It’s been a while since I posted a writing tip and one came to me the other day that has a bit of history behind it. Many years ago, when I took a “Writing Short Stories” class in college, the professor was giving me A’s but told me repeatedly that they were not, by definition, short stories.

Now that I look back, how negligent was he as the professor for that class not to define what constituted a short story on day one? Duh!

Kind of like how many grammar rules did you actually learn, much less understand, in high school or even college English classes? All I remember is diagramming sentences and making mistakes I didn’t understand. I have no love lost for the English and math teachers I had over the years. Now I’m an award-winning author and a physicist who worked for NASA for 21 years with no thanks to any of them! These were things I eventually figured out myself.

Like “What exactly is irony?” several decades later.

Am I that dense or are teachers seldom capable of teaching a subject? At this point in my life, I’m sure they’ve all passed on so if I were so inclined I’d list their names, but I don’t remember them. Ironic? Maybe. But right there, that tells you how impressed I was. My memories of high school in particular are not complimentary for my teachers, believe me.

So back to the short story class and my point for this “Tip du Jour.” I asked the professor why they weren’t short stories. He said that they were “slices of life” but not short stories because they lacked irony. So, next I asked the $64,000 dollar question: “What is irony?”

He couldn’t define it!

I think he may have referred me to a few classics that had it, but I still didn’t get it. Here I am, many years later when I’ve written 8 novels, accumulated several awards, and I’m just now figuring it out.

Is that more irony?

And I must say, I’ve wondered about it for more years than I care to count until the other day it came to be like a blast out of the blue.

Irony is when something you’ve put a lot of effort into turns out to be very wrong.

More irony that the English professor teaching a short story class couldn’t tell me what irony was. Also ironic is the fact that throughout that class I got an A on every assignment and an A in the class, yet never wrote a short story.

Once I had that epiphany, my memory flooded with examples. The biggest one that came to mind was back in the 70s, when I wanted to buy my aging parents a garage door opener for Christmas. I don’t remember why, but it probably related to them complaining about opening the heavy garage door by hand in freezing Utah winter weather.

We didn’t have much money and had a bunch of kids to buy for, so it was a challenge how to afford it. I saw an ad in the paper that some guy was buying up silver. I had some old sterling silver candlesticks, silverware, and so forth, that no one wanted. Long story short, I cashed it in and got enough for the garage door opener. (Of course, I’d give blood and pay money to have them back at today’s silver spot price which is probably at least ten times more than it was then.)

The irony of the story?

They weren’t happy!

At least my father wasn’t. He didn’t want to go to the trouble of installing it or hiring someone to do it. After all the effort I put into getting it for them and being very excited, thinking they’d love it, that was a real downer I remember to this day.

If I’d understood what irony was, I would have written that up as a short story, which would have actually fit the definition! And if that prof had given me a concise definition I could understand, I probably would have.

So here’s a note to any teachers reading this and probably shaking their head at my ignorance: Not all students can learn by assimilation. A clear definition is essential to understanding! What’s intuitively obvious to you is not to someone learning a subject for the first time! Even Einstein said if you can’t explain something to a kid in kindergarten, then you really don’t understand it yourself!

So now you know what constitutes a “short story.” In many cases, those stories you’re putting together for your memoirs or family history are just “slices of life.”

Does it matter? Absolutely not. Unless you have a professor who isn’t as generous as mine was if your short story doesn’t fit the definition.

P.S. As an astrologer, I’ll add that you’re lining yourself up for some irony if you buy anything electronic or mechanical during Mercury retrograde. Mars retrograde is similar, but in that case, it will probably function properly, but you’ll realize at some point it was a waste of money because you really don’t need it, your regret proportional to how much you paid for it.