The Art of Short Fiction

Linda Adams said:

The Washington Post ran this article on short stories, Self Taught: For the Long Disparaged Art of Short Fiction, A Widening Appreciation of the Form in today's paper. It talks about how small the market is for short stories, as well as the high quality of the writers writing short stories in the market today.

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Thank goodness for leisurely holiday weekends, or else I never would have had the time to discover Linda's link to this great Washington Post article about short stories.

I felt it was truly "bump" worthy for those of you who write short stories and might have missed it.

There was one quote in the article which is a very good example of the sort of prejudice short story writers encounter in a culture where novels are central and short stories are often just considered a writer's "warm up" act. Former Book Review editor, Charles McGrath, once compared short story writers to "People who learn golf by never venturing onto a golf course, but instead practicing at a driving range."

I once had a writing professor with a similar attitude. When I turned in a portfolio of short stories as my final writing project, this is what she wrote on my cover page below my B- "The problem I had with you having chosen to submit short stories for your final project is this . . . their shortness is like trying to learn how to scuba dive by putting one's head in a bathroom sink full of water each night."

I guess I'm destined to be shallow, because I'm still writing and publishing short stories

Linda Adams said:

The Washington Post ran this article on short stories, Self Taught: For the Long Disparaged Art of Short Fiction, A Widening Appreciation of the Form in today's paper. It talks about how small the market is for short stories, as well as the high quality of the writers writing short stories in the market today.

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The market is small? Funny, I haven't noticed.

I wonder why some people are so negative about short stories. Condensing a good story into a few words is hard and with the hasted lifestyle people have today I would expect short stories to be something people would enjoy.

But the magazine market for serious fiction has evaporated to the point where it essentially consists of the New Yorker -- which runs about 50 stories a year and buys them for sums that can reach into the five figures -- and a bevy of high-minded, low-budget literary magazines rarely seen by the broad reading public.

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Preposterous. You don't need to be paid five figures a piece to be a serious short fiction writer.

But tell us how you really feel, Hommes.