The short story is a literary genre of fictional, prose narrative that tens to be more concise and "to the point" than longer works of fiction such as novellas (in the modern sense of the term) and novels. Short stories have their origins in oral story-telling traditions and the prose anecdote, a swiftly-sketched situation that comes rapidly to its point. With the rise of the comparatively realistic novel, the short story evolved as a miniature version, with some of its first perfectly independent examples in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Anton Chekhov.