The Best American Short Story collection has been around now for almost 100 years. It was started in 1915 by Edward J. O’Brien, who also wrote two pretty good history/discussions of the form: The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age (1929) rants against machine-like standardization of the industrial age and argues that the short story of his time shares with the machine the characteristics of being impersonal, standardized, speeded-up and cheap. The Advance of the American Short Story (1931) surveys the development of the American short story from Washington Irving to Sherwood Anderson. O’Brien edited what was then called Best Short Stories of, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story for a quarter of a century.
Volume 7 of Critical Survey of Short Fiction, which I edited for Salem Press in 2001, includes the table of contents of all the Best American Short Stories volumes from 1915 up through 1999. It is interesting to note how few writers in the early volumes are still remembered, or are remembered as popular rather than literary writers, e.g. in the 1915 volume, Ben Hecht, Fannie Hurst, Wilbur Daniel Steele. But who today remembers Walter Muilenburg or Will Livingston Comfort?
Martha Foley took over the editorship in 1941 and continued in that position until 1977, sometimes co-editing with Joyce F. Hartman or David Burnett. In 1978, Shannon Ravenel took over, but that year also started the tradition of having someone else, most often a fiction writer, making the final choice. Usually, Ravenel would choose 120 stories and then send them to the guest editor who chose the final twenty. The titles of the remaining 100 were listed in the back.
Over the years, guest editors have included Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner, Anne Tyler, John Updike, Gail Godwin, Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, Annie Proulx, and Amy Tan. However, in the last few years, Houghton Mifflin has chosen guest editors who are not short-story writers and do not seem to appreciate the form, for example, Alice Sebold in 2009, who does not write short stories at all, and Richard Russo in 2010 who does not write them well. Their introductions are rambling generalities and personal anecdotes that add nothing to our understanding and appreciation of the short story. However, many of the other authors who have guest edited over the years have made interesting and helpful comments on the short story, the best of which I include below with the dates of the volume.
I hope these five sets of authorial comments have been helpful to you. Over 100 different authors are represented. I have organized many of the comments in what I think are significant categories and tried to show their relationship to each other for my presentation in Angers, France later this month entitled “Why Many Authors Like Short Stories and Many Readers Do Not.”
I have raided my own copies of Best American Short Stories for the following authorial comments on the form to complete this series. Any comments or additions are appreciated. Not all volumes are represented because not all authors commented on the short story as a form.
1981, Hortense Calisher: “If poetry has the direct line to the highest laurel—or the noblest life—and the novel is sometimes cock-of-the-walk conversationally, then the short story, somehow frozen or immured between them, is everybody’s prize orphan, of whom one speaks tenderly, if not for long. It’s the chamber music of literature and has the same kind of devotee. Besides, it doesn’t sell well. There’s often that confusion between the commercial fact and the Parnassian one.”
1984, John Updike: “The suspicion persists that short fiction, like poetry since Kipling and Bridges, has gone from being a popular to a fine art, an art preserved in a kind of floating museum made up of many little superfluous magazines.”
1985, Gail Godwin: “The paradox I have discovered, in writing and in reading the writing of others, is that the more you respect and focus on the singular and strange, the more you become aware of the universal and the infinite.”
1990, Richard Ford: “Short stories, like lyrics, are invented new each time they’re tried, becoming attached to the name-made-form only as a convenience for would-be-students and syllabus makers.”
“Unarguably, writing short stories is something most people can’t do very well. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s harder than it looks, and wonderful stories do seem like little miracles.”
“Abstractable standards of form will not very reliably predict or often inspire a first-rate short story…a good short story is not good because it conforms to or rejects doggishly some pre-existing conceit.”
“Good stories perform what wonders they do using wise standards all their own, discovered often in the private vicissitudes of being written.”
1993, Louise Erdrich: “The best short stories contain novels. Either they are densely plotted, with each line an insight, or they distill emotions that could easily spread on for pages, chapters.”
1995, Jane Smiley: “The short story is an elusive, paradoxical form, not easily mastered, yet some of the best are written by beginning writers.”
1996, John Edgar Wideman: “Stories that don’t acknowledge the mystery at the center of things, don’t challenge the vision f reality most consenting adults rely upon day by day, are stories that disappear swiftly into the ever-present buzz of entertainment.”
1997, Annie Proulx: “The short story is a difficult literary form, demanding more attention to control and balance than the novel.”
“In the short story there lingers a faint sense of example, a trimmed, useful tautness implying a function for the reader beyond entertainment… The reader comes to the short story subliminally expecting enlightenment, that is, we accept the idea that there is some nugget of embedded truth in a short story, and this acceptance partially sponges off the label of fiction in a way that does not occur with the novel in its detailed examination of character.”
