Short stories, or rather the point of them, are sacred to me.  I used to read a lot of them.  Chekhov, in particular.  I've always found his stories speaking to me, speaking to me of reality.

In one sense, why waste this energy, unless these are actual people, or composites thereof, or of something in your own deeper truer self.

You could use your own self, your own direct experience, as you perceive it, as a long on-going sort of short story, episodic perhaps, pointless, maybe, but, you hope, of use somehow for the solidarity of people like the people you know.

In the laws of the Big Bang and Holy Cosmologies of long traditions East and West, it would feel somehow, to the naked scientific eye and gut sense, that the real stories of people's life have significance too, and that in our own lives we are living out something that bears upon the wholeness of our condition, or to put it another way, the holiness of our life stories and the things of the heart, the efforts we might make, toward such ends.  Such things come forth.

Therefore it might seem to be a good but misplaced effort to read of people of fiction that inhabit the Russian Masters of this trade, and their followers, down through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, De Maupassant, Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Carver, you name it, be the written stories and accounts be long and multi-chaptered, or short, quick, severe.

It is not necessarily a joy to tell one's own stories, as they will depict the assemblage of characters found in Chekhov, let's say, the lonely schoolteacher with her dreary thankless life, the landowner in the provinces going to pot with idleness and wine...  Dostoevsky's old insomniac tutor, who's story is, found, when they go through his quiet papers, to be the survivor the Dead House, the gulag, speaking out of Dostoevsky's own experience.

It might be significant, then, that you might ask the question, well, where does it all lead you?, the conscientious reader and living being, experiencer of life, where can we meet all people of all paths of life at a center point?  Our own dreadful foibles, our own dreadful wastrel life habits...

Chekhov, having tuberculosis of the fatal kind, did not live long enough to venture thoughts beyond his stories and his travelogues.  Others, like Dostoevsky, found a sneaky way out, not unwarranted, perhaps, having his own dramatic life experiences, the loss of a son, his epilepsy, his need to seek out something, as along the lines of a career crowning character from his last book, Alyosha Karamazov, the monk here, youngest brother in the sprawling tale of family misery.

There is inspiration for such stories, of the crafted and detailed diamonds of the short story or long short story or short long story craft.

Done correctly, the writer leaves behind his (her) notes on the individual human being and soul as well, in the myriad of combinations and variations, as if conducting a botanical catalog perhaps with added horticultural notes.  

I've been called back to life by George Saunders' latest, a masterclass in the short story, even as I read the beginnings of it, the analysis of "In The Cart," by Anton Chekhov.