On Short Stories – Part 2
Part 2 of 3
So I had Steven test-drive my intended post, as I almost always do. He said, “I love you. Break this into smaller posts so your readers don’t go insane.”
I cannot argue with his logic, so this is part two of three.
- Part one includes the background, the disclaimer, and why I think this is worth reading.
- Part two includes what I could find on official short story definitions
- Part three includes what I like to see in MY short stories, and some pointed questions to try and fuel further discussion.
Popular Definition of Short Story
So, what is this popular definition that I’ve been building up to?
There kind of isn’t one. It’s one of those frustrating things where you’ll find a definition that seems to jive with your own, then read a half dozen more who lay down the law and then throw it out the window, just telling you “if it works, it’s good”.
Frustrating much?
Length
Take something simple, like story length. That one should be easy to pin down, right?
Not even remotely.
Some places say no more than 10,ooo words. Some say no more than 5,000 words. Some say anything up to 17,500 words (after which point it is defined as a novella).
Some places say that the lower bound should be 2,000, because anything less than that is flash fiction. Some say no, flash fiction is only up to 500 words, and anything between 500 and 2,000 is a “short short”.
Honestly, it’s dizzying, and more than a little confusing.
The only true, solid advice I can find on length is to determine which publication you plan on submitting to and follow their guidelines.
Guidelines which do have some overlap with other publications, but which could very well leave you with a rejected story that you can’t even submit somewhere else.
Content
Moving on. How about content?
Surely there are some broad, general content requirements? I’m not talking genre differentiation here, I mean the sort of meat and bones kind of thing that would be used to structure a proper short story.
I found a ton of sites willing to help with this, many of them giving the same five “vital” components to a short story.
- Theme
- Character
- Plot
- Conflict
- Setting
Which is lovely, and I do like that list … except pretty much all the sites go on to say that you don’t have to follow those as a rule, or even really as a guideline. The reason for the immediate retraction is clear … there are a ton of very well-received and critically-acclaimed short stories which don’t have all or most of these components.
Negative
Right, okay, so if we cannot define a short story by saying what it ought to be, maybe we should look at what it ought NOT to be. I found a great blog post from the Willesden Herald (which is quite old, so if you disagree with what you read, please don’t bash on them). The post is so wonderful because it was written by someone who helped judge that year’s short story contest (of some sort) telling people the sorts of things that caused the short stories to be rejected, disliked, or definitely not make it to the winner’s circle.
I found that useful, but saying things like “don’t be boring” is necessarily helping me with that concrete definition that I’m searching for. One man’s garbage, as they say, is often another man’s treasure. “Boring” is too subjective.
Icky
Then, of course, you read articles like this New York Times piece which bemoans the number of short story readers who are actually just writers, trying to figure out how to sell a story to a magazine, rather than reading because they love the format.
The actual quote (copied here for clarity)
In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.
And then, of course, I feel yucky, because he’s kind of talking about me there. I don’t seek out short stories.
But on the other hand, I don’t seek out short stories because so often, I don’t enjoy them. In my mind, they have a reputation for being shocking-for-the-sake-of-shock (grotesque, horror, violence, sex), or to leave the reader feeling uncomfortable.
I don’t want my fiction to make me feel uncomfortable.
I don’t want to feel uneasy or sad or … icky.
I’m not looking for something that will shock or surprise or awe me. I’m not specifically looking for something that changes my perspective on the world or challenges my morals.
I’m looking to be entertained.
And no, I don’t care if that labels me as an escapist reader.
19 Comments
Shocking for the sake of shock….I will ponder that. I will admit that I have read few short story fantasies, but the until I had kids, I never read fantasies, At any rate, I can recall a fair number of short stories that might fit your perspective. But also a good number of shorts that fall outside that description.
As a reader, I can tell you that I am not looking for anything like length, plot, or character. I am looking for soemthing that draws me in, which apparently is pretty expansive. I read articles in research journals, which may or may not be considered short stories. I bet that is helpful insight for you! ;)
From the sound of it, you are getting your hands on good quality short fiction. When I look for fantasy short fiction, most of what I get is … less than awesome. I (very briefly) read for an online ‘zine and was more than a little dismayed by what I saw there.
I once read an essay which said that novels were just short stories written by people who couldn’t get to the point. Everything would be a short story, the guy claimed, if not for the verbal diarrhea that afflicts so many writers. I don’t agree with him at all — but it goes to show that there are people who hate either end of the spectrum!
For me, it’s all about germ size.
Every piece of writing starts with a germ, a tiny speck of something that inspires you. Sometimes it’s small: an image, an event. Sometimes it’s large: a person’s life, a complex situation or chain of events.
If your germ is small, write a short story. If it’s big, write a novel. Or a series.
I’m a fan of short stories, and if you ask me about the good ones I can easily give you a one-sentence catchphrase to sum them up. Examples: a mother is haunted by the ghost of her daughter’s horse; an alien goes to a baseball game. I can summarize novels too, but it’s often much harder and starts to require compound sentences if I want any details (eg, a group of plague survivors make their way across post-apocalyptic America and must band together to defeat the forces of Evil).