1999, Amy Tan: “For me the rhythm is in the beats of the first sentence, in the way the story’s pulse quickens or evens, lulls, or leaps. And by the end the story breaches and exhales with a certain tempo and force…. Disruptions can cause me to lose the story’s focus or its essence, and at the very least its momentum. For that reason, I feel the short story is more akin to a poem than a novel in how it should be read.”
2000, E. L Doctorow:”The story as a particular kind of fiction may not be definable by its construction or its length, but what is critical is its scale. Smaller in its overall dimensions than the novel, it is a fiction in which society is surmised as the darkness around the narrative circle of light. In other words, the scale of the short story predisposes it to the isolation of the self.”
“Here in the year 2000 we lack a proprietary critic of the short story as, for example, Professor Helen Vendler is a proprietary critic of the lyric poem.”
2001, Barbara Kingsolver: “I have often wondered why short stories are not more popular in this country. We Americans are such busy people you’d think we’d jump at the chance to have our literary wisdom served in doses that fit handily between taking the trash to the curb and waiting for the carpool…. Most Americans would sooner read a five-hundred-page book about a boy attending wizard school or how to make home décor from roadside trash or anything than pick up a book offering them a dozen tales of the world complete in twenty pages apiece…. It may be that most Americans don’t read short stories because…a good short story cannot be Lit Lite; it is the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces.”
2004, Lorrie Moore: “There is no thoroughly convincing theory of the short story—it is technically a genre, not a form, but resists the definitions that usually cluster around both…in lieu of a truly winning overriding theory, we should rely perhaps on simple descriptions, in which case the more the merrier.”
“As for their oft stated affinity with poetry, short stories do have in common with poems an interest in how language completes one’s understanding of the world.”
“Unlike novels or poems, but more akin to a play, the short story is also an end-oriented form, and in the best ones the endings shine a light back upon the story illumining its meaning with both surprise and inevitability.”
2006, Anne Patchett: “The first thing the short story needs to think about is casting off the role of The Novel’s Little Sidekick, the practice run, the warm-up act.”
“Short stories are often better written and make fewer demands on our time than novels. Why haven’t we made a deeper commitment to them? I am afraid it has something to do with the story’s inability to cause a stir…. It doesn’t really matter what the short story chooses to do, but it needs to do something. Fast. The story needs hype. It needs a publicist. Fast
2007, Stephen King: “The American short story is alive and well. Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were actually true. The art form is still alive…. But well? That’s a different story.”
Showing posts with label Authors on the Short Story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Authors on the Short Story. Show all posts
Monday, April 4, 2011
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Authors on the Short Story--Part IV
Here is my fourth blog on Authors on the Short Story. I have my Angers presentation completed and will tell you more about it after the conference. I have one more set of Author comments, all from the introductions to the Best American Short Story volumes of the past several years. I will post those next week. I welcome any comments on these Authorial remarks, and any additions you may know that I have missed.
Donald Barthelme: “Fragments are the only forms I trust.”
Annie Proulx: “The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer works. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward.”
Grace Paley: “I really am in love with the story form, so I can’t say the novel will do something a short story can’t. I would just say they probably do something different. And I’ve never been really clear about it. Every now and then, I get an illumination of what one does that the other doesn’t, and if I’m in a classroom, it’s lucky, then I can say it to a lot of people. But then it sort of blurs for me . . . For me, somehow, the short story is very close to the poem in feeling and not so close in feeling to the novel, although it’s about the same people that a novel would be about. But what it tries to say is the poem of those lives.”
Jayne Anne Phillips: “I think that stories in reality are often circular; past and present ad future are mixed up in terms of the way we think; and the closer a story can get to that—the more completely it can represent that—the more timeless the story becomes.”
George Saunders: “The novel and the short story “are, at their origin, very different… In a novel the whole point is the little constructions along the way… A chance to describe a certain household or a certain while-travelling phenomenon. And the plot is just a way to link these together, and, in a sense justify them…. Whereas in a story the progression of the plot is what the whole machine is ultimately judged against. You can do the other things—description, dialogue, etc., but any piece that is inessential to the plot-machine (to the sense that this thing is moving forward, and along a certain thematic track) is felt as extraneous. And I am very firmly in the latter mindset.”
Wells Tower: It's very easy to write a terrible short story: you just write something and then stop. In a good short story, you are made to care for someone within a very limited space and then hopefully arrive at some explosive moment at the end, where the characters' lives are changed in some way. A good short story should rock the axis of your world.”
Joy Williams: A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the dark. The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct of advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery…. he wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend them.”
