Good morning. Today, we shall talk about an important and interesting literary style – short story, which is fictional work depicting one character's inner conflict or conflict with others, usually having one thematic focus. Short stories generally produce a single, focused emotional and intellectual response in the reader. Novels, by contrast, usually depict conflicts among many characters developed through a variety of episodes, stimulating a complexity of responses in the reader. The short story form ranges from “short shorts," which run in length from a sentence to four pages, to novellas that can easily be 100 pages long and exhibit characteristics of both the short story and the novel. Because some works straddle the definitional lines of these three forms of fiction – short story, novella, and novel – the terms should be regarded as approximate rather than absolute. First, we need to learn the elements of the short story. The basic elements of the short story including setting, including time and place, conflict, character, and theme.