Short Thoughts on Short Stories
Woman Reading on a Porch by August Muller
www.pinterest.com
This is a collection of random thoughts about the short story genre, many of them written by short story writers, which I have found thought provoking.
Woman Reading on a Porch by August Muller
www.pinterest.com
This is a collection of random thoughts about the short story genre, many of them written by short story writers, which I have found thought provoking.
Brian Evenson recounts the joys of reading short stories that "continue to evolve and unfold within me after I've read them."
As a reader I love stories that surprise me, that work into my head and then continue working on me, that continue to evolve and unfold within me long after I've read them. Stories that not only are difficult to forget, but that change slightly my way of thinking and perceiving. There's a joy and seriousness both to writing and reading such stories that for me lies at the heart of what makes fiction relevant to being human.
Mark Slouka talks about how much history is implied in a short story "moment."
Though I love the novel and the essay as well, I have a particular fondness for short fiction, for its particular challenges, for its risks and possibilities. If pressed, I'd say that what I love best about short stories is that even though, generally speaking, they build to a pivot point—a shift, however subtle, in direction or understanding - they can suggest the years, even lifetimes that had to pass before that point was reached. In other words, though a story is almost always about a particular moment, a moment when "something happened," that moment is pregnant with the history of what came before. The result can feel very much like life itself—troubling, haunted, beautiful, ultimately mysterious.
Though I love the novel and the essay as well, I have a particular fondness for short fiction, for its particular challenges, for its risks and possibilities. If pressed, I'd say that what I love best about short stories is that even though, generally speaking, they build to a pivot point—a shift, however subtle, in direction or understanding - they can suggest the years, even lifetimes that had to pass before that point was reached. In other words, though a story is almost always about a particular moment, a moment when "something happened," that moment is pregnant with the history of what came before. The result can feel very much like life itself—troubling, haunted, beautiful, ultimately mysterious.
This is an excerpt from Stephen Millhauser's excellent essay, "The Ambition of the Short Story." It's one of the most clever and insightful I have read.
The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: "I'm not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that's what you're looking for, you don't want me." Rarely has one form so dominated another. And we understand, we nod our heads knowingly: here in America, size is power. The novel is the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of literature. The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What's left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn't forget its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. "Hoo ha!" cries the novel. "Here ah come!" The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.
The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: "I'm not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that's what you're looking for, you don't want me." Rarely has one form so dominated another. And we understand, we nod our heads knowingly: here in America, size is power. The novel is the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of literature. The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What's left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn't forget its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. "Hoo ha!" cries the novel. "Here ah come!" The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.
Tash Aw compares writing short stories to artisans constructing physical objects in this passage.
Working in the short form exercises a different part of the novelist's brain: it's almost as if the short story tests whether you are truly a writer, or merely someone typing out a stack of pages in the hope that it forms something readable. I've always been interested in the way that things are put together—chairs, buildings, boats: I'm attracted to the workings of the artisan. In this way, I think writing shares much in common with the physical objects that fill our daily lives. When well constructed, they have the capacity to be emotionally moving, as well as being useful in some way. And I feel that aspects of craftsmanship and artistry are often easier to discern in a short story than in a novel, as if all that is superfluous and distracting is stripped away. Instinctively, I've always found the short form more challenging and intimidating than the novel, which is why I think I'm fascinated by it—for me, it has the lure of unattainable perfection.
Working in the short form exercises a different part of the novelist's brain: it's almost as if the short story tests whether you are truly a writer, or merely someone typing out a stack of pages in the hope that it forms something readable. I've always been interested in the way that things are put together—chairs, buildings, boats: I'm attracted to the workings of the artisan. In this way, I think writing shares much in common with the physical objects that fill our daily lives. When well constructed, they have the capacity to be emotionally moving, as well as being useful in some way. And I feel that aspects of craftsmanship and artistry are often easier to discern in a short story than in a novel, as if all that is superfluous and distracting is stripped away. Instinctively, I've always found the short form more challenging and intimidating than the novel, which is why I think I'm fascinated by it—for me, it has the lure of unattainable perfection.
