The Figure of the Author in the Short Story Conference--Issues

It is my honor to have been invited to be the plenary speaker at the conference, “The Figure of the Author in the Short Story in English,” April 8 and 9, 2011, in Angers, France. The conference will be co-hosted by the CRILA short story research group (Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Langue Anglaise) of the Université d’Angers and Edge Hill University, England. Primary organizers for each group are: Michelle Ryan-Sautor, of The Journal of the Short Story in English at Angers, and Ailsa Cox, of Short Story in Theory and Practice at Edge Hill. The website address for the conference is:
http://www.univ-angers.fr/ACTUALITE.asp?ID=1087&langue=1

I will be speaking on the topic of why writers like short stories better than readers do. I will be posting my progress on this keynote presentation over the next two months, focusing on issues involving the relationship of the author to the short story form.

The first two issues I intend to explore were suggested to me by two of my readers—Cathy and Dex.

Issue 1. Do young writers write short stories rather than novels, not because they like the form, but because the workshop format of universities compels them to write short stories? If university workshops disappeared, would the short story disappear also? Do writers move away from the short story to the novel as soon as possible because (a) they like novels better or (b) because novels are the only fiction that makes money? Why didn’t Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, or Andre Dubus write novels? Why do Alice Munro and David Means not write novels? Why does William Trevor keep writing short stories?

Cathy has posted a piece on The Millions at http://www.themillions.com/2011/01/the-story-problem-10-thoughts-on-academias-novel-crisis.html in which she argues that most fiction workshop instructors use the short story rather than the novel as the primary pedagogical tool because it is a more manageable form for both student and instructor: The student gets an immediate reward for a completed job, and it is easier for the instructor to critique a short work than a long one. The result, Cathy says, is that a lot of what comes out of creative writing programs are stories that really want to be novels, but novels are discouraged from being writing, for the rhythm of school semesters and quarters encourages writing small things, not large things. She concludes: “Do students write stories because they really want to or because the workshop model all but demands that they do? If workshops are bad for big things, why do we continue to use them?”

It’s an interesting argument and has received a number of responses on The Millions. I recommend it to you. I responded to Cathy as follows:

“I agree with you, of course, that fiction workshops in MFA programs are more conducive to the short story than to the novel. But I am sure you would agree that the short story does not differ from the novel merely, or even primarily, in terms of length, but rather in terms of technique--i.e. language use, thematic focus, emphasis on the ending, importance of unity, etc. etc. all that familiar stuff. I tend to think that a writer trained in the writing of the short story has a better chance of writing a good novel than a writer trained in the writing of a novel has of writing a good short story. What do you think? I am working on a keynote presentation at a short story conference in Angers, France in April on the topic of why I think short story writers like short stories more than readers do. Sometimes I think writers write short stories because they love the form, but write novels because they have a better chance of publishing them, because readers (and therefore publishers) like novels better than they do short stories.

Cathy kindly replied:

Questions I'm asking myself:

--Some people are saying the short story is a better pedagogical tool, better way to teach craft, because young writers aren't "ready" or mature enough to attempt a novel. Well, then does that mean George Saunders and Alice Munro and Andre Dubus are immature?
--What would happen if the taxonomy of creative writing programs (undergrad and grad) with regards to prose was governed not by genre but by form? Short-form Prose WORKSHOPS (where the essay and short story are studied and emulated) and Long-Form Prose STUDIOS, where process is emphasized over product.
And, rightly, you ask about the practicalities of the publishing market, where novels are preferred, how much that is driving this discussion. As someone who is working on her first novel (not a novel in stories, not a nonfiction novel), I ask myself that question often. Am I writing this book for the right reasons?

I hope Cathy and I can talk more about these issues. I certainly do not think that such writers as George Saunders, Alice Munro, and Andre Dubus (not to mention Raymond Carver, William Trevor, David Means, and many others) wrote short stories because they were not “mature” enough to write novels. Indeed, why they continued to write short stories when their publishers probably begged them to write novels is something I intend to explore as I prepare my Angers presentation during the next two months.

