I would like to write critically about the state of the short story as it is now, but I would also like to write emotionally, ecstatically, about what the form means, and has meant, to me.

I can remember when I first fell in love with short stories. I was at Lancaster University, studying English literature and creative writing. The campus is composed of grey, concrete blocks that mirror the sky; I was not necessarily happy or very comfortable with myself there, but it had the biggest library I’d ever been in. Aside from Shakespeare, my literature course was mostly about novels, but the creative writing course was almost entirely short stories. Something about the form immediately appealed. They were bright flashes, suddenly illuminating everything, while also throwing everything into shadow. I loved how solidly they enveloped me, how intensely the people within them were discontented, lonely, isolated, confused, undone, grieving, overcome – just as I was at the time. I was hooked, and have remained so.

Short stories show us the world at an angle, through their own tilted lens. I have always loved horror fiction, and short stories often fearlessly occupy a space of weirdness, smudging the line between horror and literariness with far less trepidation than novels. Short-story writers such as Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Helen Oyeyemi, Ramona Ausubel, Nalo Hopkinson and Carmen Maria Machado all infiltrate realism with science fiction, horror and myth. And writers including Stuart Dybek, Lauren Groff, Joy Williams and Sarah Hall show us the weird through structure, and innovation in voice and language.

Novels sustain us, lasting for days or weeks while we live with the characters. From novels we retain certain lines or flashes of images. But the best short stories stay with us wholly formed, often for years at a time. I think we ask the wrong questions about short stories – What can they do that novels can’t? What is different about reading short stories? – because any answer requires us to put short stories and novels in the same box. In a way that would never happen with poetry, we must explain our enjoyment of the short story in relation to the novel. But short-story collections are not the same as novels and it is maybe only when we accept this that we will be able to really enjoy them for what they are.

So many of us read short story collections the way we read novels; pushing for a conclusion, a tick in the box

The stupendous reception of Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person is a good example of how wonderfully different the form can be, what it can give us. I saw the first stirrings of the internet furore around Cat Person when it was published in December 2017 but didn’t pay much notice until a friend demanded that I read it. By the time I had, 10 minutes later, I’d been sent it by another two friends.

There are many things about Cat Person that caused such excitement: it both irritated and struck a chord with huge swathes of people, and it seemed to arrive exactly when we needed it, in the midst of #MeToo. And happily, it could be consumed (and then consumed again and again and again) in the space of a lunch break, or on the bus home, or just before bed or in the bath or on the toilet or read aloud to a friend. Once read, it was easy to read again. Its compactness enabled us to hold the entire, hilarious, tragic, story in our minds and (a mixed blessing for Roupenian) dissect it, upend it, examine it from every angle.

Perhaps the best thing about short stories is that they are short. It is time we stop apologising for their brevity and begin celebrating it. Think of how little effort it would require to read one right now. It is not even necessary to go and buy a book. There are thousands of excellent short stories published online, free, easily accessible – try Julia Armfield’s The Great Awake, Sophie Mackintosh’s The Weak Spot, Sarvat Hasin’s Lights, Alan Trotter’s Godspeed, Interesting about E and A by Helen Oyeyemi and everything Lauren Groff has ever written.

I do not love every short-story collection I read, as I do not love every novel I’ve read either; I dislike – or am unmoved by – a lot of them. Part of the problem in convincing readers to try short stories is that so many of us read a collection the way we read novels; ploughing on, pushing for a conclusion, a tick in the box. Except that collections do not have a single dénouement. They cannot, and should not, be read the way chapters in a book are read. They are best taken slowly, drawn out, like the early dates in a relationship or picnics in the late days of the summer. Linger with a story, do not rush on to the next.

• Daisy Johnson is a judge for the BBC national short story award with Cambridge University. The submission deadline is 11 March. For more information visit www.bbc.co.uk/nssa.

• Everything Under by Daisy Johnson is out now in paperback (Vintage).