I read a lot of short stories and, yes, while they're short, they can require several readings (three, for starters) and great concentration. The more I read short stories, the more I admire the skills required to write them. Still, I think they would satisfy readers with shorter attention spans because you can read it, put it away, think a bit about it, then read it again.
I think the SS is a complete art form in itself, not mere training ground for writing a novel. It is not playing on the JV team until you’re good enough to “graduate” to the novel form. Similarly, writing flash fiction is completely different from writing a SS, not just an exercise on your way to writing a SS.
I prefer the SS form for my own writing and have no desire to write a novel. Of course I realized eons ago that I would never become a well-known SS writer. But that isn’t why I write.
This is been something that's mystified me since I entered publishing in the early 2000s. Even when the occasional collection or anthology blows up, "short story collections don't sell" has remained one of the most unshakable self-fulfilling prophecies in the industry.
I forgot to whom this quote belongs to but it's old and went something along the lines of "the short is the perfect form of fiction since the reader can enjoy it in one sitting". And that's fair and I can see the reasoning behind it but it makes me think of people's reading habits today.
Purely from a reader's point of view, I doubt I've met anyone lately who, if they do pick up a short story book, find the discipline to read patiently and enjoy them one at a time so that story has time to take some effect. Instead, they'll devour it and forget half of what's in there by noon. Not that this is a reason that necessarily prevents their publishing, but bunch up some stories in a book and chances are most will be lost to the reader.
I think what you say about the short story in America is true elsewhere in the world too. Countries like Russia (Turgenev), France (Maupassant), Ireland (Joyce) and the UK have a fine tradition in the genre - but I agree it is seen as something of a 'poor relation'. If Novels encroach on the short story from one side, then perhaps 'Flash' nibbles into its turf from the other too.
I love a short story collection; a good short story can teach you so much about economy of plot, movement, words. It has to be efficient and effective.
I totally agree with you, even though my opinion is unquestionably biased as hell. I am a lover of both reading and writing shorts. It will always be 'where I'm from' and how I started. I have a few full-length books in print, but I still write short stories and submit them wherever I can. Thanks for pointing out the value of short stories and the effort it takes to create them. - Jim
While I agree that short stories are getting a somewhat short end of the stick, it would be hard for me to imagine putting a collection of short stories in the same "category" as a novel. To me, a short story is a statuette, a singular piece of art that you could appreciate in a single viewing. A novel, then, is a building—a complex and engineered structure that, in addition to its beauty, always has some function and some scale. Some buildings you can appreciate from afar, some only from the inside, some are comforting, some are dangerous, etc. So, the 'Great American Novel', to me, was always a title for the creations of architects and not of sculptors. Not because sculptures are not important, but because we are appreciating a different quality here.
We can disagree of course, but I'll note most major awards have a category for poetry collections. And many (Pulitzer and NBCC for example) break nonfiction books into multiple categories. Pulitzer gives Memoir, Biography, History, and General Nonfiction. To me, the story collection is at least as distinct from the novel as Memoir is from Biography. And the precedent for collections (of poems) is there.
I fully agree that any good fiction should be celebrated, and I would welcome more distinct categories in every prize, exactly for this reason. That said, I've always felt that the "Great American Novel" title is not simply synonymous with "Great American Fiction", that the word "Novel" bears weight there because it is a celebration not only of the quality of prose but also of structure, of monumentality. "Great American Novel" feels like Mount Rushmore to me, or like the Hoover Dam.
Maybe it's an outsider's (or an amateur's—or both!) viewpoint, but I always appreciated this specific distinction.
i've enjoyed some of the collections you mention, but good novels seem more fulfilling
The writers you mentioned are great of course, but sometimes it seems that short stories were emphasized by MFA programs as a shortcut to perfecting the "craft"
I think it was Otessa Moshfegh said somewhere that she had to buy like a "how to write a novel" book to complete one of her novels b/c she didn't learn storytelling in the MFA
Well on the flipside many novels are fluffy, full of filler. The MFA does focus on stories but it's mostly a practical thing: you can read and workshop a few stories a week. You can't do that with novels.
