Introduction to a short story BY: Tobias Wolff

What is the motivation to read a short story?

According to Tobias Wolff our interest on reading short stories is because we can associated it into our daily life, the events occurring to the characters on the short stories are situations that we go thru or we know that someone has experienced. As Wolff said "The experience of something read can form us no less than the experience of something lived through". So what it means is that our motivation or interest to read these stories is because the make us remember those good moments, happy moments or harsh and sad moments. In our day to day life we keep committing mistakes and sometimes is so frequently that is hard to tell that we made a mistake but when we are reading the stories that has a similar situation, we can identify the mistakes that we are committing and by knowing them try to stop doing them.

I agree with Wolff that that is a true motivation. However I think there are more. As the time has moved, the society has changed and many of the times the people prefer to read something short that they can understand rather than a big book that would probably not catch their full attention.
But I understand that for a writer the motivation is completely different. First of all, a writer can not write with confidence if she /he does not have the passion to do it. Wolff cites a quote from Jack Yeats that help us understand one of the many possible motivations to write as he says: "The social act of a solitary man" my interpretation to this quote is that writing gives any man the possibility to express their ideas, thoughts, opinions and believes in a freely way and with them inspire and help someone. The writers are people that help the society a lot, because through literature they express questions, problems, solutions, discoveries and many other aspects and if helping other people does not motivate  someone to say, or in this case write, something what would it do?