David Means: “Short stories demand a kind of intense poetic eye, and you can’t flinch. I relate stories to songs; you listen to a song and get a bit of narrative along with beat and tone and sound and images, then the song fades out, or hits that final beat, and you’re left with something that’s tangible and also deeply mysterious.”
Sherwood Anderson: “The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist’s imaginative life…there is determination to give the tale…Form—to make it real to the theme, not to life. Often the better the job is done, the greater the confusion…. Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality in life, is always bad art—although it may possibly be very good; journalism.”
Ambrose Bierce: The only way to get unity of impression from a novel is t shut it up and look at the covers.”
Joyce Carol Oates: “The short story is a dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a sympathetic audience (and not, as the world really is, a busy and indifferent crowd): the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery.”
Catherine Brady: Every good story has to risk being obscure, aimless, about nothing if it is to sustain that ‘something wild’ not within reach, not enclosed in the story because it cannot be named or identified in any single passage. . Good stories dance on the boundary line between resisting a final interpretation and resisting any interpretation at all.”
Elizabeth Taylor: “Short stories are a form of contradiction: an act of both isolation and relationship.”
Julio Cortazar: “For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe…. I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
The short-story writer knows that he can’t proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His own solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.”
Anthony Burgess: The nature of a short story may have nothing to do with length…there is a kind of short story element, the short story entity, which can be accommodated to any size, that a novel of immense length can be no more than a short story in that it doesn’t present the process of change taking place in human passions. The possibility of change, yes, and the revelation that may lead to change.”
William Carlos Williams: “What are the advantages of the short story as an art form? One clear advantage as against a novel—which is its nearest cousin—is that you do not have to bear in mind the complex structural paraphernalia of a novel in writing a short story and so many dwell on the manner, the writing. On the process itself. A single stroke, uncomplicated but complete; not like a chapter or a paragraph, incomplete…. The short story in contrast to the novel stresses virtuosity as opposed to story structure… The creation of the effect, the climate, the character, by management of the pure verbal effect is paramount…. I should say that the short story consists of one single flight of the imagination, complete: up and down.”
Henry James: "A short story has to choose between being either an anecdote or a picture and can but play its part strictly according to its kind. I rejoice in the anecdote, but I revel in the picture.”
C., S. Lewis: “To be stories at all they must be series of events: but it must be understood that this series…s only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state of quality… It may be asked why anyone should be encouraged to write a form in which the means are apparently so often at war with the end…. I suggest that the internal tension in the heart of every story between the theme and the plot constitutes, after all, its chief resemblance to life. . In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and fond only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied.”
Bernard Malamud: “The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime.”
John Wain:” The short story is a form on its own, with its own laws and its own logic. A short story has its natural length. It isn’t trying to do the same thing as a novel. It has found staked out which is its own ground. …The short story has its own logic and its own laws, and it is not trying to be something else and failing. It is very triumphantly doing one thing. There are perfectly successful short stories, and there are totally unsuccessful ones, and there’s nothing in between”
Edith Wharton: “One of the chief obligations in a short story is to give the reader an immediate sense of security. Every phrase should be a signpost, and never (unless intentionally) a misleading one…. The least touch of irrelevance, the least chill of inattention, will instantly undo the spell, and it will take as long to weave again as to get Humpty Dumpty back on his wall. The moment the reader loses faith in the author’s sureness of foot improbability gapes…. The chief technical difference between the short story and the novel may be summed up by saying that the situation is the main concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form, or presentation.”
John Barth: “We may safely generalize that short story writers, as a class, from Poe to Paley, incline to see how much they can leave out, and novelists as a class, from Petronius to Pynchon, how much they can leave in.”
Richard Ford: “Short stories feels as though they arise out of some fierce schism that they by their very existence mean to reconcile. And fascination edging on to mystery does exist in the discrepancy between the ingenious capacity of great stories to penetrate us and our ineludible awareness of their brevity.”
Isabel Allende: “I think that in a short story the most important thing is to get the tone right in the first six lines. The tone determines the characters. In long fiction, it’s plot, its character…a lot of stuff goes in there. But in short stories, it’s tone, language, suggestions.” People think if they can write a short story then eventually they will be able to write a novel. It’s actually the other way around. If you are able to write a novel, someday with a lot of work and good luck you may be able t write a good short story”
Moira Crone: “Novels are messy and short stories are very defined. Short stories have a consistent, arguably a universally recognized form, and novels can have any number of forms. There is closure in most short stories…. Getting a short story right, and being obsessed with it until you do, is more occupying, like having an acute illness, a kind of attack.”
Richard Ford: “If stories fail, then they don’t make a short story. It’s like bread. Either it’s a loaf of bread or it’s doughy goo.”
William Faulkner: “When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant.”