Issue 2: Craft vs. Passion—Are these contradictory characteristics in fiction? Can you have messiness and careful control at the same time in fiction? Are short stories too often too well crafted? Is the messiness of many novels more like “real life”? Is it the task of fiction to mirror “real life” with all its messiness?
My friend Dex sent me a recent review of Charles Baxter’s collection Gryphon: New and Selected Stories. The review, by Bart Schneider, was laudatory, but ended with this paragraph:

“Readers will find much to admire in this collection by one of our best storytellers. If I have one criticism, it’s that the stories often wind down in tasteful denouements that come across more as elegant triumphs of craft than satisfying conclusions. The fact that a generation of MFA students have mastered that method inevitably colors my view. As many of the stories drew to a close, I found myself wishing for a bit more messiness, a bit more passion.”

Dex asked me what I thought about Schneider’s comments about passion, messiness, and the MFA story.
As everyone who is kind enough to read this blog well knows, I cannot resist it when someone asks me “what do you think about….?” And I have thought about the issue of craft vs. passion, tight control vs. messiness, and whether the short story can be taught in an MFA program ever since I have been teaching the form. The issue has a history as long as the reach of Edgar Allan Poe, who was the first champion of the short story as a form and the first champion of tight artistic control. I will be coming back to this issue in the next couple of months as I prepare my Angers presentation.

And speaking of a writer who insists on continuing to write short stories, in spite of the accusation that short stories are for the beginning, immature writer, the January 31 issue of The New Yorker has a new story by Alice Munro, entitled “Axis.” I have read it once and plan to read it twice more before posting something about it next week. I guess by this time, Munro’s book publishers have given up trying to talk her into writing a novel.

Junot Diaz Urges MFA Programs for Readers

I just read an interview with Junot Diaz on Narrative. The Interviewer, Reese Kwon, said what surprised her about last year’s National Endowment for the Arts study was not that fewer people are reading, but that there has been a significant increase in the number of people who are writing—that people are reading less and writing more. She asked Diaz if he had come across this trend. Here is Diaz’s reply:

DÍAZ: “ I come across it every time I meet young writers who don’t give a shit about reading; all they give a shit about is their own work. I think that in the same way we’ve had a huge market crash, there’s a quiet market crash going on every year with writers, but we don’t get to see it as openly because there’s no way for it to be dramatized. But every year there is a huge body of young writers that there’s no room for, there’s no place for, there’s no readership for. If we were really smart, if we really cared about reading and writing, we wouldn’t be having MFA programs for writers, we would have MFA programs for readers.”

Although I am not sure there can be too many writers (After all, MFA students don’t really think they can make a living writing, do they?), I remind Diaz that we do have graduate programs to train readers; they are called MA and Ph.D. programs in literature. It is just that for various reasons many of these programs have shifted from focusing on reading to focusing on mining works for cultural and political content and contexts.

All during my forty-year teaching career, I told my students at the beginning of the semester--regardless of whether the class was a survey of American Literature, a seminar in Victorian Poetry, or an introduction to the short story—the class was primarily going to be a course in reading.

I told them that if they wanted biographical background, historical context, social ideas, cultural customs, or political debate, there were many places in the university, including the library, where they could find all that. They did not need a person at the front of the classroom to provide mere information that could be provided more efficiently and cheaply in other ways. I had no intention of being an animated footnote wandering back and forth in front of the chalkboard.

What they did need, I thought, was knowledge of and experience with the conventions of various kinds of writing and awareness of the careful way good writers manipulated language to increase awareness, make discoveries, and change them and the world. Based on my experience with these conventions and language use, I would try--by questioning, prompting, goading, aggravating, and infuriating--to get them to read carefully, closely, and sensitively. My goal was, as is the goal of all teachers, to make myself superfluous.

So, I agree with Junot Diaz. We should have MFA programs for readers. All literature and writing programs—both graduate and undergraduate—should be programs to teach reading. Reading, as all good writers know, is not a simple matter.

Reading Like a Writer, Reading Like an Editor

The July 20th issue of The New Yorker includes three letters about Louis Menand’s “Critic at Large” piece on the rise of creative writing programs in the June 8^th & 15^th issue. Allyson Stack from Edinburgh, Scotland, writes that creative writing programs teach young writers to be their own editors since publishing companies no longer have the time or money to shepherd younger writers along. “A good creative-writing program,” argues Stack, “will aim at making students better editors by requiring them to read intensively, exhaustively, and endlessly—and to read far more than one another’s work.”

Stack reminds us that reading a novel (or a story) with an eye toward writing one is a very different task from reading it with an eye toward writing a term paper, a review, or a lecture. The aim of creative writing classes should be, Stack concludes, “not so much to produce novelists or poets as to produce more astute readers of novels and poetry—which is to say, better editors.”