Melinda Moustakis enjoys the "sense of freedom" she experiences when writing short stories.
There is a sense of freedom in writing short stories that I enjoy. For twenty pages you can try anything. And if it doesn't work, you've only lost twenty pages and can move on. Or you put it in a drawer and come back to it later. One story, like one song on an album, can be weird and out there and on a different plane from what has come before—which means less pressure. There is also a sense of comfort in the page limit—you plop yourself in the middle of a small lake and can see the shore and, consequently, believe you can swim to shore—and maybe this is just a story I tell myself so I can start writing.
There is a sense of freedom in writing short stories that I enjoy. For twenty pages you can try anything. And if it doesn't work, you've only lost twenty pages and can move on. Or you put it in a drawer and come back to it later. One story, like one song on an album, can be weird and out there and on a different plane from what has come before—which means less pressure. There is also a sense of comfort in the page limit—you plop yourself in the middle of a small lake and can see the shore and, consequently, believe you can swim to shore—and maybe this is just a story I tell myself so I can start writing.
Helen Simpson discusses the challenge of combining "maximum power for minimum length" when creating short stories.
I love the short story, and it is my chosen form. It makes it possible to do something powerful but with a light touch. It's direct and intimate and it doesn't waste time. The challenge is, maximum power for minimum length. Also, it's technically demanding and tests the writer's mastery of form; every story has its own shape, and finding that shape is a major part of the challenge and pleasure of writing it.
I love the short story, and it is my chosen form. It makes it possible to do something powerful but with a light touch. It's direct and intimate and it doesn't waste time. The challenge is, maximum power for minimum length. Also, it's technically demanding and tests the writer's mastery of form; every story has its own shape, and finding that shape is a major part of the challenge and pleasure of writing it.
British writer Rose Tremain compares the short story to a novel in a fascinating analogy that reverses the gardening process.
In a novel, the core material undergoes a process of expansion. From a few seeds arises a whole varied and complicated garden. But the short story form demands an absolutely contrasting process--of reduction--whereby the core material is pared down and down to its poetic essentials, like carving a tiny figure out of a big block of stone.
I love American writer Neil Gaiman's "magical" definition of a short story....
A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of
thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
American writer Hortense Calisher offered one of the most concise definitions of a short story that I have read. In very few words Callisher captured both the diminutive size and tremendous potential of the short story.
A story is an apocalypse served in a very small cup.
(The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, 1975)
(The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, 1975)
I love American writer Rick Bass's comparison of the difference between a short story writer and a "regular person." What a gift to be able to view everything in life as "an interesting possibility."
There's an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger, better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or wonderful in real life the moment may have been.
I love reading about how short story writers engage in the writing process. This excerpt from American writer Andre Dubus's "The Habit of Writing" (On Writing Short Stories, 2011) describes how he "surrenders" to a story.
I gestate: for months, often for years. An idea comes to me from wherever they come, and I write it in a notebook. Sometimes I forget it's there. I don't think about it. By think I mean plan. I try never to think about where a story will go. This is as hard as writing, maybe harder; I spend most of my waking time doing it; it is hard work, because I want to know what the story will do and how it will end and whether I can write it; but I must not know, or I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender....
When I see the first two scenes, I begin writing. This truly means that the first two scenes show themselves to me. I may be watching a movie or driving my car or talking with a friend, and here come the scene. It means it is time. The story is ready for me to receive it. Then I must write, with the most intense concentration I can muster. (p. 105)
When I see the first two scenes, I begin writing. This truly means that the first two scenes show themselves to me. I may be watching a movie or driving my car or talking with a friend, and here come the scene. It means it is time. The story is ready for me to receive it. Then I must write, with the most intense concentration I can muster. (p. 105)
Many writers have explored the differences between novels and short stories. This explanation by American writer Russell Banks discusses how novels and short stories differ in relation to our experience with time. He contends that short stories are actually closer in form to poems than novels.