Lincoln, I'm looking forward to reading your stories. Thanks for this piece. This phenomenon has been on my mind, too. I have a kind of left-field theory: the short story got supplanted in.....what to call it?..."cultural prestige"?.....by the song. And the short story collection by the album.
If peak short story was late '60s/early '70s, that's just the time the 1st-person, confessional-type, singer-songwriter form was rising. And the pleasures and ambiguities of the short story and song are similar. I'm wondering if not only did the audience switch from Updike to Carole King, but the would-be short story writers picked up a guitar or piano... Which is not at all to say there aren't great short story writers now... I don't know. I've been making some notes for a piece about this, but I don't know.
When I was younger, I wanted to be a writer. I also wanted to be a cartoonist for Disney, but that's another story...and short. But seriously. I started writing when I was around 15, maybe 16. I took to it. I started writing poems and stories, and books. I wrote them out by hand until I got my first typewriter. My parents asked me what I wanted to be when I graduated, and I said "A writer." They looked and me and nodded, said I had a year to prove I could do it. I wrote a poetic novel about Robin Hood. It was 212 pages in ballad form. Then I wrote my magnum opus, a sweeping epic that was 340,000 words. I call it my apprenticeship. Because there were no MFA classes back in the 70's.
But then I started to write Short Stories.
I still write them. But the thing I enjoy the most about it, is that now I've discovered Substack. A possible Total Game-Changer for the future of the Short Story. My problem is that magazines need a certain word count. Sometimes, the story just wants to write itself, and now, I let it. Now I find myself in that category where I've left the short story realm and have moved on to the Novelette...which of course had led to the Novella. When I start a story now, I tell myself I can tell this story in 10,000 words. If I go over or fall short, no biggie. The freeing thing about Substack is there is that the word count doesn't matters anymore, because we've monetized ourselves. You can charge for the stories yourself. It's a different sort of a freedom, and while it's not for everyone, there are those of us out there who just like to write things and let the story take them along.
Hopefully with Substack, there will be a new resurgence of the Short Story. It is a Cultural opportunity in that it allows more freedom to the writers well as offering more to the reader. The Serial Novel is soaring to the front of the pack because everyone and his uncle is writing one. Why should we expect any less of the short story? I look forward to the day a major magazine looks at the stories available here, and picks out a list of the best stories. It would be a global online contest.
What better way for Substack to Promote the fiction part of its platform, than with an article in a major magazine? Maybe even prize money? (That's the broke-ass, starving writer in me dreaming again.)
I have also thought that the potential audience, or market, for short fiction is greater than it is. Maybe part of the problem is that, aside from prizes, anthologies and workshop reading list., readers don't get their attention directed to specific short stories in the way that novels (and off Broadway plays and art house films) do by reviewers and other intermediaries unless published in a collection. This is obviously a bigger problem for unknown or emerging writers than it is for a name writer whose story is in the New Yorker or the Paris Review.
They would have gotten along since they fit the worn out detective mode of the righteous loner (more often that not -white hard nosed macho male flattened by life. And frankly I am amazed at you Lincoln for your lack of mention of writers from othercountires who are short story masters such as Italo Calvino of Italy, Ghassan Kanafani of Palestine, Boris Pillnyak of Russia, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood of Canada, Edna Obrien auand William Trevor of Ireland ( and Colin Barrett). our own Louise Erdrich and Greg Sarris, Thane Rosenbaum's brilliant post Holocaust collection Eli Visible, and at least four scintillating collections by John Edgar Wideman including All Stories Are True and Gods Gymnasiums- hands down somare of the finest stories of the last forty years.Then there is the outstanding collection by Harukii Murakami Blind Willlow, Sleeping Woman, and the consitently terrific short stories of Scotland's James Kellman.