A good short-story has a tight focus, a sharp, laser-like quality that etches its germ into your mind. I still recall how shocked I was, for instance, when I realized why that horse-ghost was actually there. Novels are more diffuse, more laid-back. They unfold at a more leisurely rate. They’re also better if you like character studies, because a short story simply can’t devote a lot of pages to one person.
Knowing your preferences, Tami, that might be one of the reasons short stories don’t appeal to you as much: you love characters. When I think of the short stories I’ve read, I don’t recall many characters. Images, plot ideas, twists… but not characters. When I think of novels, I normally think of characters.
What bothers me is when people are not true to their germ. A writer thinks of a neat image or plot snippet… but they want to write a novel and so they drown the poor little germ under mounds of fluff and extraneous material, just to pad things out. Consider A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller. Originally Miller wrote three linked short stories. They were brilliant, intense. Then he decided to combine the short stories and expand them into a full novel. The book version was good, yes. But to me, it was like a big bowl of watery oatmeal. It lacked the clarity of the short stories.
There are also cases where I wish people had written books. George RR Martin, for instance, writes about a hedge knight in the Middle Ages. And man, that guy deserves a book of his own! I want to know more about him, about his life. Fortunately, this problem has a nice compromise: you can write multiple short stories about the same character. (Which Martin has done, thank goodness! I will pick up any book that’s got one of his Hedge Knight tales in it.)
Those intermediate forms of short stories — novellas, story “serials” — might appeal more to you, Tami!
That’s an excellent point. You’re right, I am a very character-driven reader (which is why I’ve had to focus so much on learning how to write character-driven stories in a plot-driven fashion).
Novellas are a lot of fun for me, and I think I’d like serials. One of the issues I’m finding is … how to locate these things?
Back In The Day, you could pick up a zine from the magazine rack and have a ton of fun. Now, there are a few short story collections out there, but they’re not very popular. (I love Must Love Hellhounds, excepting the first story, which I disliked immediately and never improved upon).
Well, I’m lucky. My preferred genre is horror, which is probably the healthiest short story market out there. (The germ “Wouldn’t it be scary if…” really lends itself to short stories!)
I don’t have any good suggestions for finding story series. Only two come to mind immediately. One is the George RR Martin Hedge Knight series that I mentioned (Tales of Dunk and Egg).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Dunk_and_Egg
The other is an older dark fantasy series by Manley Wade Wellman that focuses on Silver John, a folk singer with magical powers who wanders through Appalachia. The Silver John novels suffer from Watery Oatmeal Syndrome (in my opinion). But the short stories are often gems, and they’ve been collected a couple of times. Both “Owls Hoot in Daytime” and “John the Balladeer” contain all of the short stories, I believe.
Novellas… I got nuthin’. Stephen King is the only person I know who does them. Even he, a mega-author if ever there was one, has struggled to get novellas published.
Even if you don’t like horror, you might consider King’s “Different Seasons.” It’s composed of four non-horror novellas he wrote; originally no one wanted to publish them, because they weren’t horror. Three of them were eventually made into movies (“The Body” = “Stand By Me”; “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” = “The Shawshank Redemption”; and “Apt Pupil” = “Apt Pupil”) Of them, only “Apt Pupil” comes close to horror (a straight-A high school student discovers that his neighbor is a Nazi war criminal and… then things get weird). It’s a brilliant story, however, one of my all-time favorites.
Egads. The Hedge Knight is out of print … so I can pick up a copy for a cool hundred bucks. *facepalm*
And the same goes for the Silver John stories. *sigh*
I’ve read Different Seasons! Loved The Shawshank Redemption movie, so of course I had to hunt down the original. I do think the movie was better, excepting the detail of his cellmates complaining of the cold. *grin*
Library’d them both!
One hundred dollars?!? Ha! Ha, I say!
Just yesterday, Ros was staring at my library saying, “We ought to go through it sometime and get rid of about half of these books.” When I began to whine furiously against this idea, he said, “Well you don’t need any of that fiction, do you?”
Now I can fend him off with a scary price tag. I want to be able to loan books I like!
I HATE that so many of my kindle books disallow loaning. Just … ARG. It’s so simple, it’s a single checkbox when creating the book. *sigh*
Stuff like that keeps me from being 100% a fan of ebooks. Bleh.
Anyrate, I have one of these > http://www.amazon.com/princess-bride-first-william-goldman/dp/B004GLF24I on my shelf. And I will happily sell it for $500 if anyone is interested. *snort*
Everything I know about short stories can be found in Rust Hill’s “Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular” (http://www.amazon.com/Writing-General-Short-Story-Particular/dp/0618082344/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1339471324&sr=1-1) and Stephen King’s “Everything’s Eventual” (http://www.amazon.com/Everythings-Eventual-14-Dark-Tales/dp/0743235150), particularly the introduction. So, everything that follows is basically me repeating those things.
