiment into something like the following: the short story is the event of initial stasis subject to drastic, irreversible change by the end, and it is a change which the reader experiences very quickly indeed,” he added, citing the work of James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Enright, Franz Kafka and Saki. 

Complementing Aquilina’s high-level overlay of how short stories can, at their best, work on the reader, David Hudson brings in a more nuts-and-bolts description of the mechanism behind some of the best examples of the genre. 

“Stories are about change. A great short story captures a meaningful and credible transformation as efficiently as possible within the confined space of the medium: a relationship shifts, a character develops, a familiar place is seen in a new light, details take on an unexpected weight,” Hudson said, adding that the story’s language or voice often mirrors the nature of this change, reinforcing its emotional or thematic arc. Hudson mentions a number of short stories that beautifully enact these principles, including ‘A Small Good Thing’ by Raymond Carver, ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson, ‘A Temporary Matter’ by Jhumpa Lahiri, ‘Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl’ by Annie Proulx, and several others. 

Happily, both Aaron Aquilina and David Hudson will be taking part in a workshop tour on the short story organised by the National Book Council. The tour will also include sessions by author, editor and translator Joe Gatt and author Leanne Ellul. More information here. 

The tour is devised to coincide with this year’s edition of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which will be open to submissions from 1 September to 1 November 2025. With support from the National Book Council, the Prize will once again be open to writers from Malta, including those who write in Maltese. More information here.