"Why read short stories?" by Beth Weeks
An essay persuading my BFF to appreciate short stories (and incidentally how I came to found OFIC Mag).
Genre: Nonfiction, Craft Essay
Word Count: 2700
Why read short stories?
Beth Weeks
Here is a direct quote from my best friend, Heather:
If I turned into a vampire and was given a library of infinite options, I would probably not read a short story collection until the sun had died.
Even though I guffawed at this (it was in response to me talking about my own short story collection), admittedly I once felt the same way. And, as it happens, the journey to discovering my love of short stories is also the journey of how I came to found OFIC.
When I started applying for MFA programs in 2015, I was told by many people that it’s best to work on short stories—not just for the writing sample in the application, but to submit to workshop and eventually, as your thesis.
I scoffed at this. I’m a novelist, I thought. I like door-stopper books. I can’t keep something under 5k words if you paid me. With this hubris, I entered the MFA program and immediately workshopped a piece of a longer work. I received godawful feedback. I workshopped the second piece of that same work in the next round. I received even worse feedback.
What I didn’t realize was that the basic workshop model, the Iowa model, really doesn’t work for long-form works. You might have one group that reads chapter 1, but then the next group won’t have the context of that chapter when you give them chapter 2. And none of them will have the context of the greater project, so you get a great many criticisms that will be addressed in future chapters, and which readers, especially ones still learning how to edit, don’t seem to realize can’t fit in the first 5k words of a book.
And so for the sake of my own education and sanity, I relented to the short story. I remember when it finally clicked for me as a form: reading Mary Gaitskill’s short story collection, Bad Behavior, which is all about BDSM and messed-up power dynamics and ugly sex, particularly the stories “A Romantic Weekend” and “Secretary.” Some of you might have seen the 2002 film Secretary, which is adapted from the final story in the collection. The film is a beautiful but distant rendition, the original decidedly darker and far less consensual.
From there I started reading Lorrie Moore and Flannery O’Connor. I admired their snappy, clever prose; their structural experimentation (two stories in Moore’s Self-Help are written as “how to”s); and their ability to gaze into the grotesque aspects of girlhood and sexuality in a way I hadn’t read before.
Having finally understood short stories, I took on multiple unpaid reading gigs, my first foray into professional editing. I encountered one problem over and over again: my taste did not align at all with anyone else’s. When I first read for a well-regarded novella competition, I read a few sample novellas and participated in a priming session. Of the three novellas we read, we were supposed to rank them and determine which of the three we would accept. Everyone’s #3 was my #1. I explained why I would have chosen it: It had a lot of heart. I cared about the characters. Exciting things happened in it, unlike the other two, in which nothing happened at all. The leader of the exercise said, “But you see how it doesn’t align with our aesthetic, right?”
Right. I could admit it absolutely did not align with the aesthetic of the publication I was reading for. That was a difficult lesson to learn. Even after climbing the ranks to Editor-in-Chief of a few magazines, I still felt like my own tastes weren’t allowed to be represented. These were lit mags that I inherited and positions I was elected to, and so, despite my position of authority, there was an established aesthetic to which I had to align myself.
Meanwhile, I was reading stuff on my own that my peers didn’t even know existed. Six-hundred-thousand-word danmei novels actively being translated in Google Docs. BL manhwa. Manhua posted on Weibo, lovingly translated into English, and distributed to other social media platforms within a handful of minutes. And as always, fanfiction.
One reason I’ve come to admire the short story as we know it today is because of how much it reminds me of fanfic. Not necessarily in form or even content, but in context.
Like fanfiction, the short story is often derided in comparison to the novel, and many believe that fanfiction/short stories are inherently “practice writing” for a supposedly superior form. In her introduction to the 1983 edition of Best American Short Stories, Ann Tyler says, “The most appealing short story writer is the one who’s a wastrel. He neither hoards his best ideas for something more ‘important’ (a novel) nor skimps on his material because this is ‘only’ a short story.” When I think of a wastrel writer, I think of the miracle of finding that perfect longfic in a nearly empty fandom or ship tag, knowing that somewhere some stranger saw/read/played a piece of media, went, “I have Thoughts,” and proceeded to churn out a five-digit word count of some of the most gorgeous prose you’ve ever read in your life. God bless the wastrel writer.
In lacking any real avenue for profit—and therefore having no reason to compulsively appeal to the widest possible audience—both fanfiction and short stories can take great artistic risks. With the exception of The New Yorker (owned by Condé Nast) and Harper’s Magazine (owned by HarperCollins), basically all short form serial publications, by which I mean lit mags, are independent presses. A great many are also nonprofits, and those that are not official nonprofits are still probably not making much or any profit, which is why so few of them pay for short stories and why so many of them have a fully volunteer staff. So if you want to support indie presses, subscribing to lit mags is a good way to go.
Like fanfiction, the greater population is aware that short stories exist but only those active in the community really understand the enormity of this world. If you’ve never dipped your toes into the waters of short story publishing—and after reading this, if you decide to do so—you will perhaps become totally overwhelmed by your options. Unlike fanfiction, which has been more or less centralized by AO3 (thank you OTW, bless you OTW), there is no lovingly wrangled archive of lit mags, though many have tried. Currently there’s Duotrope (paid) and Chill Subs (free with paid option). You can’t really make money on short stories, but there’s apparently a lot of money to be made helping people find them.