There are way too many Americans unaware of their own unconsious or implicit jingoism. They have no idea what they are missing, stuck in a cannon whose rust has been showing for a long long time despite a few long standing sparklers ( Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, and Feathertop, Melville's Bartleby, Hemmingway's Soldier's Home(one of the great antiwar stories) Joyce's "The Dead" (One of the few stories in any literature that shows a not-too-likeable protagonist obtaining an inkling of his own sexist oblvion), Damon Runyon's The Snatching of Bookie Bob (one of the funniest stories ever written), Grace Paley's one page stinger about the essential flawsi in American education "He Tells Me The Story Of His Life", Toshio Mori's incrediible two page Buddhist story "The Trees", and Toni Cade Bambara's astute and entertaining tale of an upbeat community organize "The Apprentice"
But I would say that there has been a revolution in short story writing led by Blassim, Yu Hua, and Vi Khi Nao ( check her collecions The Private History of Torture, and Oh God Your Babies Are So Delicious- they write circles around even the most outstanding US writers with very few excptions Wideman and Mcpherson among them, with an nod to Edward Jones daring experiment of writing two short story collections twentyyears apart with revisited characters- Lost In The City, and Aunt Hagar's Children.
The Atlantic article was specifically Great American Novels, so I limited myself to American authors in this post. I don't think that's jingoism! Just the parameters of the list exercise.
I certainly agree there are infinite amazing story authors around the world. Some favs of mine I teach frequently: Yoko Ogawa, Ben Okri, Dino Buzzati, Silvana Ocampo, Can Xue, Italo Calvino, etc. One could go on forever.
why are you sending my name to other people ? I dont want any subscriptions that I have to pay for. I think this makes Substack''s entire process suspect. It is so hypocritical.You can participate on all democratic levels as long as you are willing to pay and pay and pay. Ive been at this my entire life, sharing my writing and love for great books, and there was no money exchanged. SO STOP USING MY NAME AND TELL ME WHY THE HELL YOU ARE DOING IT Is there a comission in this for you? Or maybe there is some essential info I am not understanding .
I'm unsure what you mean here. I have not sent your name to anyone and this post is free for the public and does not cost money. You posted a public comment on this post, which is why your name appears in the comments.
One would think short stories would be tailor made for the attention span we have today: a story you can actually finish and that too in one sitting.
I read a lot of short stories and, yes, while they're short, they can require several readings (three, for starters) and great concentration. The more I read short stories, the more I admire the skills required to write them. Still, I think they would satisfy readers with shorter attention spans because you can read it, put it away, think a bit about it, then read it again.
I think the SS is a complete art form in itself, not mere training ground for writing a novel. It is not playing on the JV team until you’re good enough to “graduate” to the novel form. Similarly, writing flash fiction is completely different from writing a SS, not just an exercise on your way to writing a SS.
I prefer the SS form for my own writing and have no desire to write a novel. Of course I realized eons ago that I would never become a well-known SS writer. But that isn’t why I write.
This is been something that's mystified me since I entered publishing in the early 2000s. Even when the occasional collection or anthology blows up, "short story collections don't sell" has remained one of the most unshakable self-fulfilling prophecies in the industry.
Also that comic is amazing haha
I forgot to whom this quote belongs to but it's old and went something along the lines of "the short is the perfect form of fiction since the reader can enjoy it in one sitting". And that's fair and I can see the reasoning behind it but it makes me think of people's reading habits today.
Purely from a reader's point of view, I doubt I've met anyone lately who, if they do pick up a short story book, find the discipline to read patiently and enjoy them one at a time so that story has time to take some effect. Instead, they'll devour it and forget half of what's in there by noon. Not that this is a reason that necessarily prevents their publishing, but bunch up some stories in a book and chances are most will be lost to the reader.
I think what you say about the short story in America is true elsewhere in the world too. Countries like Russia (Turgenev), France (Maupassant), Ireland (Joyce) and the UK have a fine tradition in the genre - but I agree it is seen as something of a 'poor relation'. If Novels encroach on the short story from one side, then perhaps 'Flash' nibbles into its turf from the other too.
I love a short story collection; a good short story can teach you so much about economy of plot, movement, words. It has to be efficient and effective.
