What makes a good short story?

Writers' comments:

"I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation. There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless
motion, or else, most often, there simply won't be a story."
-Raymond Carver



"A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is...When anybody asks what a story is about, the only
proper thing is to tell him to read the story."
-Flannery O'Connor



"Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads
of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?..."
-Eudora Welty 

"Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening
children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.....
I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken--and to know a truth. I also had to recognize a lie." -Eudora Welty 

From the writer's autobiographical essays--One Writer's Beginnings. Harvard University Press, 1984. 


"I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view—for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest—I say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone—whether by ordinary
incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall
best aid me in the construction of the effect." - E.A. Poe. "The Philosophy of Composition."