Jack Matthews: “I don’t think the short story as a genre is insubstantial at all, just brief... It’s the narrow instrument that penetrates deepest. (That’s part true and part not — like most truths relating to labels and judgments). Also, if you love a novel, what is it, exactly, that you love? One answer would be that you love what you remember of certain scenes in it, or perhaps a specific emblematic scene, which lasts in your memory as a short story, of sorts. And it is this way with all images, of course, for an image often functions as a symbol of the narrative’s plenary meaning… A discontent with I[the short story’s] brevity does not constitute a legitimate argument. Ask a coral snake, which is as deadly as it is small.”
Sean O’Faolain: “If I had to choose one word to describe short-story language I would either say that it is engrossed, or that it is alert. What one searches for and what one enjoys in a short story is a special distillation of personality, a unique sensibility which has recognized and selected at once a subject that, above all other subjects, is of value to the writer’s temperament and to his alone.”
Mary Lavin: “I feel that it is in the short story that a writer distills the essence of his thought. I believe this because the short story shape as well as matter, is determined by the writer’s own character. Both are one. Short-story writing—for me—is only looking closer than normal into the human heart. The vagaries and contrarieties three to be fund have their own integral design.”
Barry Hannah: “Get in and get out.”
Donald Barthelme: “Fragments are the only forms I trust.”
Annie Proulx: “The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer works. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward.”
Grace Paley: “I really am in love with the story form, so I can’t say the novel will do something a short story can’t. I would just say they probably do something different. And I’ve never been really clear about it. Every now and then, I get an illumination of what one does that the other doesn’t, and if I’m in a classroom, it’s lucky, then I can say it to a lot of people. But then it sort of blurs for me . . . For me, somehow, the short story is very close to the poem in feeling and not so close in feeling to the novel, although it’s about the same people that a novel would be about. But what it tries to say is the poem of those lives.”
Jayne Anne Phillips: “I think that stories in reality are often circular; past and present ad future are mixed up in terms of the way we think; and the closer a story can get to that—the more completely it can represent that—the more timeless the story becomes.”
George Saunders: “The novel and the short story “are, at their origin, very different… In a novel the whole point is the little constructions along the way… A chance to describe a certain household or a certain while-travelling phenomenon. And the plot is just a way to link these together, and, in a sense justify them…. Whereas in a story the progression of the plot is what the whole machine is ultimately judged against. You can do the other things—description, dialogue, etc., but any piece that is inessential to the plot-machine (to the sense that this thing is moving forward, and along a certain thematic track) is felt as extraneous. And I am very firmly in the latter mindset.”
Wells Tower: It's very easy to write a terrible short story: you just write something and then stop. In a good short story, you are made to care for someone within a very limited space and then hopefully arrive at some explosive moment at the end, where the characters' lives are changed in some way. A good short story should rock the axis of your world.”
Joy Williams: A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the dark. The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct of advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery…. he wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend them.”
David Means: “Short stories demand a kind of intense poetic eye, and you can’t flinch. I relate stories to songs; you listen to a song and get a bit of narrative along with beat and tone and sound and images, then the song fades out, or hits that final beat, and you’re left with something that’s tangible and also deeply mysterious.”
Sherwood Anderson: “The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist’s imaginative life…there is determination to give the tale…Form—to make it real to the theme, not to life. Often the better the job is done, the greater the confusion…. Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality in life, is always bad art—although it may possibly be very good; journalism.”
Ambrose Bierce: The only way to get unity of impression from a novel is t shut it up and look at the covers.”
Joyce Carol Oates: “The short story is a dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a sympathetic audience (and not, as the world really is, a busy and indifferent crowd): the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery.”
Catherine Brady: Every good story has to risk being obscure, aimless, about nothing if it is to sustain that ‘something wild’ not within reach, not enclosed in the story because it cannot be named or identified in any single passage. . Good stories dance on the boundary line between resisting a final interpretation and resisting any interpretation at all.”
Elizabeth Taylor: “Short stories are a form of contradiction: an act of both isolation and relationship.”
Julio Cortazar: “For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe…. I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
The short-story writer knows that he can’t proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His own solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.”
Anthony Burgess: The nature of a short story may have nothing to do with length…there is a kind of short story element, the short story entity, which can be accommodated to any size, that a novel of immense length can be no more than a short story in that it doesn’t present the process of change taking place in human passions. The possibility of change, yes, and the revelation that may lead to change.”
William Carlos Williams: “What are the advantages of the short story as an art form? One clear advantage as against a novel—which is its nearest cousin—is that you do not have to bear in mind the complex structural paraphernalia of a novel in writing a short story and so many dwell on the manner, the writing. On the process itself. A single stroke, uncomplicated but complete; not like a chapter or a paragraph, incomplete…. The short story in contrast to the novel stresses virtuosity as opposed to story structure… The creation of the effect, the climate, the character, by management of the pure verbal effect is paramount…. I should say that the short story consists of one single flight of the imagination, complete: up and down.”
