Writing and publishing short stories is a part of the writer’s apprenticeship – but publishers don’t believe short stories sell. This is a problem.
If publishers say short story collections don’t sell, I would argue it’s not, for the most part, conspiratorial. They’re talking about sales figures, and you can bet if they did sell, short story collections would be as common as the novel.
Even if it is influenced by external forces, sales figures are dictated by one thing – sales figures are the number of books bought by real people.
So, let’s summarise: writers write short stories but publishers don’t publish them because readers don’t read them. As a result, there’s a surplus of short fiction, veritable rainforests of the things that writers of all skill levels have spent days and sleepless nights and precious work hours thinking about, writing and editing.
“When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant,” said Truman Capote.
I haven’t personally met an aspiring writer who hasn’t, in some way, written the shorter form – in fact, it seems mad to begin one’s writing career with a novel. And, apart from short story competitions, the obvious ‘official’ outlet for short stories are literary journals. Apart from poetry – a whole other form so popular among one group, so unpopular beyond them – and the essay, the short story is the literary journal’s bread and butter.
But… who reads literary journals?
I take an interest in lit journals because I am an aspiring writer. I want to see what is being written or, more to the point, what is being published and, ultimately, I want to be published in them because, perhaps naively, I still view it as one of the steps in getting a novel published (the editorial to the 70th anniversay issue of Southerly basically said as much).
I suspect 95 per cent of readers of Australian literary journals are the same as me (while I love the beach and will happily spend an evening cheering on two teams hitting or kicking an orb of some sort back and forth, I don’t drink, smoke or do drugs and I am quite at ease spending my weekends in a library, reading, studying and writing – that probably further separates me from 99 per cent of my generation, so I may not be the best case study). Which is a problem.
The short story paradox is symptomatic of the modern reader-writer relationship.
If writing for writers is all one is doing, something is wrong. Literature, in that case, is not working. It’s like car manufacturers making cars for other car manufacturers. Like comedians telling jokes to a room full of comedians. There’ll be some laughs, some back-slapping of familiarity and an innate understanding of the entire process. But there’ll be significant deconstructing, some bloviating, lots of comparing. There will be deep appreciation – but the jokes in this setting won’t simply be jokes.
Before you get too mad with me for comparing short stories to jokes, there is an analogue. Like jokes, short stories must follow a formula – we can at least agree that they follow the formula of being freakin’ short – in order to work. They’re also written for an audience. I could probably quote Aristotle’s Poetics here.
The internet is an extreme example of this niche writing. I’m under no illusions that very few non-writers will read this, or much of anything I post. If they do, I don’t expect them to get much from it. My hope is that most of the stuff on Lead Igloo is the equivalent of a watchmaker showing off a handful of tiny cogs.
Solutions
I’m scared. The artform that I have chosen to invest a large portion of money and, more importantly, LIFE to is something I increasingly think of being on a push-bike to obsolescence - the need to digitalise books and revitalise the industry would be unnecessary or less of an issue of contention if people were READING BOOKS. However, I still have hope.
Literary journals and, more importantly, writers need to play a bigger role in the public debate. The more writers, and the forums they use, matter, the more their work matters. Of course, a writer can make as much noise as he wants and it still won’t garner anywhere near the same amount of attention as a quasi-celebrity will. What can I say, we’re just a vapid, vacuous society and it’s time we started getting offended into action.
T.S. Eliot, in his introduction to Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, wrote, “One of the lessons to be learnt from [Pound's] critical prose and from his correspondence is the lesson to care unselfishly for the art one serves.”
I also think literature’s problems would be less of an issue if people were not looking solely to make money from the writing. Self promotion is (almost) perceived as being more important than the work itself – but it’s not. If writers spent more time forming true, lasting connections than the socialficial networks they form online, a decent portion of the self promotion would take care of itself.
The ebb and flow of fashion says that it’s likely literature will have another golden era and, again, a proportion of the population who have no intention of writing anything, ever, will scramble to read that new short story. Until then, I’ll keep writing and I hope you will too, because hope is all we have.
I wish you way more than luck.
LI
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5 Comments
Oh God you nailed this issue good and proper. I never used to write short stories since it took me the length of a novel to unfurl the themes and characters and metaphors I was dealing with. But along came my novel and its necessity to promote and all of a sudden I find myself having to offer up fresh material to get people to keep coming back to my various sites. That means shorts, flash, videos – today I posted a 30 word story with a visual image. Now partly because if you are posting new material once, twice a week, it’s going to have to be short. One could post a chapter each week of a novel, but boy you better have it polished if you want to show it and I choose not to write a novel to the order of one ‘finished’ chapter per week. That’s not how my process works.
