Some Words

Sometimes, as I’m writing, I find myself wondering about the way the short story works within America’s reading society.

The market for short stories might be the most over saturated of all the markets for any form of entertainment. When it comes to breaking into the writing world, the short story is the method of choice for a great many of the writers, and would be writers, that I talk with. They flood any periodical that publishes short stories with submissions. To make matters worse, there are hundreds of venues for short stories, many with tiny readerships. A friend who goes to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop recently told me that everyone there is intent on getting published in the New Yorker. That’s all well and good, but we can’t all be published there, at least not our first story. Many of the short stories published are in periodicals with absolutely tiny readerships. Some of those readerships are probably composed entirely of writers and would be writers. Getting published in one of these doesn’t even necessarily get you published in a second one.

On top of this, the short story is an incredibly limiting form. The size of a short story theoretically goes up to 20,000 words, according to most sources I read. In practice they rarely do, with most of the short stories I see clocking in at between 5,000 and 9,000 words, give or take. This gives very little room for error and very little room to explore. It may be a limitation of the current writers I see getting published, but even in the top end periodicals I read, there is a great deal of very bland fiction. I’m talking about generic stories of young male discovery. I’m thinking of stories where an aged narrator learns something late in life that proves to be of great emotional value, or teaches a youngster the like. Hell, that second one is a plot that I’m shopping a copy of, and polishing another that arguably follows the same line.

It just doesn’t give you much to work with. You have to be in and out of the narrative so quickly that a lot of things don’t have time to develop. You have to realize what you are willing to leave out, and when you can do the leaving without frustrating the reader. It’s actually a great exercise for someone to learn about how narrative works. But I think maybe we’ve gotten too enamored with the exercise, and now we’re publishing it, instead of the adventurous stuff.

Sometimes it feels like we’re all building the same things with the short story, like its the ranch house of the fiction world.

It would be tempting to say that I’m not cut out for the short story, but I see so many other short stories that are falling prey to the same dangers. I read a fair number of short stories, and perilously few of them stick out for me. Is this a byproduct of the short fiction by committee attitude that I seem to hear about in writers groups? Too many times I seem to hear people subtly tailoring their own narrative desires to that of the small group that they work with all the time. The more I read short stories, the less I want to read them, the more they seem like a chore. These things should be palate cleansers. After a long novel, I should be able to pick up a collection of short stories and get a few sweet bursts of joyous concentrated narrative. What you think “joyous concentrated narrative” means should be open to interpretation.

It could mean a man meditating on the shape of his shoe as he puts it on in the morning, and then deciding to leave his wife. I could be four viewpoints on a dead man, from the minds of the people at his wake. It could be a madman in an asylum screaming about how we’re all doomed. I don’t really care as long as you grab my attention. It should not be another goddamn three part story of a teenager coming to terms with their own hesitant sexuality. Yes, I know, you went through that, we all did. Remember when reading was fun and mysterious? Maybe we should all be trying to get that feeling back into our fiction.

Next time: The novella, why I think we should all be reading and writing more of them.