About "Occidental Hotel" by Peter Orner

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I can’t help it. I just love these super short stories. It’s an art within an art, a very difficult skill, to clarify and distill a story down its core elements, to extract its essence a choose just the right words to show us what you’ve done. It makes sense that it’s hard though, because when it’s good, it’s really good.

Orner explains in a few short sentences a clear, simple setting, and that is important because it puts aspects necessary for the story in our heads without also filling our heads with all the bits the author may think are important but really don’t matter at all to us. And so much of it is left vague too, so we can also add bits that the author may not have thought important. We can go ahead and make connections between the story he’s telling and the things the setting puts in our minds with no middle-man. We can make this story our own without even realizing what we’re doing. (It’s a good thing you’ve got me though, ‘cause now you know.)

But we don’t see them court each other, we don’t see him fall in love. Isn’t that a problem? Of course not! It must not matter how that happened or why, just that it did. It just did, and it’s happened before and it may well happen again, but it wasn’t good enough and it isn’t. In a couple hundred words your forced to think about what is. What’s important, what makes it important. You don’t need any more to do that. Orner just did it with less.