Henry James: "A short story has to choose between being either an anecdote or a picture and can but play its part strictly according to its kind. I rejoice in the anecdote, but I revel in the picture.”
C., S. Lewis: “To be stories at all they must be series of events: but it must be understood that this series…s only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state of quality… It may be asked why anyone should be encouraged to write a form in which the means are apparently so often at war with the end…. I suggest that the internal tension in the heart of every story between the theme and the plot constitutes, after all, its chief resemblance to life. . In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and fond only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied.”
Bernard Malamud: “The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime.”
John Wain:” The short story is a form on its own, with its own laws and its own logic. A short story has its natural length. It isn’t trying to do the same thing as a novel. It has found staked out which is its own ground. …The short story has its own logic and its own laws, and it is not trying to be something else and failing. It is very triumphantly doing one thing. There are perfectly successful short stories, and there are totally unsuccessful ones, and there’s nothing in between”
Edith Wharton: “One of the chief obligations in a short story is to give the reader an immediate sense of security. Every phrase should be a signpost, and never (unless intentionally) a misleading one…. The least touch of irrelevance, the least chill of inattention, will instantly undo the spell, and it will take as long to weave again as to get Humpty Dumpty back on his wall. The moment the reader loses faith in the author’s sureness of foot improbability gapes…. The chief technical difference between the short story and the novel may be summed up by saying that the situation is the main concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form, or presentation.”
John Barth: “We may safely generalize that short story writers, as a class, from Poe to Paley, incline to see how much they can leave out, and novelists as a class, from Petronius to Pynchon, how much they can leave in.”
Richard Ford: “Short stories feels as though they arise out of some fierce schism that they by their very existence mean to reconcile. And fascination edging on to mystery does exist in the discrepancy between the ingenious capacity of great stories to penetrate us and our ineludible awareness of their brevity.”
Isabel Allende: “I think that in a short story the most important thing is to get the tone right in the first six lines. The tone determines the characters. In long fiction, it’s plot, its character…a lot of stuff goes in there. But in short stories, it’s tone, language, suggestions.” People think if they can write a short story then eventually they will be able to write a novel. It’s actually the other way around. If you are able to write a novel, someday with a lot of work and good luck you may be able t write a good short story”
Moira Crone: “Novels are messy and short stories are very defined. Short stories have a consistent, arguably a universally recognized form, and novels can have any number of forms. There is closure in most short stories…. Getting a short story right, and being obsessed with it until you do, is more occupying, like having an acute illness, a kind of attack.”
Richard Ford: “If stories fail, then they don’t make a short story. It’s like bread. Either it’s a loaf of bread or it’s doughy goo.”
William Faulkner: “When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant.”
Jack Matthews: “I don’t think the short story as a genre is insubstantial at all, just brief... It’s the narrow instrument that penetrates deepest. (That’s part true and part not — like most truths relating to labels and judgments). Also, if you love a novel, what is it, exactly, that you love? One answer would be that you love what you remember of certain scenes in it, or perhaps a specific emblematic scene, which lasts in your memory as a short story, of sorts. And it is this way with all images, of course, for an image often functions as a symbol of the narrative’s plenary meaning… A discontent with I[the short story’s] brevity does not constitute a legitimate argument. Ask a coral snake, which is as deadly as it is small.”
Sean O’Faolain: “If I had to choose one word to describe short-story language I would either say that it is engrossed, or that it is alert. What one searches for and what one enjoys in a short story is a special distillation of personality, a unique sensibility which has recognized and selected at once a subject that, above all other subjects, is of value to the writer’s temperament and to his alone.”
Mary Lavin: “I feel that it is in the short story that a writer distills the essence of his thought. I believe this because the short story shape as well as matter, is determined by the writer’s own character. Both are one. Short-story writing—for me—is only looking closer than normal into the human heart. The vagaries and contrarieties three to be fund have their own integral design.”
Barry Hannah: “Get in and get out.”
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Authors on the Short Story--Part III
I have finished a rough draft of the presentation I am making next month at the conference on the short story at Angers, France. The title of my presentation is: "Why Many Authors Love Short Stories and Many Readers Do Not." Today, I am posting my third blog entry of authors' comments on the short story. I plan to post one more such blog filled with author comments before I go to France. In my presentation at Angers, I attempt to organize comments I have drawn from 100 short story writers abut the form into significant categories and, by synthesizing them, make connections between the categories and draw conclusions about the generic characteristics of the short story.