You really can't live inside the head of another human being long enough in the short story. I've always felt the short story is much more closely related to lyric poetry than it is to the novel. Both happen to be written in prose, and they rely on some of the same tools, like dialogue, scene and so forth, but they have a very different relation to our experience of time, our subjective experience. When you start a novel, part of the point is to forget where it began. A novel imitates the flow of time. So, 75 pages into a novel, you can't remember where it began. And that's the point: Just like in your life, you can't remember where it began. Whereas with a short story, it's the opposite. You have to remember where it began when you get to the end, otherwise it doesn't work. Just as in a poem or in a sonnet, if you don't remember where it began, the last couplet doesn't really make sense. When Poe describes the proper length of a short story as being short enough to read in one sitting, what he was really talking about was not forgetting where it began.
Here's another comparison of the novel and short story, written by American writer Peter Orner. I am definitely among those who need "our daily fix--our daily stab of pain" that a good short story provides.
The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between a pang in your heart compared to the tragedy of your whole life. It’s all a matter of how you feel the pain. Read a great story and there it is—right now—in your gut. A novel gives you some time between innings. A story is complete, remorseless…
And those of us who can’t live a day without it know what I’m talking about. We need our fix, our daily stab of pain—maybe to feel alive at all.
And those of us who can’t live a day without it know what I’m talking about. We need our fix, our daily stab of pain—maybe to feel alive at all.
Perhaps part of the the lure of the short story is in its deceptive complexity. It leaves us with "more questions than answers, and more answers than questions," as American writer David Means explains in Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art
of the Short Story
(2012).
... the paradoxical quality of a good story is that it seems to give us everything we need and yet not quite enough to fulfill a sense of having been shown a full life. All we’re given is a sliver of some wider existence, a collection of minutiae, a shift of viewpoint, a statement made weeks later. The poetics of the modern story are both anachronistic (tapping old modes of myth and folklore) and contemporary (the pop song, the third-second commercial spot). One must—as a writer and reader—crystallize deep meaning from a few, slight gestures”….(p. 195)
Only American writer Flannery O'Connor could and would compare the theme of a story to a string that ties a sack of chicken feed.....
I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully. (from Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 1969)
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully. (from Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 1969)
American writer Ron Rash, who writes novels, short stories, and poems, compares his writing of the three genres.
They’re all radically different. I think writing a poem is like being a
greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long
row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far
you still have to go. Short fiction is the medium I love the most,
because it requires that I bring everything I’ve learned about
poetry—the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as
possible—but also the ability to create a narrative that, though
lacking a novel’s length, satisfies the reader.
Writing about Alice Munro's acceptance of the Nobel Prize, Canadian writer Russell Smith discusses the lack of popularity of the short story, a literary form that is "too damn artsy for mass popularity." Smith finds it perplexing that in an age when no one has time to read, the short story should not be more popular--"You could read one on the train to work every day." One of the many reasons readers shun short stories, Smith writes, it that they require the too much work to read....
There is another problem with stories, especially when they are collected into books. Beginning a story, as a reader, is always difficult. One must adjust to the voice and the landscape as if one were learning to breathe a different kind of air. It takes work to sort out where you are – a little coughing and spluttering before one adapts. With a novel, that confusing teleporting process has to happen only once, and then momentum takes over. With stories, after each ending, there is another daunting beginning, with its mysterious setting, its locked doors. You must pass through that gasping airlock over and over again. It’s too much work for most people. In other words, short fiction requires a longer attention span, not a shorter one.
American writer Amy Tan describes the process of writing the interwoven stories that would eventually comprise her novel The Joy Luck Club. It was as if an "invisible storyteller" were whispering in her ear....
When I wrote these stories, it was as much a discovery to me as to any reader reading them for the first time. Things would surprise me. I would sit there laughing and I would say, "Oh, you're kidding!" It was like people telling me the stories, and I would write them down as fast as I could.
In her Introduction to The Best American Short Stories (2011) American Editor Geraldine Brooks compares short stories to jokes.
The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs. (xv)
This is a passage that describes how American writer Eudora Welty wrote her short stories. Most of them were composed on a typewriter in her Jackson, MS home.
