My Affair with the Short Story

Short stories are the overlooked stepchild of the literary world. They’re the sluggish tales you hated reading in English class. They’re the training ground for newer writers not yet “good enough” to write novels. The mainstream consensus is, they’re cute. Oh, you wrote a short story? That’s cute.

Just cute.

That was my attitude until a few years ago. To me, short stories were stuffy page-fillers meant for literature textbooks, and while writing one was a welcome detour from your typical English homework, they were a lesser art than my 800-page work-in-progress at the time. (Yes, really. You can imagine what a *masterpiece* that turned out to be. Let’s not talk about it.) Needless to say, I was a novelist at heart. That’s where the money was. That’s how you got published. These little short stories we all wrote in creative writing classes, they were, you know, cute.

So, this is my confession. My total one-eighty. My infidelity to the novel and conversion to shorter fiction is here outlined for your judgmental pleasure. Here I’ve attempted to lay out why, as a reader or a writer, you should give short stories a shot. Take it from someone who used to venerate the novel, you won’t be disappointed.

Bite-Sized Lit Fix

You might find this hard to believe, but short stories are, well . . . short. Quick reads. They don’t require the commitment of a novel. In a world of decreasing attention spans, the appeal is obvious. I won’t try to tell you I don’t have time for full-length books—because I would be lying—but there’s something extra satisfying about beginning a story and knowing how it all ends and culminates within a single sitting. That’s often what has gotten me to return to books I’ve put down: I just wanted to know how it ended. I wanted closure. I wanted the pretty bow tied at the last paragraph. I didn’t care how we got there, so long as we did.

Just because short stories cater to our “quick fix” desires doesn’t mean they’re the fast food of literature.

In other words, I’m impatient. We’re impatient. Short stories aren’t as needy as novels. It’s hard to tell if the short story market has boomed at all in response to our collective impatience. After all, movies and television shows aren’t getting shorter; they’re getting longer.

Price could be the issue. If you ask folks to pay for something, anything, they’re going to want more than a few pages of content. My rebuttal: there are dozens of FREE e-magazines publishing fantastic short stories. Online venues like Apex, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Arsenika helped ignite my affinity for short stories, perhaps more so than my undergraduate work. This isn’t to mention the many book-length story collections you can purchase if you’re needing a little more meat to sink your teeth into.

But just because short stories cater to our “quick fix” desires doesn’t mean they’re the fast food of literature. Far from it! Authors pour a lot of care and craft into these tiny gems. They may be low-commitment for both readers and, arguably, writers, but that’s all the more reason for writers to pour their hearts into them. There’s rarely the slog of finishing a long manuscript with short stories; the turnaround is much faster, and you don’t have to overstay your welcome with any one idea or set of characters. For reader and writer, it’s easy to push through a story you’re not crazy about, but it’s also easy to put it down and try another one.

Freedom to Break Rules

Writing isn’t quite as artsy or subjective as some people make it out to be. There are rules. That said, the “rules” are more so proven tips and tricks than graven-in-stone commandments, and sometimes the best stories work so well because they bend the rules. Short stories are a great laboratory for these kinds of experiments. For writers, they offer a smaller canvas on which to test out new, wacky ideas, gimmicks, and techniques. It’s far less risky than banking an entire manuscript—which might take months or years to write—on an experimental style or premise. This is especially true for authors who have already carved out a genre or niche that they’re known for but want to dabble in something new.

Sometimes the best stories work so well because they bend the rules.

A short story that bends the rules is also more palatable for readers, who are more willing to give your experiment a chance if they don’t have to commit to reading 300-plus pages. If anything, a bizzarro gimmick (like the characters all having numbers for names, a story told in the second-person plural, a setting that’s only described in smells) might actually attract me to short story, even get me excited about it, whereas these experimental quirks might make me sick to my stomach just imaging a long, drawn-out novel hinged upon them.

And did I mention short stories are short? When I was committed to writing novels, fresh new ideas were hard to nurture because they each represented a whole new manuscript and months upon months of keyboard labor. With short stories, it’s much more manageable to dive into something new because they’re low-stakes projects: easy to abandon, easy to begin, quick to finish. If my wacky idea to tell a story from the point of view of a dust mite doesn’t turn out as great as I had hoped, it’s no big deal to shelve it and move on.

Training Wheels

Remember when I jokingly said short stories are the training ground for newer writers? Well, that’s partially true. There’s a reason academia chooses to train student writers with short stories, and no, it’s not just because they’re shorter and therefore easier to grade. (Although that’s also partially true.) Student writers begin with short stories because they’re a great introduction to the elements of fiction—like character, setting, dialogue, and theme—without the orchestration of a massive project with overlapping subplots and a dozen minor characters. It’s kind of like learning to prepare a great meal before trying to run the whole kitchen. In fact, I would highly recommend any newer writer hold off on their idea for the next Lord of the Rings in favor of dipping their toes in the water with short stories. It’ll quickly illuminate your strengths and weaknesses and help you hone your voice without the time investment or collateral damage of multiple long manuscripts riddled with problems that could have been weeded out far more efficiently. I speak from unfortunate experience.

Writing short fiction is like learning to prepare a great meal before trying to run the whole kitchen.

This isn’t to say short story writers are subpar to novelists. The mediums might share basic elements, but they’re very different forms. That would be like comparing poets to essayists. Just because you’ve mastered the short story doesn’t mean you can write a great novel, and vice versa. There are some short stories that demonstrate greater talent and pack a bigger punch than some novels.

 This applies to readers as well. Since short stories offer a smaller, more digestible sampling of a writer’s work, they give readers a chance to experience an unfamiliar author before considering some of their longer works (if they have any). They let readers taste an appetizer before exploring the larger menu.

Short story collections are also common among newer writers, so it can be fun to glimpse the potential of fresh up-and-comings as well as to go back and read the early works of authors who are now well-known and see where they started. Either way, for readers and writers, it’s a win-win.

Final Thoughts

By now my unfaithfulness to the novel has been clearly argued, but here’s the beauty of it: this isn’t a marriage. It’s an open relationship. You can read and write both. Not a big shocker, but still worth noting. If we get stuck consuming or producing only one form, one genre, or one style, we’re depriving ourselves of potential growth! How else are we to broaden our tastes as readers or diversify our talent as writers if we never breach our comfort zone?

You might not absolutely love short stories like I do, and that’s okay. I can’t say I love novels any less, but I would have stunted both my love of reading and my skillset as a writer if I had never given short fiction another chance. Worst case scenario: you pick up and put down a few bad stories. The good news? There are a million other, better stories to choose from.