Authors on the Short Story: Part III
Herbert Gold: The short story must “tend to control and formalize experience and strike hot like the lyric poem.”
Alberto Moravia: “The novel has a bone structure holding it together from top to toe, whereas the short story is, so to speak, boneless… The short story is made up of intuitions of feelings, whereas the novel is made up of ideas.”
Clare Boylan: “In the short story, the world is in the detail and that small random acts can set ordinary lives alight or consume them to ash.”
Charles D’Ambrosio: “I know why I read some stories over and over . . . to me it’s some mix of the harmony, I hear music of the creation; the stories I’ve read over and over again . . . I can feel the whole thing . . . the whole thing in any one of the sentences, you know, I love that aspect of the short story; it’s almost like reading a poem.”
Lee K. Abbott: “I'm really intrigued by the possibilities that the story offers. In the first place you can try and fail it a whole lot more per year than you can at a novel. In the second place, I use up material at a frenetic kind of pace. The stories are dense. The stories are speedy. The stories are sometimes as demanding to read as they are to write, and frankly writing a couple hundred pages or three or four hundred pages of that kind of thing would kill me, exhaust the hell out of me”
Richard Ford: “Short stories want to give us something big but want to do it in precious little time and space. For another they succeed by willfully falsifying many of the observable qualities of the life they draw upon… You could say that the most fundamental trait of short stories, other than their shortness, would seem to be audacity…. Short stories are the high-wire act of literature… Being the slightly discomforting/intensely pleasing aesthetic agents they are, short stories are often good on the strength of sheer nerve.”
Ernest Hemingway: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one eighth of it being above water."
Robert Olen Butler: “Fiction is the art form of human yearning.” Butler cites Joyce’s famous theory of epiphany--that moment in the story when something about the human condition shines forth in its essence. Butler says this is the result of the yearning present in all the separate organically resonant moments in the fiction accumulating to a critical mass. It is just that because of its brevity, these two moments typically occur at the same time in the short story. “The final epiphany of a literary short story is also the shining forth of the character’s yearning.”
Joyce Carol Oates: "The perennial question 'Is the short story an endangered species?' would seem to assume a perilous contemporary climate for the survival of this purely literary form." Oates doubts the 21st century will be as hospitable to the short story as the 19th and 20th, since the short story, unlike the novel, is "invariably literary."
Anton Chekhov: "The short story, like the stage, has its conventions. My instinct tells me that at the end of the novel or a story I must artfully concentrate for the reader an impression of the entire work, and therefore must casually mention something about those whom I have already presented. Perhaps I am in error."
V. S. Pritchett: “The short story wakes the reader up. "It answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience, the desire for the electric shock."
Raymond Carver: “It is possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring--with immense, even startling power.
William Boyd: “Something occurs in the writing - and reading - of a short story that is on another level from the writing and reading of a novel. The basic issue, it seems to me, is one of compression versus expansion. The essence of almost every short story, by contrast, is one of distillation, of reduction. It's not a simple question of length, either: there are 20-page short stories that are far more charged and gravid with meaning than 400-page novels. We are talking about a different category of prose fiction altogether.”
Anne Beattie: “I don’t think that short stories have all that much in common with novels, not poetry with short stories. I like each form or genre for what it inherently possesses…a story re-creates for me more directly what my sense of the world is; a short story wrier has to use language differently from a novelist.”
Robert Stone: “The short story is like a pitch in baseball. It’s one continuous movement that ideally has to, like a pitch, break and then with a kind of retrospective inevitability end up in a catch’s mitt. It’s a beautiful form when it works, but it’s very difficult.”
Ron Carlson: “I’ve become a writer who thinks in short stories…I consider each short story a world of its own, and I try to make each world dense and rich and beautiful… Stories at their best offer the reader the illumination and discomfort of a charged moment.” I love the short story; I’d write them forever, regardless of the fact that it isn’t a particularly sharp career move.”
Dan Chaon: “The short story as a species tends to be a solitary and lonely creature…They are meant to be experienced singly, with a long, silent pause between each one.” “One of the things I love about the short story as an art form is its ability to evoke the ephemeral quality of being alive… My hope and ideal is to rescue ‘missing’ moments in time, to take a snapshot of those fleeting, life-or-death visions, before they vanish back into the haze of daily life.”
Stuart Dybek, 1997: “What I love about the short story is that you can jump into it where it’s already geared up at a high level, start out already in third gear and then kick it into fourth and fifth.”
Rikki Ducornet: “Perhaps for me writing stories is a way of engaging in the infinite, the mutable, the evocative world which is the world of the imagination.”
Deborah Eisenberg: “Sometimes there’s a kind of tonality that I want, almost as if I was writing a piece of music…sometimes in the back of my mind there’s a musical model.”
