Sketch story

A sketch story, literary sketch or simply sketch, is a piece of writing that is generally shorter than a short story, and contains very little, if any, plot. The genre was invented in the 16th century in England, as a result of increasing public interest in realistic depictions of "exotic" locales. The term was most popularly used in the late nineteenth century. As a literary work, it is also often referred to simply as the sketch.

A sketch is mainly descriptive, either of places (travel sketch) or of people (character sketch). Writers of sketches like Washington Irving clearly used the artist as a model. A sketch story is a hybrid form. It may contain little or no plot, instead describing impressions of people or places, and is often informal in tone.

In the nineteenth century, sketch stories were frequently published in magazines, before falling out of favour. Such stories may focus on individual moments, leaving the reader to imagine for themselves the events that led to this occasion, and to wonder what events will follow. Writers from Sherwood Anderson to John Updike used this form, often as a hybrid. In short, a sketch story aims at "suggestiveness rather than explicitness."

In modern usage, the term "short story" embraces what was once popularly termed "the sketch." Short stories of extreme brevity still exist under the names flash fiction or microfiction. Talehunt is a community of short story writers, with each story in the platform limited to 250 characters.

A major Russian short story writer and playwright. The point of a typical Chekhov story is most often what happens within a given character, and that is conveyed indirectly, by suggestion or by significant detail. Chekhov eschews the traditional build-up of chronological detail, instead emphasizing moments of epiphanies and illumination over a significantly shorter period of time.

Most popular for The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a book of thirty essays and short stories.

An iconic Australian short story writer and poet. However, Lawson was arguably most accomplished at writing the sketch story. In 1933, Edward Garnett praised Lawson's sketches, once observing that "Lawson gets even more feeling observation and atmosphere into a page than does Hemingway." Lawson, himself, was a firm believer in the merits of "the sketch":

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