In Defense of the Short Story

Novel pursuits are neglecting a powerful medium.

Authors, editors and newsletter navel gazers were recently embroiled in another discussion about the nature of traditional book publishing, its seedy underbelly of backdoor dealings and mysteriously cloudy sales metrics. Who is buying books, who is writing them and ultimately who is reading them, has once again sucked all of us unwittingly into arguments that haven’t been this ferocious since Amazon launched the Kindle Store. Will eBooks decimate the world of physical books? Tune in, twenty years from now, when the question will remain unanswered.

To say I don’t care about the machinations of the traditional book publishing beast would be an understatement, although as an author who self-publishes and who founded the Lunar Awards, it would be careless to ignore the industry and what it can offer my fellow writers. My goal is to highlight independent authors and good writing, hopeful that fiction writers in our midst would gain exposure and notoriety for their stories instead of their tweets. There are a few already that I believe will experience success by their own standards. I encourage them to use whatever means are at their disposal and that still allows them to practice their craft with sincerity.

I have no ill will toward any author’s sales and marketing tactics, be they legal and honest, and conceptually the idea of selling out has no merit in today’s gig economy. Find an agent, don’t find an agent, self-publish or don’t, it’s all secondary and inconsequential to the act of writing. But that’s a discussion for another time.

As for me, the desire to write a full-blown novel has yet to grab hold, the only creative force I have constantly inspiring me to write short stories instead. While perceived-as-serious writers focus primarily on longer works — easier to pitch and sell to agents and gather a large audience — a few of us are wholeheartedly embracing the peculiar art of short form fiction. According to common wisdom, it’s the inverse of how success is typically achieved. Only established authors who have published longer works are given the privilege by agents and publishers to express themselves in less than ten thousand words.

Short stories have always been seen as a stepping stone, a method of learning to crawl before we walk and then eventually run to the bank to cash our exorbitant advances. As infants, we are primed with picture books, graduate to little readers and then eventually move on to chapter books. For those of us who continue to enjoy fictional, marvelous universes, we eventually evolve intellectually or pop culturally (if there is such an evolution) to ingest a series, discussing it rabidly with fellow fans. We’re not taught to move backwards, because isn’t that what a short story is, moving backwards?

No, nobody that I know has said such a thing, but it’s implied for both writers and readers. We’re taught that short story collections don’t sell and aren’t remembered, unless you’re a Ray Bradbury or an Isaac Asimov, and even then, many of those stories are collected works written first for literary magazines elsewhere. Short stories are practice pieces for honing one’s craft, or to fill the creative void between something grander. It’s how Stephen King got started before his rise to stardom, so it must be true this is the approved method for attaining greatness.

I don’t disagree with the practice part. New writers should not cut their teeth on novels. They should write vignettes, brief dialogs, even fill pages with long droning expositions so they can get the meaningless drivel out of their system. Submitting finished short fiction pieces also teaches the resilience required to enter the industry, providing new authors an opportunity to discover their voice, and to discover if traditional publishers will be interested in hearing it. These rejections are necessary for improvement, hopefully stoking a passionate fire to press on instead of forcing authors to wallow in self-pity and doubt.

I understand the economics of the matter. When was the last time you walked into a bookstore and asked for a good short story recommendation? There are genres that contain collections, those curated works pruned for a discerning audience, but you can’t purchase a single short. Trying to do so will result in confused looks by overworked customer service representatives, who will shove “The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke” in your face and tell you to go away. Short stories must exist as a unified cohort, the most esteemed of which are called an anthology. There are occasional attempts to proffer singles in digital form, but unlike music singles, which can become a viral sensation overnight, short stories are hard sells as one-shots.

And yet there is something special about a short story that simply can’t be achieved as a novel. In a novel you can make longstanding friends and learn about the patterns of life that change people or cause them to become completely undone. However, trying to qualify a friendship is impossible to do with strangers. Summing up the whole of all experiences, public and private, the gravity attracting you to another individual, requires the same commitment as actually writing the novel. It wreaks havoc on popular book recommendations, where responses fall under two categories: loved it or hated it. Sounds like friendship.

This is easier to accomplish with a short story. As a mechanism for crossing boundaries, for relaying complex information and ideas, the short story is the perfect medium. They are the hilarious anecdotes told around the coffee maker, the inspirational graduation speech from a business magnate or the gruesome details an uncle shares about the war. They are even the ramblings of an addicted homeless man on the corner and the lonely little old lady in the checkout line. These are powerful, electric connections that can succinctly teach us about character during bouts of anxiety and familiar struggle.

The first short story I remember vividly is The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell and then The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. I read them both in middle school, an impressionable age when we ruthlessly question our sense of self, which could explain why they left a mark. The same could be said of any short story, which pierces our facade, digging into the bone and marrow when we’re at our most vulnerable. It’s why I love writing short stories and why they need to be elevated beyond the black sheep of the family, looked down upon as a lesser child.

In our present world, the short story has the greatest capacity for influence. Books like “Animal Farm”, “Fahrenheit 451”, “A Brave New World” and “1984” will always be available as warnings, harbingers of doomsday scenarios we should avoid, but they are academically tainted. We treat them as textbooks, to be analyzed constantly, their impact dwindling as the years erode. What we need are earthquake inducing short stories, fantasy and science fiction that speaks to a generation with dwindling attention spans. The failure or success of traditional book publishing could rest in the hearts and hands of a younger generation who is no longer capable of digesting long form fiction. How will the growing divide be bridged? How will we steal the attention of slaves incessantly pleasured by digital masters?

I’m aware of the stakes as I prepare my second collection of short stories for print publication. The thoughts of mortality in mid-life are intensifying. There is a growing desire to leave behind a prolific and influential set of individual works that connect deeply with readers, to personally transform an audience if possible, and at the very least to make an indelible mark on future society. It’s one reason why I first publish short stories via newsletter on Future Thief, readily available for anyone to digest. I’m optimistic they’ll one day be too powerful to ignore, no longer requiring a defense.