“There’s something that I can’t quite put my finger on about the demands of doing something long, something that looks just slightly more conventional.”
Tim Gautreaux: “The short story, of course, is a wonderful form that I love dearly. It is a manageable form. You are in and out in six or seven thousand words. The novel, of course, has to keep going beyond that to one hundred and thirty, one hundred and fifty thousand words, and it's very easy to lose your way. It's a quantum leap from story writing.”
Adam Haslett: “I think of each story as having a rhythm, an intensity, and I am always trying to find the rhythm that fits a particular story.” “I think of the short story in some ways as the labor toward the perfected sentiment.”
Ron Hansen: What stories do is “give us access to otherwise hidden, censored, unsayable thoughts and feelings now shiftily disclosed in the guise of plot and character…The hungers of our spirits are fed by sharing in the glimpsed interior of others.”
Bret Anthony Johnston: “I think the reason short story collections don’t sell as well as novels is because they’re much more difficult to read. Novels might require a longer commitment, but stories demand a deeper concentration and a more intense focus, and a lot of people would rather not exert themselves in that way… Those that do buy and read literary short fiction are among the best and the brightest readers we have. They’re willing to take risks, to invest their attentions and emotions.”
Andrea Lee: “I feel a bit ill at ease in the novel form because I’m so used to the intensity and compression of short stories. It’s an odd and rather luxurious feeling to have so much room to maneuver, to describe, to create subplots—rather like moving to a mansion when you are used to apartments. It’s fun, but I think I’ll always love short fiction best, because I am obsessed with structure and symmetry, and somehow it is more satisfying for me to work with these on a small canvas. Again, the word is intensity. I love the way a short story can offer a sharp concentrated insight like a stiletto thrust. I love the way you can experience a whole life time in a few pages, as you do in the lines of a poem.”
Daniyal Mueenuddin: “A short story has a fixed narrative line—it’s like an artillery shell, which is fired out, goes up and lands at a fixed point—but a novel can be discursive.”
Julie Orringer: “When I started out writing short stories I imagined that this was a kind of practice for a novel that was going to come later. As I got farther along in my studies and in the development of my writing I became so excited about the short story as a form I ceased thinking of it and anything I wanted to do as preparation…I was happy to think that I might always work in the short story form.”
Amy Hempel: “The trick is to find a tiny way into a huge subject.”
Authors on the Short Story: Part III
Herbert Gold: The short story must “tend to control and formalize experience and strike hot like the lyric poem.”
Alberto Moravia: “The novel has a bone structure holding it together from top to toe, whereas the short story is, so to speak, boneless… The short story is made up of intuitions of feelings, whereas the novel is made up of ideas.”
Clare Boylan: “In the short story, the world is in the detail and that small random acts can set ordinary lives alight or consume them to ash.”
Charles D’Ambrosio: “I know why I read some stories over and over . . . to me it’s some mix of the harmony, I hear music of the creation; the stories I’ve read over and over again . . . I can feel the whole thing . . . the whole thing in any one of the sentences, you know, I love that aspect of the short story; it’s almost like reading a poem.”
Lee K. Abbott: “I'm really intrigued by the possibilities that the story offers. In the first place you can try and fail it a whole lot more per year than you can at a novel. In the second place, I use up material at a frenetic kind of pace. The stories are dense. The stories are speedy. The stories are sometimes as demanding to read as they are to write, and frankly writing a couple hundred pages or three or four hundred pages of that kind of thing would kill me, exhaust the hell out of me”
Richard Ford: “Short stories want to give us something big but want to do it in precious little time and space. For another they succeed by willfully falsifying many of the observable qualities of the life they draw upon… You could say that the most fundamental trait of short stories, other than their shortness, would seem to be audacity…. Short stories are the high-wire act of literature… Being the slightly discomforting/intensely pleasing aesthetic agents they are, short stories are often good on the strength of sheer nerve.”
Ernest Hemingway: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one eighth of it being above water."
Robert Olen Butler: “Fiction is the art form of human yearning.” Butler cites Joyce’s famous theory of epiphany--that moment in the story when something about the human condition shines forth in its essence. Butler says this is the result of the yearning present in all the separate organically resonant moments in the fiction accumulating to a critical mass. It is just that because of its brevity, these two moments typically occur at the same time in the short story. “The final epiphany of a literary short story is also the shining forth of the character’s yearning.”
Joyce Carol Oates: "The perennial question 'Is the short story an endangered species?' would seem to assume a perilous contemporary climate for the survival of this purely literary form." Oates doubts the 21st century will be as hospitable to the short story as the 19th and 20th, since the short story, unlike the novel, is "invariably literary."
