In studying the form of pre-war Malay literature, it is important to note that the writers' Malay education precluded them from any significant contact with Western literary tradition. The efforts of the Malay Translation Bureau, which saw to the translation of works such as Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and the like, did not acquaint readers with Western literary tradition. Interest in these novels went little beyond that of the story itself. The finer points of Western literary conventions remained quite inaccessible to the majority of the Malay readers.

However, while pre-war writers might not have had access to the Western literary tradition, they had available to them a rich oral heritage. It was this tradition of story-telling that Malay writers brought to bear upon their modern literary material. Analysing pre-war short stories, Hashim Awang finds that these early literary efforts bore structural characteristics similar to those of oral narratives. He attributes this close affinity to familiarity with and availability of oral narratives and the marginal influence of other literary traditions. He thus suggests that pre-war short stories were largely an evolution from the old literary tradition, and that they formed a bridge to the modern (Hashim Awang 1975). The close tie with oral narratives indicates, on the one hand, the link with the rural areas where such stories flourished. On the other, it demonstrates how writers adapted literary conventions at their disposal to suit the needs of a changing socio-cultural environment. In appreciating modern Malay literature of the period, a point to be borne in mind is the underlying motivation which prompted literary writings in the first place. In the light of this factor, the question of genres was irrelevant to the writers, a point borne out by the disregard for length, a criterion often used to distinguish between short stories and novels. The short stories of the period ranged between 160 to 48,000 words.