When it occurs in conversation, at least, the phrase "to cut a long story short" is almost always popular, writes Frank McNally.
Indeed, depending on the storyteller, it can sometimes be as welcome as the sound of the cavalry riding over the hill. So it seems a bit of a paradox that, in its literary form, the short story should be so little in demand.
Electronic media have shrunk our attention spans, or so we are told. And anyway, nobody has time to read whole novels any more. This should therefore be a golden age for latterday Chekhovs and Maupassants. But instead of making a comeback, the literary short story continues to starve in its loft, surrounded by rejection slips.
Maybe Britain's National Short Story Award will succeed in its aim of doing for the form what the Booker Prize has done for the novel. The sponsors have already provided would-be literary miniaturists with 15,000 incentives - all of them sterling - making it one of the most valuable prizes per word in fiction. Moreover, in getting talked about, the new award seems to have acquired some of the older one's talent for controversy.
Julian Gough's winning story was only the second most notorious on this year's short list. The BBC's scheduled reading of Hanif Kureishi's Weddings and Beheadingshad to be postponed because of events in the Middle East. But Gough's The Orphan and the Mobneeded considerable amendment before it could go out on Radio 4's afternoon slot. And revolving as it does around an incident in which an orphan accidentally urinates on a Fianna Fáil minister, it may not be appearing on the school curriculum any time soon.
The most famous Irish short story is famous for, among other things, not being very short. In my old Penguin edition, James Joyce's The Deadruns to a hefty 47 pages of small print. It also has more sub-plots that many modern novels and of course it inspired a film. But if the story's scope makes it almost a novella, its celebrated closing passage is often read in isolation, at least by those who already know the story.
Contrary to the earlier point about the value-per-word of Gough's prize, serious short story writers would reject any productivity-based approach to assessing their work's worth. Joyce's writings started out short and became ever longer and more complex, whereas Samuel Beckett's did the opposite. But there is no suggestion that Beckett worked any less hard.
Ernest Hemingway is a cautionary tale in how challenging brevity can be for a writer. For most of his career, he was famous for short sentences. He hunted adjectives with the same enthusiasm as he hunted wildlife. And although best known now for novels, he was also a master of the short story.
Hemingway perfected the "iceberg" approach to writing, paring the detail until only 10 per cent was visible and the reader had to assume the rest. A classic example is Hills Like White Elephants: a story comprising a short, tense conversation between a couple discussing an unspecified "operation".
The hills in the title are a hint about the submerged part of the iceberg, but Hemingway was disciplined enough not to elaborate.
By the end of his career, this was quite beyond him. In 1959, Lifemagazine commissioned him to produce 10,000 words on the bullfighting season in Spain. It was to be an essay rather than a short story, although its theme of the high-risk rivalry between two matadors - a rising star and an older man coming out of retirement - was the stuff of novels.
So, unfortunately, was the length of the manuscript eventually submitted: a sprawling 120,000 words. The ability to cut a long story short had deserted Hemingway at the end and his attempts to edit the essay only added to it. Giving up on the 10,000-word plan, his publishers eventually split the difference and brought The Dangerous Summerin at the length of a short novel.
UNLIKE ITS PROSEcounterpart, the short poem sells just as well as the long one: that is to say it doesn't sell at all (usually). Brevity at least makes poetry easier to commit to memory, however. Patrick Kavanagh's Wet Evening in Aprilmay not one of his greatest works, but it is short enough both to memorise and to reproduce here in full.
"The birds sang in the wet trees/And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now/And I was dead and someone else was listening to them/But I was glad I had recorded for him/The melancholy." As an appeal for modest literary immortality, the poem is also succeeding admirably. It has even lent its title to a tribute night in Inniskeen this coming Friday, which also kicks off a weekend of poetry and songwriting workshops in Kavanagh's home village.
"Wet Evening in April" - the event - is not in fact a tribute to the poet, except indirectly. It is dedicated instead to Gene Carroll, a local man who had entertained thousands of visitors with his tours and one-man-show before he died last Christmas aged 81. The night in his honour will feature music, poetry, and story telling, while Macdara Woods and Colum Sands will oversee the weekend workshops It is not yet 100 years since Kavanagh wrote the poem. But sure enough, according to Met Éireann, Friday may well be another wet evening in April. The good news is that all the events are being held indoors in the Kavanagh Centre, from which information and booking are available via Tel. 042-9378560.