As for length, I don’t think you’re going to find anyone that’s going to give you a hard line (that isn’t just being subjective or pragmatic — i.e. a publisher). To be fair, though, it’s really hard to make good definitions (even more so with all of those fuzzy, art things). (I still haven’t figured out a good definition of a “cat” that I can’t poke holes in (because cats is tangible).) Poe and King say it shouldn’t take longer than can be read in a single sitting. My wife might consider War and Peace a short story, then, but most of us are going to think something like 30-50 pages (which is approximately I-don’t-know-how-many words).
Your problem with short stories really two, possibly three,-fold. First, as Jenny mentioned, short-stories don’t have the space for vast worlds with multiple characters interacting and growing. You’ve got just enough room for one character in the story to move.
Second, short stories have been on the decline for a long time. King might be the most well-known contemporary author that writes them. Second to that might be Garrison Keillor (who also does the only “old school” radio program I’m aware of). There are plenty of other short story writers, most probably better than the two I just mentioned, but they’re probably not that popular outside of “people that read short stories” circles (aka. Reader’s Digest, The New Yorker, etc.). Contemporary novelists, on the other hand, everyone can list with ease.
This has the effect of making most short stories you might find not-so-great because I think it’s a bit of a lost and difficult art. Hill’s quotes Poe as saying that “the short story provides a ‘single and unique’ effect towards which every word contributes: ‘If his [the author's] very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.’” Contrast that with a novel where you can successfully have multiple effects. Most of the shorter stories I’ve read are things Rust Hills calls “slicks” because the story is static. The characters don’t move — things just happen to them. Put them in the same situation time and time again and the same things happen. What makes it a “story”, is its dynamism and the fact that the character is changed from the interaction. Repeat the scenario and different things happen. You can’t go back to the way things were.
Re-reading that introduction by King just reminded me, I’m supposed to go read “Sam the Cat” by Matthew Clam and “The Hotel Eden” by Ron Carlson because the introduction told me so — thank God it didn’t ask me to jump off a cliff…I don’t know where I’d find one around here.
Oh and look at what I just read. Your links. :P
*grin*
I do think you’re right, though. Novelists are “in vogue” and have been for a while … and that means that novelists tend to turn up their noses a little at short stories. Not just out of snootiness (“I’m too good for this”) but also probably in very large measure because there is so little market for them.
Which is a shame, as I recall many great short story collections during my high school years. I remember one that was a bunch of authors retelling the same exact fairy tale. Amazing how different each story was.
Also, both those books are too spendy for me (grrr, kindle should be cheaper than print, people!!!) so I’ll be librarying them. Thank you!
King also recommends the Short Story Anthology he edits. ;)
I guess the book prices don’t phase me because of what I used to purchase (hardcover academic/technical books in multiple volumes ain’t cheap). $10-16 for a paperback didn’t cause me a moment’s notice.
Keillor had a fun short titled, “The Mid-Life Crisis of Dionysus”, that I caught as an audiobook years back when I used to commute 100-miles to work.
*laugh* Go figure, he’d recommend that. *grin*
Full price paperbacks used to be 6-7 dollars when I was growing up … and they were a lot cheaper than that for the generation before mine.
And movies were just a nickel!
*wink*
A dollar, actually. It went up to a dollar fifty when I was in high school, then to THREE WHOLE DOLLARS as I graduated.
Scandalized the entire town, I don’t mind tellin’ ya.
Okay, I have short stories on the brain this morning. Gotta recommend a bunch.
Neil Gaimon does some amazing fantasy SS. If you haven’t read “Chivalry”, you MUST do so (from his collection Smoke and Mirrors). An elderly British woman buys the Holy Grail at a thrift store and is flummoxed when Sir Galahad shows up on her doorstep. It is, hands down, my favorite SS ever. Read it and tell me if it doesn’t make you think of Bart!
If you don’t mind the elaborate and purple prose of the Lovecraft Mythos, then you might like the SS of Clark Ashton Smith. Weird and dark fantasy, often set on strange worlds. I find his writing breath-takingly beautiful.
Did you like the original Twilight Zone? If so, check out the SS collections of Charles Beaumont and Robert Mathieson. I think between the two of them they created 90% of the sci-fi “memes” that exist today.
If — courtesy of Supernatural — you ever decide to venture into the realms of horror SS, I will happily recommend entire shelves of authors. There are many different “flavors” of horror. I don’t actually like the gore, slasher, and torture-porn stuff that makes up most modern horror. I much prefer early Gothic (18th-19th century); the delicate ghost stories of Victorian horror; the ‘weird tales’ of HP Lovecraft and Arthur Machen; the antiquarian ghost stories of MR James; or the huge corpus of early women’s horror, which offer a glimpse into the lives and terrors of our ancestors. (If you haven’t read “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that’s another one I’d recommend highly, even to horror-haters. A young wife, confined in her room by her husband and doctor, becomes fascinated by the wallpaper — and the things she begins to see within it…)
…I …. am going to keep this in my inbox for future reference. *laugh* So many good recommendations there! I’ll make sure I read your super recommended stuff first.
And Mr. Moore may like the horror stuff more than me. Whenever he writes, it comes out very horror-y anyway. =]