SOURCE: "A Beginning on the Short Story (Notes)," in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, Random House, 1954, pp. 295-310.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1950, the author comments on the art of the short story.

The principal feature re the short story is that it is short—and so must pack in what it has to say (unless it be snipped off a large piece of writing as a sort of prose for quality of writing which might be justifiable).

It seems to me to be a good medium for nailing down a single conviction. Emotionally.

There's "Melanctha" (and there are the Poe stories), a means of writing, practice sheet for the novel one might discover, in it. But a novel is many related things, a short story one.

Plato's discourses: the Republic, a walk up from the port of Athens, the stopping with a...