Gabriel García Márquez: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1927 to 2014
Quick answer: Gabriel García Márquez reported the impossible with a straight face. A craft guide to his deadpan tone, exact numbers and the realist stories that came before the magic.
Quick facts
- Born: 6 March 1927, Aracataca, Colombia
- Died: 17 April 2014, Mexico City
- Wrote in: Spanish
- Known for: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Big Mama's Funeral, Strange Pilgrims
- Signature move: Deadpan for the impossible: the narrator never registers surprise
- Start with: Tuesday Siesta
Gabriel García Márquez is remembered for the novel that put Macondo on the map, but his method was worked out in stories first. Big Mama's Funeral (1962) holds two kinds of writing side by side: the bone-dry realism of Tuesday Siesta and the carnival exaggeration of the title story. The later fables, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World (both 1968), are the pieces every anthology takes, and both are lessons in tone before they are lessons in wonder.
He came to fiction from newspapers in Cartagena and Barranquilla, and it shows. The reporter's habits, exact figures, named streets, the refusal to editorialise, are what make the impossible in his stories feel like something that simply happened on a Tuesday.
What he actually does on the page
He reports the marvellous as a logistics problem. In A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings an angel lands in a courtyard and the questions raised are practical: where to keep him, what he eats, whether to charge admission. The doctor who examines him is puzzled only that the wings seem anatomically natural. The narrator never winks, and the surprise is handed entirely to the reader. He often credited his grandmother's way of telling outrageous things with a completely straight face for this tone.
He anchors hyperbole with numbers. Counts, durations, weights and prices appear with the precision of a municipal register, so the fabulous acquires the texture of fact. And he can write with no magic at all. Tuesday Siesta (1962) follows a mother and daughter arriving by train in the heat to visit the grave of a son shot as a thief; the whole story is dignity under stares. One of These Days (1962) is a dentist, a mayor and an abscessed tooth. Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon (1962) is a carpenter, a birdcage and a bad debt. Learn those first.
The signature move
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World (1968) begins with children playing with a body washed up on the beach. The village women clean him, sew clothes for a man too large for any bed in the town, and give him a name. By the funeral the whole village has decided to rebuild itself, doors wider, houses painted, so that the memory of a stranger fits. The narration moves in long, gathering sentences that hold several villagers' thoughts at once, and no single character is the protagonist. The community is. That collective point of view, executed without confusion, is the thing to study.
Stories to read first
Begin with these.
What to steal for your own stories
Drills, not rules.
What not to copy
Magic as decoration. His marvels sit on top of real history, the banana company, the civil wars, the long dictatorships, and without that weight they become wallpaper. The very long paragraphs need his ear; in imitation they turn into sludge. Also resist the idea that everything Latin American must be written this way. He never thought so.
Life at a glance
- 1927: Born in Aracataca and raised for his first years by his grandparents.
- 1948: Begins working as a journalist, first in Cartagena and then Barranquilla.
- 1955: Leaf Storm, his first novella, introduces the town of Macondo.
- 1961: No One Writes to the Colonel published.
- 1962: Big Mama's Funeral, the story collection that includes Tuesday Siesta.
- 1967: One Hundred Years of Solitude published in Buenos Aires.
- 1982: Nobel Prize in Literature.
- 1992: Strange Pilgrims, twelve stories set in Europe.
What writers can take from this
- Never let the narrator be astonished. If a character must be, make it a minor one.
- Use numbers the way a journalist does, to prove you were there.
- Let the town react before any individual does.
- Keep a realist story in your drawer for every magical one you finish.
- End on what the community does next, not on what the protagonist feels.
Try it yourself
Write 1,000 to 1,400 words in which something impossible arrives in a small town (an object, a creature or a weather) and the story is told entirely through the arguments the residents have about what to do with it. No one is allowed to be amazed on the page.
Questions
What is Gabriel García Márquez's best short story?
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is the most anthologised, and The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World is the one many writers prefer. Tuesday Siesta is the story he himself often named as his best.
Where should I start with García Márquez?
The collected stories, reading Big Mama's Funeral first. Then No One Writes to the Colonel. Only then One Hundred Years of Solitude, which will make far more sense once you know the stories.
Why is García Márquez important?
He made a way of writing in which the miraculous and the political share one deadpan sentence, and he did it from the Caribbean coast of Colombia rather than from Paris or New York. It changed the world's idea of where great fiction comes from.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory story contest
Enter the Writory Short Story Contest and have your own story read and scored out of 100. Entries close 25 November. That first entry makes you a Writorian.