Anton Chekhov: "The short story, like the stage, has its conventions. My instinct tells me that at the end of the novel or a story I must artfully concentrate for the reader an impression of the entire work, and therefore must casually mention something about those whom I have already presented. Perhaps I am in error."
V. S. Pritchett: “The short story wakes the reader up. "It answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience, the desire for the electric shock."
Raymond Carver: “It is possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring--with immense, even startling power.
William Boyd: “Something occurs in the writing - and reading - of a short story that is on another level from the writing and reading of a novel. The basic issue, it seems to me, is one of compression versus expansion. The essence of almost every short story, by contrast, is one of distillation, of reduction. It's not a simple question of length, either: there are 20-page short stories that are far more charged and gravid with meaning than 400-page novels. We are talking about a different category of prose fiction altogether.”
Anne Beattie: “I don’t think that short stories have all that much in common with novels, not poetry with short stories. I like each form or genre for what it inherently possesses…a story re-creates for me more directly what my sense of the world is; a short story wrier has to use language differently from a novelist.”
Robert Stone: “The short story is like a pitch in baseball. It’s one continuous movement that ideally has to, like a pitch, break and then with a kind of retrospective inevitability end up in a catch’s mitt. It’s a beautiful form when it works, but it’s very difficult.”
Ron Carlson: “I’ve become a writer who thinks in short stories…I consider each short story a world of its own, and I try to make each world dense and rich and beautiful… Stories at their best offer the reader the illumination and discomfort of a charged moment.” I love the short story; I’d write them forever, regardless of the fact that it isn’t a particularly sharp career move.”
Dan Chaon: “The short story as a species tends to be a solitary and lonely creature…They are meant to be experienced singly, with a long, silent pause between each one.” “One of the things I love about the short story as an art form is its ability to evoke the ephemeral quality of being alive… My hope and ideal is to rescue ‘missing’ moments in time, to take a snapshot of those fleeting, life-or-death visions, before they vanish back into the haze of daily life.”
Stuart Dybek, 1997: “What I love about the short story is that you can jump into it where it’s already geared up at a high level, start out already in third gear and then kick it into fourth and fifth.”
Rikki Ducornet: “Perhaps for me writing stories is a way of engaging in the infinite, the mutable, the evocative world which is the world of the imagination.”
Deborah Eisenberg: “Sometimes there’s a kind of tonality that I want, almost as if I was writing a piece of music…sometimes in the back of my mind there’s a musical model.”
“There’s something that I can’t quite put my finger on about the demands of doing something long, something that looks just slightly more conventional.”
Tim Gautreaux: “The short story, of course, is a wonderful form that I love dearly. It is a manageable form. You are in and out in six or seven thousand words. The novel, of course, has to keep going beyond that to one hundred and thirty, one hundred and fifty thousand words, and it's very easy to lose your way. It's a quantum leap from story writing.”
Adam Haslett: “I think of each story as having a rhythm, an intensity, and I am always trying to find the rhythm that fits a particular story.” “I think of the short story in some ways as the labor toward the perfected sentiment.”
Ron Hansen: What stories do is “give us access to otherwise hidden, censored, unsayable thoughts and feelings now shiftily disclosed in the guise of plot and character…The hungers of our spirits are fed by sharing in the glimpsed interior of others.”
Bret Anthony Johnston: “I think the reason short story collections don’t sell as well as novels is because they’re much more difficult to read. Novels might require a longer commitment, but stories demand a deeper concentration and a more intense focus, and a lot of people would rather not exert themselves in that way… Those that do buy and read literary short fiction are among the best and the brightest readers we have. They’re willing to take risks, to invest their attentions and emotions.”
Andrea Lee: “I feel a bit ill at ease in the novel form because I’m so used to the intensity and compression of short stories. It’s an odd and rather luxurious feeling to have so much room to maneuver, to describe, to create subplots—rather like moving to a mansion when you are used to apartments. It’s fun, but I think I’ll always love short fiction best, because I am obsessed with structure and symmetry, and somehow it is more satisfying for me to work with these on a small canvas. Again, the word is intensity. I love the way a short story can offer a sharp concentrated insight like a stiletto thrust. I love the way you can experience a whole life time in a few pages, as you do in the lines of a poem.”
Daniyal Mueenuddin: “A short story has a fixed narrative line—it’s like an artillery shell, which is fired out, goes up and lands at a fixed point—but a novel can be discursive.”
Julie Orringer: “When I started out writing short stories I imagined that this was a kind of practice for a novel that was going to come later. As I got farther along in my studies and in the development of my writing I became so excited about the short story as a form I ceased thinking of it and anything I wanted to do as preparation…I was happy to think that I might always work in the short story form.”
Amy Hempel: “The trick is to find a tiny way into a huge subject.”
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