My ideal way to write a short story is to write the whole first draft through in one sitting, then work as long as it takes on revisions, and then write the final version all in one, so that in the end the whole thing amounts to one long sustained effort.
Here are American writer Jhumpa Lahiri's thoughts on rewriting short stories.
I think that's all I do really. I'm always intrigued by authors who say, "This book took 17 drafts." They're very clear about it. I couldn't possibly count the number of times. ...So many of these stories I worked on for a very long time, and wrote them, set them aside, rewrote them, worked on something else -- they were never far from reach, they informed each other.
In his New York Times Book Review essay "What Ails the Short Story?", American writer Stephen King bemoans the fact that the short story is not alive and well. In this passage King describes his hunt for literary journals that publish short stories in typical bookstores. He finally finds them--carefully stowed away and gathering dust on the bottom shelf.
I walk past the best sellers, past trade paperbacks with titles like “Who Stole My Chicken?,” “The Get-Rich Secret” and “Be a Big Cheese Now,” past the mysteries, past the auto-repair manuals, past the remaindered coffee-table books (looking sad and thumbed-through with their red discount stickers). I arrive at the Wall of Magazines, which is next door to the children’s section, where story time is in full swing. I stare at the racks of magazines, and the magazines stare eagerly back. Celebrities in gowns and tuxes, models in low-rise jeans, luxury stereo equipment, talk-show hosts with can’t-miss diet plans — they all scream Buy me, buy me! Take me home and I’ll change your life!
I can grab The New Yorker and Harper’s while I’m still standing up, without going to
my knees like a school janitor trying to scrape a particularly stubborn wad of gum off
the gym floor. For the rest, I must assume exactly that position. I hope the young
woman browsing Modern Bride won’t think I’m trying to look up her skirt. I hope the
young man trying to decide between Starlog and Fangoria won’t step on me. I crawl
along the lowest shelf, where neatness alone suggests few ever go. And here I find fresh
treasure: not just Zoetrope and Tin House, but also Five Points and The Kenyon Review.
No Glimmer Train, but there’s American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, even an
Alaska Quarterly Review. I stagger to my feet and limp toward the checkout. The total
cost of my six magazines runs to over $80. There are no discounts in the magazine
section.
So think of me crawling on the floor of this big chain store and ask yourself, What’s
wrong with this picture?
I can grab The New Yorker and Harper’s while I’m still standing up, without going to
my knees like a school janitor trying to scrape a particularly stubborn wad of gum off
the gym floor. For the rest, I must assume exactly that position. I hope the young
woman browsing Modern Bride won’t think I’m trying to look up her skirt. I hope the
young man trying to decide between Starlog and Fangoria won’t step on me. I crawl
along the lowest shelf, where neatness alone suggests few ever go. And here I find fresh
treasure: not just Zoetrope and Tin House, but also Five Points and The Kenyon Review.
No Glimmer Train, but there’s American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, even an
Alaska Quarterly Review. I stagger to my feet and limp toward the checkout. The total
cost of my six magazines runs to over $80. There are no discounts in the magazine
section.
So think of me crawling on the floor of this big chain store and ask yourself, What’s
wrong with this picture?
American writer Brad Watson wrote "Visitation" (see my list of favorite short stories) after several years of living a "motel-dad life" in order to visit his son. Once those visits began taking place in his own home, the passage of time gave him the ability to channel the intensity of that emotional experience into a story. I really like the way he describes this process.
...I was able to look back on those years with some remove and write about the experience with the necessary detachment and invention. Which is usually when the darker emotional experience of it all comes back to you with a power that needs some outlet. You find away to ground yourself and let the current pass through. Into a story is good.
(New Stories from the South 2010: The Year's Best, p. 330)
(New Stories from the South 2010: The Year's Best, p. 330)
Here's another comparison of the short story and novel by British writer Richard Beard.
It can be interesting to sacrifice some of the what-happens-nextness (the engine of a novel) for more of the
what's-happening-nowness (the focus of a story)...