But yes, your point is who reads this stuff? Other writers as you say. I don’t bother to submit to journals, they’re too safe in their tastes, of course they have to garner a readership. While it’s nice to belong to a community, an online guild of writers, ultimately one must hope to sell to readers who aren’t casting one eye on the mechanics of the craft as they read.
I can’t get into the economics and politics of the future of literature. My instincts are that the technology, the competition from other leisure activities, the dumbing down of children and adults alike, all dop not augur well for the future of literature. I hope I’m wrong. But we writers must bear a responsibility too. I don’t think we’re writing nearly enough books that are interesting enough to read, to bring the reader into the 21st Century with fresh stories, fresh characters, fresh language and fresh metaphors for our modern age. It’s all looking a bit on the tired side really. The novel seems stuck in the previous century and from my parochial view, it’s like the modernism of Joyce, Faulkner et al never happened.
Fantastic post. I hope you generate the interest and response it deserves.
By the way, I’m reading an Australian novel at the moment. “A Fraction Of The Whole”. I’m enjoying it greatly, very funny. There’s something quintissentially Australian about the voice but I can’t put my finger on it exactly. Somehow it has no respect for tradition and that’s a good thing in the light of the above. It has the feel of a conversation rather than a read, but again I like that (I would, exactly the same goes for my novel).
Thanks Marc. Your articulate and incisive thoughts are always appreciated.
Writers, especially emerging/aspiring/wannabe ones, should be terrified that the audience who reads for the simple enjoyment of reading is growing forever smaller. They should be terrified if for no other reason than the fact that it changes writing forever.
As you allude to, I do think dumbing down is part of it. Poetry, for instance, has a reputation of being a big wank. That’s just another way of framing it as being too difficult, that because it can’t be ingested immediately, because it has to be read slowly and takes time to understand, it is pointless. Poets are now in the situation of very much writing solely for other poets, of producing chapbooks at their own expense, of attending readings in rooms full of other poets, and so on. My fear is that fiction will go the same way.
You’re right about us, writers, bearing responsibility. I am convinced working together will go some way in reducing certain problems and allow for a clearer focus, i.e. getting readers interested again.
And re/ Toltz’s novel – I haven’t read it but I’ve heard good things. There is some amazing literature being produced by Australian writers – importantly, it often breaks rules and defies trends at the same time as being a GOOD read.
Was pointed here by Marc.
Excellent post. Scary post.
I belong to an online writing community that posts a new flash fiction every Friday. The idea was that we would attract new readers to our blogs/stories.
But it is only we, the writers, who read/critique the stories.
You mention Truman Capote. One afternoon, many years ago, I sat to read his short story, “The Grass Harp.”
I was inspired to become a writer after I finished.
Yes, all we can do is to keep writing, keep reading, and keep fingers crossed and hope undiminished.
Good luck to you, too.
This is a really interesting post. My writing life started out as a short-story writer and through determination and luck and a bit of generosity on the behalf of the journal editors, I managed to get quite a few published. What a great source of encouragement this was – and continues to be. And ever since I began getting published I’ve been subscribing to a handful of journals. But I must admit that it’s rare for me to find true delight in the journals. I love short stories, and though I’m not a poet I do like reading the odd poem. But still the journals pile up on my bedside table unread. Is it quality of writing? Or the subject matter? The last time I was blown away was a Nam Le story in Overland well before The Boat came out; I’d never heard of Le before. So why aren’t short stories being written well and published broadly? Surely in these time-starved times the shorter form would suit us really well? At the risk of offending, I think it’s the writer’s focus on craft rather than story, on the academic rather than character and situation and heart (says he who has a masters in creative writing!).
Thanks Marisa.
#FlashFriday is an intriguing concept – I originally had a reference to it in this post but scrapped it. The idea behind posting flash fiction every Friday to bring readers to your blog sounds good in theory. However, once again, most if not all those who participate in Flash Friday and bounce – those readers – from blog to blog are writers with blogs themselves. The movement is still in its infancy and it could very well grow. But it really does epitomise the writer-reader problem.
I’m glad the Capote quote had some extra weight – he spoke about the craft well.
Nigel, I share your opinion on thinking short stories are more appropriate for the modern, time-poor reader. I have also been reading a bit of poetry lately and I am convinced that poetry should be in the midst of another golden age given that the format would be perfect for mobiles and iphones. While that’s obviously just me, it still worries me that poetry’s glory days are well and truly behind it without any more in sight.
As you suggest, the switched focus to craft – writers advising other writers as though the reader, the other half of the relationship, does not exist – has surely had an impact.
Thanks for stopping by.