Writing a short story is a different challenge compared to writing a novel. Short stories do not have the freedom to give every detail about a character. They start with action and end with an impact.
Short stories can range from a few words to 2500-4000 words. It’s not the length, but the kind of emotion it can invoke among readers that matter. I enjoy writing short stories because they give me enough challenge and equally a constraint to figure out my creativity. Previously, I wrote 500 Miles, and Blind Alley.
The Lake
One such short story The Lake by Ray Bradbury is my favorite short story. The sadness invokes through the lost love resembles a candle that spreads its scent for days and days.
The short story creates vivid imagery of the lake and a small town by that lake. The protagonist remembers his childhood days when he is revisiting the town with his wife. All those beautiful moments he spent by the lake building sand castle with his friend and love interest Tally. Both are young, innocent, and naive, but enjoy each other’s company by the lake.
The lake, the water remains at the center of the story. Ray describes the lake as a magician for all those memories it had created. The poignancy of the story remains till the last word. Ray was a master storyteller and according to him, this was the first story he was paid for.
I was only twelve. But I know how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that is no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long autumn days of the years past when I had carried her books home from school.
A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it. It forgets the cornlands of Illinois, the rivers of childhood, the bridges, the lakes, the valleys, the cottages, the hurts and the joys. It spreads them out behind and they drop back of a horizon.
Like a memory, a train works both ways. A train can bring rushing back all those things you left behind so many years before.
I thought: people grow. I have grown. But she has not changed. She is still small. She is still young. Death does not permit growth or change. She still has golden hair. She will be forever young and I will love her forever, oh God I will love her forever.
I did. I built the rest of it up very slowly, then I arose and turned away and walked off, so as not to watch it crumble in the waves, as all things crumble.
This short story is simple and with few characters. It has all the elements like metaphors, great characters, great writing style, and emotion-evoking parts. The story makes you realize we are all humans and we all suffer in our own ways. Life and death are part of us. All things that we build, eventually crumble.
