The Liberating Joy of the Short Story Form

When your novel is giving you headaches, try something smaller.

In This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, which chronicles Ann Patchett’s journey to becoming a writer, Patchett writes of the short story form,

Love the short story for what it is: a handful of glorious pages that take you someplace you never knew you wanted to go.

As both a novelist and a short story writer, I love the way stories happen: you write a se…