Stories are more relaxed, more comfortably likened to a game of Patience: set up the cards and arrange the conflict (black on red, red on black) - sometimes it comes out, and sometimes it doesn't. When it does, as with any other type of writing, it's because the words fit the sentences fit the paragraphs fit the structure fit the form fit the ideas fit the writer. And when that happens, when everything comes together, small is just as likely to be beautiful.
what's-happening-nowness (the focus of a story)...
Stories are more relaxed, more comfortably likened to a game of Patience: set up the cards and arrange the conflict (black on red, red on black) - sometimes it comes out, and sometimes it doesn't. When it does, as with any other type of writing, it's because the words fit the sentences fit the paragraphs fit the structure fit the form fit the ideas fit the writer. And when that happens, when everything comes together, small is just as likely to be beautiful.
British writer Tessa Hadley discusses the "discontinuity" of reading short stories compared to novels.
There's something more discontinuous about our reading relationship with short stories: (not more strenuous, though, because reading good novels can be just as strenuous, demanding). At the end of each story we're thrown out again, out of the containing sea of illusion, into the dry air of our own awareness outside the book. We have to pick ourselves up and shake ourselves off and ready ourselves for another plunge, into a new story, a new place.
Some readers learn to love that discontinuity, how it makes the familiar become strange and then the strange become familiar, over and over. The best short story writers seem to share a sideways perspective on things: they favour irony, oddity, the coolness of surprise. The discerning reader finds completeness in these story-pieces broken out of their whole context, different to the complex broad cloth of a good novel.
Some readers learn to love that discontinuity, how it makes the familiar become strange and then the strange become familiar, over and over. The best short story writers seem to share a sideways perspective on things: they favour irony, oddity, the coolness of surprise. The discerning reader finds completeness in these story-pieces broken out of their whole context, different to the complex broad cloth of a good novel.
I'm sure many of us can relate with the "junkie craving" British writer Claire Wigfall describes in this passage.
I love short stories. I love to read them. I love to write them. I have known that junkie craving one can feel as you work your way through a brilliant collection, aching for the next fifteen minute/half hour slot of time when you can sit down and read a story through in one sitting, hitting the high with its conclusion and feeling the effects long after you've left the story behind.
American writer Maile Meloy talks about the difficulty of choosing the order of stories when a collection is going to be published.
Sometimes the arranging felt like lining up the batting order for a baseball game: which story leads off? And sometimes it felt like seating people at a dinner party: boy-girl-boy-girl if possible, and certain stories shouldn't go next to each other, and try to encourage interesting conversation. And sometimes it felt like making a mix tape for someone you love. But mostly it felt like a puzzle with a discoverable solution, and moving the pieces around was part of the pleasure.
American writer Tim O'Brien discusses how stories are not the place to go to look for solutions or resolve mysteries.
A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.
American writer David Sedaris talks about how short stories have the ability to take us out of our comfort zones.
A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
Japanese writer Haruki Murakami describes how his short stories sometimes wake him up in the middle of the night and demand to be lengthened into novels.
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
American writer Lawrence Block comments on the economic reality of writing short stories. Thank goodness some writers continue to perform this "labor of love."
The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...
I know just the feeling that American writer Raymond Carver describes of being "moved off the peg just a little" after reading a short story and having to take a minute to breathe deeply and then go on with life. It's what happens after you've read a really good short story.
If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.”
American writer Tim Gautreaux draws an analogy between a good short short and an automobile engine.
I like to tell my students that a short story is like an automobile engine. There are no redundant parts. If you lift up your hood and you look at your car, you don't find extra spark plugs scotch-taped to the side of the engine with a note from someone at the factory saying, "we just found this on the floor. Thought you'd like to have it."
American writer Tim Gautreaux says the short story is a more of an art form than the novel because the author has more control of it.
The short story; it's controllable, and it's — how can I put this? — you can work on a short story sentence by sentence almost the way you work on a poem. And you can micromanage it. You can go back over it many times and make everything line up. You can make sure that the logic of the first sentence ties in with the logic of the very last. You can't do that with novels; they're just too large. I guess you could if you were a genius or something, but I don't fall into that category. I think the short story is more of an art form, really, than the novel. I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me on that.