Hi Lincoln,
I totally agree with you, even though my opinion is unquestionably biased as hell. I am a lover of both reading and writing shorts. It will always be 'where I'm from' and how I started. I have a few full-length books in print, but I still write short stories and submit them wherever I can. Thanks for pointing out the value of short stories and the effort it takes to create them. - Jim
While I agree that short stories are getting a somewhat short end of the stick, it would be hard for me to imagine putting a collection of short stories in the same "category" as a novel. To me, a short story is a statuette, a singular piece of art that you could appreciate in a single viewing. A novel, then, is a building—a complex and engineered structure that, in addition to its beauty, always has some function and some scale. Some buildings you can appreciate from afar, some only from the inside, some are comforting, some are dangerous, etc. So, the 'Great American Novel', to me, was always a title for the creations of architects and not of sculptors. Not because sculptures are not important, but because we are appreciating a different quality here.
We can disagree of course, but I'll note most major awards have a category for poetry collections. And many (Pulitzer and NBCC for example) break nonfiction books into multiple categories. Pulitzer gives Memoir, Biography, History, and General Nonfiction. To me, the story collection is at least as distinct from the novel as Memoir is from Biography. And the precedent for collections (of poems) is there.
I fully agree that any good fiction should be celebrated, and I would welcome more distinct categories in every prize, exactly for this reason. That said, I've always felt that the "Great American Novel" title is not simply synonymous with "Great American Fiction", that the word "Novel" bears weight there because it is a celebration not only of the quality of prose but also of structure, of monumentality. "Great American Novel" feels like Mount Rushmore to me, or like the Hoover Dam.
Maybe it's an outsider's (or an amateur's—or both!) viewpoint, but I always appreciated this specific distinction.
i've enjoyed some of the collections you mention, but good novels seem more fulfilling
The writers you mentioned are great of course, but sometimes it seems that short stories were emphasized by MFA programs as a shortcut to perfecting the "craft"
I think it was Otessa Moshfegh said somewhere that she had to buy like a "how to write a novel" book to complete one of her novels b/c she didn't learn storytelling in the MFA
Well on the flipside many novels are fluffy, full of filler. The MFA does focus on stories but it's mostly a practical thing: you can read and workshop a few stories a week. You can't do that with novels.
Lincoln, I'm looking forward to reading your stories. Thanks for this piece. This phenomenon has been on my mind, too. I have a kind of left-field theory: the short story got supplanted in.....what to call it?..."cultural prestige"?.....by the song. And the short story collection by the album.
If peak short story was late '60s/early '70s, that's just the time the 1st-person, confessional-type, singer-songwriter form was rising. And the pleasures and ambiguities of the short story and song are similar. I'm wondering if not only did the audience switch from Updike to Carole King, but the would-be short story writers picked up a guitar or piano... Which is not at all to say there aren't great short story writers now... I don't know. I've been making some notes for a piece about this, but I don't know.
When I was younger, I wanted to be a writer. I also wanted to be a cartoonist for Disney, but that's another story...and short. But seriously. I started writing when I was around 15, maybe 16. I took to it. I started writing poems and stories, and books. I wrote them out by hand until I got my first typewriter. My parents asked me what I wanted to be when I graduated, and I said "A writer." They looked and me and nodded, said I had a year to prove I could do it. I wrote a poetic novel about Robin Hood. It was 212 pages in ballad form. Then I wrote my magnum opus, a sweeping epic that was 340,000 words. I call it my apprenticeship. Because there were no MFA classes back in the 70's.
But then I started to write Short Stories.
I still write them. But the thing I enjoy the most about it, is that now I've discovered Substack. A possible Total Game-Changer for the future of the Short Story. My problem is that magazines need a certain word count. Sometimes, the story just wants to write itself, and now, I let it. Now I find myself in that category where I've left the short story realm and have moved on to the Novelette...which of course had led to the Novella. When I start a story now, I tell myself I can tell this story in 10,000 words. If I go over or fall short, no biggie. The freeing thing about Substack is there is that the word count doesn't matters anymore, because we've monetized ourselves. You can charge for the stories yourself. It's a different sort of a freedom, and while it's not for everyone, there are those of us out there who just like to write things and let the story take them along.
Hopefully with Substack, there will be a new resurgence of the Short Story. It is a Cultural opportunity in that it allows more freedom to the writers well as offering more to the reader. The Serial Novel is soaring to the front of the pack because everyone and his uncle is writing one. Why should we expect any less of the short story? I look forward to the day a major magazine looks at the stories available here, and picks out a list of the best stories. It would be a global online contest.
