In the absence of a narrator, a play relies heavily on stage directions, such as asides, to direct the reader's attention to key details about character, plot, or setting. A play will also communicate key information through monologues and soliloquies, which by their nature are not features of short stories. Dialogue, while present in both plays and short stories, becomes even more important in a play, as it is the primary way that characters are developed. Some literary elements will be present in both plays and short stories: plays often contain rich symbolism, like Cyrano de Bergerac, which uses the white flag/plume as a key symbol. Foreshadowing, suspense, and irony may also be present in both genres. Shakespeare's play Hamlet obviously contains all three, but so does the short story "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell, for example.

There are three major differences between these two literary types.  First, as Aristotle points out, the narration differs, in prose, there can be multiple narrators, including the omniscient narrator, while drama has no narrator.  Secondly, the dramatic text requires an “imitation of an action” like a recipe requires cooking: that is, it is designed to be transformed into stage language, proxemics, costume, action, etc.—while the short story is verbal and descriptive.  The third important difference is in the dialogue; in drama, the speech-act generates all the action, while in the short story, there can be descriptions of the mise-en-scene, internal musings of the characters’ reactions, etc. (of course, the dramatic text includes “stage directions” and the short story includes dialogue, but the distinction is still valid.)  Both these literary forms allow such linguistic features as metaphor, meter, etc., but these three “literary elements” – narrator, imitation, and dialogue – distinguish their differences.