08.17.2009 | Blog : Anne Stameshkin, Blog, short stories
In a world where fifteen minutes is a “commitment”…
By Anne Stameshkin
Please read that subject line in Dramatic Male Movie Preview Voice.
Today, Bookfox synthesizes some insightful comments on Seth Fisher’s piece “More Crappy News for Short Story Writers” (on The Rumpus), addressing the whole “why don’t people read more short stories if they have less time?” question.
Thoughts? Comments? Revolutionary notions?
I plan to discuss this question in depth when I (finally) review Lauren Groff’s wonderful collection, Delicate Edible Birds, this fall, and I’d love to hear what others think about it. Does a short story require a more focused kind of attention than most readers are able to muster? Is it harder to “jump in and out” (in one commenter’s words) of a story than, say, a novel or television series?
The average reader of fiction is looking for mild entertainment that has an extended story line with distinct characters and doesn’t require a large vocabulary or the exertion of much mental effort. My girlfriend constantly listens to books on tape, which she flatly describes as “rubbish,” while doing other things such as knitting or gardening. Recently written short stories seem to inhabit the realm of literature and probably put off most readers. There is probably some sort of psychic soothing that readers get from “rubbish” that they could never get from the style or length of a New Yorker short story.
I think a good novel is of greater value than a good short story, and requires far more knowledge to write. However, it is possible to write a great novel without the same kind of dexterity found in many of today’s short stories. Short stories can show you things you might not otherwise see, but never on the scale of a novel.
Regarding Delicate Edible Birds, Groff has the right technical skills for short stories, but the constraints of the form show, and I think she could express herself better in novelistic length.
The “short stories are short, so they’re perfectly tailored for short attention spans” argument just doesn’t hold water with me. By this logic, “The Red Wheelbarrow” would be the perfect thing to recite to someone who wants to hear a knock-knock joke.
I think all this talk about shrinking leisure time and reduced attention spans misses a key point (and is in fact almost completely beside the point): it says nothing about the qualities of the stuff people want to imbibe during what leisure time they have. A poem’s a subtler thing than a joke, and the derivation of pleasure from it requires a level of concentration that a joke does not. The ability to achieve and sustain that level of concentration is, let’s face it, not all that common these days—nor is it an ability that seems to be very much in demand.
Meanwhile, a short story is not simply the same thing as a novel, only shorter. It is a form with its own particular demands and pleasures, and a reader who approaches a short story expecting it to place a novel’s demands upon her, and to yield to her the pleasures of a novel, is bound to be disappointed. (As one of the BookFox commentators points out, “The biggest complaint I hear is that short stories get them interested in a story or character and then ‘just ends,’” which is precisely the complaint of someone who expects her short story to behave like a novel, her hummingbird to soar like an eagle, and her gladiolus to tower like an oak.)
I think that a major part of problem—and this is something that BookFox and its commentators and the Rumpus piece seem to be dancing around without quite stating explicitly (to be fair, I haven’t read through all the Rumpus comments)—is that the concentration required by a good short story is qualitatively similar to that required by a good poem.
Among other things, this means that a significant portion of the pleasure a good reader derives from both a short story and a poem arises from the minute details of the language in each. (To borrow from WC Williams, so much of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” depends upon the use of a single word near the story’s end: “reasonably.” Similarly, think of the way James Salter uses “finally” in the opening of “Last Night.”) Novels, meanwhile, due in part to the sheer numbers of words they comprise, cannot satisfying turn upon the inclusion of, for example, a single adverb in the way a short story or a poem can. Novelistic prose may be intense/incantatory/experimental/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, but the individual words share a fundamentally different relationship to the effect of the text as a whole than they do in a short story, and I think that the short story’s “poem-like” dependence on the details of language is a major reason (if not the major reason) that short stories, despite their seemingly convenient lengths, aren’t more popular these days.
So I don’t think that “how should we market short stories?” is a particulary useful question, though it seems to be the one most people are asking. Problem is, it assumes there’s already a significant untapped market waiting for the short story right now. I think a far better question would be something more like “how do we attune more readers to the particular pleasures of the short story, so many of which are derived from the minutiae of language or else require similarly rigorous attention to detail?” It’s a question as much for our educational system as for our publishing industry.
In a world where ‘Billy Budd’ is considered a short story (according to my high school English teacher), I think that it requires no more attention to complete a novel than it does a short story. I read vast tomes in 10-page sections. This is also why I renew library books two or three times. I honestly think that the dying off of the short story has more to do with the sick publishing industry. Most short stories are published in magazines, which are being trimmed back considerably in ‘today’s economy.’ (Ugh. I hate that phrase.) So there’s simply less of them. So we read less of them.
Well said, Greg. I couldn’t agree more, and couldn’t have said it nearly so well.