What better way for Substack to Promote the fiction part of its platform, than with an article in a major magazine? Maybe even prize money? (That's the broke-ass, starving writer in me dreaming again.)
Oh, fun coincidence, my post that went up this morning is about John Cheever's "The Swimmer" and how it achieves its emotional vibes — https://open.substack.com/pub/litinonesentence/p/the-swimmer-by-john-cheever-in-one-sentence
I have also thought that the potential audience, or market, for short fiction is greater than it is. Maybe part of the problem is that, aside from prizes, anthologies and workshop reading list., readers don't get their attention directed to specific short stories in the way that novels (and off Broadway plays and art house films) do by reviewers and other intermediaries unless published in a collection. This is obviously a bigger problem for unknown or emerging writers than it is for a name writer whose story is in the New Yorker or the Paris Review.
I mean. Where would we be without Raymond Carver…
They would have gotten along since they fit the worn out detective mode of the righteous loner (more often that not -white hard nosed macho male flattened by life. And frankly I am amazed at you Lincoln for your lack of mention of writers from othercountires who are short story masters such as Italo Calvino of Italy, Ghassan Kanafani of Palestine, Boris Pillnyak of Russia, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood of Canada, Edna Obrien auand William Trevor of Ireland ( and Colin Barrett). our own Louise Erdrich and Greg Sarris, Thane Rosenbaum's brilliant post Holocaust collection Eli Visible, and at least four scintillating collections by John Edgar Wideman including All Stories Are True and Gods Gymnasiums- hands down somare of the finest stories of the last forty years.Then there is the outstanding collection by Harukii Murakami Blind Willlow, Sleeping Woman, and the consitently terrific short stories of Scotland's James Kellman.
There are way too many Americans unaware of their own unconsious or implicit jingoism. They have no idea what they are missing, stuck in a cannon whose rust has been showing for a long long time despite a few long standing sparklers ( Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, and Feathertop, Melville's Bartleby, Hemmingway's Soldier's Home(one of the great antiwar stories) Joyce's "The Dead" (One of the few stories in any literature that shows a not-too-likeable protagonist obtaining an inkling of his own sexist oblvion), Damon Runyon's The Snatching of Bookie Bob (one of the funniest stories ever written), Grace Paley's one page stinger about the essential flawsi in American education "He Tells Me The Story Of His Life", Toshio Mori's incrediible two page Buddhist story "The Trees", and Toni Cade Bambara's astute and entertaining tale of an upbeat community organize "The Apprentice"
But I would say that there has been a revolution in short story writing led by Blassim, Yu Hua, and Vi Khi Nao ( check her collecions The Private History of Torture, and Oh God Your Babies Are So Delicious- they write circles around even the most outstanding US writers with very few excptions Wideman and Mcpherson among them, with an nod to Edward Jones daring experiment of writing two short story collections twentyyears apart with revisited characters- Lost In The City, and Aunt Hagar's Children.
The Atlantic article was specifically Great American Novels, so I limited myself to American authors in this post. I don't think that's jingoism! Just the parameters of the list exercise.
I certainly agree there are infinite amazing story authors around the world. Some favs of mine I teach frequently: Yoko Ogawa, Ben Okri, Dino Buzzati, Silvana Ocampo, Can Xue, Italo Calvino, etc. One could go on forever.
One other problem here in the uk is the relatively smaller market which, an agent friend says, makes it unviable to publish short stories
an abundance of Raymonds
Ursula K. LeGuin’s collection The Unreal and the Real, for instance. The universe in a single leaf.
why are you sending my name to other people ? I dont want any subscriptions that I have to pay for. I think this makes Substack''s entire process suspect. It is so hypocritical.You can participate on all democratic levels as long as you are willing to pay and pay and pay. Ive been at this my entire life, sharing my writing and love for great books, and there was no money exchanged. SO STOP USING MY NAME AND TELL ME WHY THE HELL YOU ARE DOING IT Is there a comission in this for you? Or maybe there is some essential info I am not understanding .
I'm unsure what you mean here. I have not sent your name to anyone and this post is free for the public and does not cost money. You posted a public comment on this post, which is why your name appears in the comments.
Viva la Short Story!