Stack’s argument for writers being taught to read like editors does not sound that different from Francine Prose’s argument in her book Reading Like a Writer that everyone should read like writers.

Prose’s central point is that to be a good reader, one must be knowledgeable of, and sensitive to, those elements of writing that constitute the craft: words, sentences, character, dialogue, and details. Prose reminds us of something that students of literature often find it hard to accept—that subject matter is not all that important, that what the writer most often wants to do is write really great sentences.

Over and over, Prose urges the reader to focus on words, rhythm, and pattern–not subject matter. By relentlessly insisting on the importance of language and form, Prose reinforces what William H. Gass has argued in Finding a Form: that the artist's "fundamental loyalty must be to form.” Every other diddly desire," insists Gass, "can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day."

Prose’s insistence on the importance of language and literary form seems so obvious it is difficult to see how anyone could deny it. But of course that the excellence of writing depends not on its content but its language and form is denied in classrooms around the world every day. In fact, the very idea of artistic form and excellence is often challenged in many of those classrooms as elitist.

Prose admits that many of her students complain that reading great writers makes them feel stupid. And indeed, a quick look at the hundred-plus list of “Books to Be Read Immediately” that Prose appends may have that effect. In addition to the “classic” writers who put off modern students--Austen, Babel, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, James, Joyce, Kafka, Mansfield, Melville, Proust, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Twain, and Woolf--there are a number of intimidating contemporary “writer’s writers” as well--Raymond Carver, Stuart Dybek, Deborah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, William Trevor, and Joy Williams.

In her Gold Medal acceptance speech at the 1999 National Book Awards, Oprah Winfrey told a little story about calling Toni Morrison and asking, “Does anyone ever tell you that sometimes they have to go over the sentences several times to get the full meaning of what you’re really saying.” Morrison wryly and wisely replied, “That, my dear, is called reading.”

Writing that requires going over the sentence several times to get the full meaning is usually the result of the writer’s careful editing, which most often means following Chekhov’s advice that it is better to say too little than too much, or the famous advice of Strunk and White in Elements of Style: “Omit needless words, omit needless words, omit needless words.”

Perhaps the best-known example of the relationship between a writer and an editor, in which the issue of omitting needless words is crucial is the writer/editor collaboration of Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. In my opinion, Carver’s stories that show Lish’s influence in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk When we Talk About Love are much better stories than the “more generous” stories that appeared in Cathedral after he had repudiated Lish.

Critics who have scolded Carver for his minimalist shortcomings have done so for the same reasons that in previous generations they criticized Poe, Chekhov, and Sherwood Anderson. Clearly, those who spent much of the eighties scorning Carver's so-called cryptic tales for the same reasons that previous critics have criticized the short story in general, were more comfortable with the later, more explanatory versions of such stories as “The Bath” and “So Much Water Close to Home.”

However, Carver adds explanatory information to “A Small, Good Thing” that adds nothing significant to the original version entitled “The Bath.” For example, in “The Bath” the parents are trying to fasten on to some term that will categorize and thus normalize the son's condition, but each time they use the term “coma” the doctor simply says “I wouldn't call it that.” In “A Small, Good Thing.” Carver puts into the doctor's mouth a verbatim definition of a coma from Webster's New World Dictionary as a state of “deep, prolonged unconsciousness,” which does nothing to clarify the essential mystery of the boy's inaccessibility. In “The Bath,” when orderlies come in to get the boy for a brain scan, “they wheeled a thing like a bed.” However, in “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver uses the word “gurney”--certainly a more informative term, but one that loses the sense of disorientation the parents feel.

This addition of such bits of information serves unnecessary and distracting polemical purposes in the long version of “So Much Water Close to Home.” In the short version, when the wife reads about the death of the girl in the newspaper, she sits thinking and then calls and gets a chair at the hairdresser's. In the long version, we are told what she is thinking: “Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any difference any longer. Look at what has happened. Yet nothing will change for Stuart and me.”

Chekhov would never have approved of Carver's added explanation, which sounds more like a freshman composition essay than the muddled emotions of a woman who has identified with the image of a dead girl floating just beneath the surface of the water.

I agree with Francine Prose that the best way to teach reading is to teach students to read like writers and with Allyson Stack that the best way to teach writing is to teach students to read like editors.

I would love to hear from writers who have been in MFA programs and teachers who have been in graduate literature programs on the issue of how to teach good reading and good writing.