Like fanfiction, short stories can seem frivolous in comparison to the sociopolitical chaos of today, particularly in the US. Of this belief, Martha Foley, editor of the Best American Short Stories series for many decades, said during World War II, “Against the tragic backdrop of world events today a collection of short stories may appear very unimportant. Nevertheless, since the short story always has been America’s own typical form of literary expression, from Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe onward…the short story has a right to be considered as among the cultural institutions the country now is fighting to save.”
I consider fanfiction and short stories (or literary fiction in general) to be cousins. Except that one of the cousins is buttoned up, ambitious, and honestly kind of tries too hard; and the other is actively watching anime on her phone.
The reason I consider them cousins has to do with how people in literary spheres respond when I bring up fanfiction. I’ve never once attempted to hide my love of fanfiction. I’m not sure why I have no shame or embarrassment about that—possibly it’s because I came to fandom later in life and so I don’t associate it with the awkwardness of adolescence. Possibly also I’m allergic to pretenses and performativity, and if I think something is cool I am going to tell other people about it whether they want to hear about it or not.
I can’t account for anything said behind my back, but to my face one of two things happens when I bring up fanfiction in literary spaces:
Immediate interest. Most people don’t know anything about it and, being creatives, love learning about new things, especially things people create that have nothing to do with money.
Admission that they too read and/or write fanfiction.
Only once has a third thing happened: A professor once told me not to talk about fanfiction when speaking to anyone in publishing. He played it off like he wasn’t the one judging me, but that he was concerned for my reputation and career.
I told him, “I wouldn’t want to work with anyone who judges me for writing fanfiction. They wouldn’t be a good fit for me.”
Being a lifelong clout-chaser, he didn’t know what to say to that.
Around this time I started up my coaching business. Naturally nearly all my early clients were fanfiction writers who wanted some support in writing (and publishing) original work. Just about everyone asked the same thing: “My work is too fanfiction-y. Who would publish it?”
And I started thinking to myself, “I would.”
Six years, thirteen issues, and 112 stories later, here we are.
What even is a short story?
The definition of a short story seems obvious: a work of fiction under an arbitrary number of words, usually ~10k. But I argue that word count is irrelevant to form. The reason that word count is important is because page count is important, and page count is important because each page printed increases the cost of the production of a physical book. But with the rise of digital publishing, page count is becoming far less integral to our understanding of form.
The term “short story” is a comparative one—the concept of “short” is in relation to some standard length. In this case, that standard is the novel. The irony here is that the short story predates the novel by centuries. Fables, fairy tales, and myths are all closer to our present definition of a short story than a novel is. Short stories predate writing itself, but the novel doesn’t even predate the printing press (with the exception of, arguably, The Decameron and The Tale of Genji, but even then Don Quixote is widely considered the first novel as we understand the form today). The novel exists because of the printing press, in the same way film exists because of cameras and video games exist because of computers.
In the introduction of the first volume of the Paris Review‘s Writers at Work series, Malcolm Cowley explains that short stories and novels are two separate forms “and that mere length is not their distinguishing feature. A long short story—say of forty thousand words—is not the same as a novel of forty thousand words, nor is it likely to be written by the same person...It is the division between those who think in terms of the short story and those who are essentially novelists.”
If we remove word count from our definition of a short story, we’re left only with the work a short story does. As we’ve already established, the term “short story” is in relation to a novel, so we can also build our definition of a short story in comparison to a novel. Cowley says, “The short story is an exposition; the novel is often and perhaps at its best an inquisition into the unknown depths of the novelist’s mind.”
In brief: short stories implode, novels explode. By “implosion” I mean short stories don’t necessarily work toward a climax but more often what I can an “illuminating moment,” a moment which, once reached, casts the rest of the story in a new light. Sometimes it’s a reveal, or a twist, or a brief moment of lucidity. The momentum of a short story relies on tension, the relationship between the text and the reader where the reader is going “there is a reason for all this but I don’t know what it is yet.” The payoff happens when a story justifies itself and solidifies its themes. When a short story implodes, things like conflict resolution and denouement are far less important than illumination. The shorter something is, the less conclusive the ending needs to be in order to feel satisfying.
An example of a story that implodes—and that, to me, has an ideal illuminating moment—is “The Night Face Up” by Julio Cortázar. I don’t want to spoil you for the reveal, but if you’re interested in a thorough craft analysis of the story I highly recommend the recent New Yorker Fiction podcast where Valeria Luiselli reads the piece and discusses it with fiction editor Debra Treisman.
Cortázar, a master of the short story himself, has an essay called “Some Aspects of the Short Story” in which he simplifies the difference between the novel and the short story, between exploding and imploding narratives: “In that fight that takes place between an absorbing text and its reader, the novel wins a technical victory, while the story must win by knockout.”
Where to begin
If you’re interested in getting into short stories, I have great news: you’ve already started. By subscribing to us, you’ll get one short story in your inbox every other week. But I also have some other tips for those who want to get an even wider perspective:
Find your favorite writers’ websites and look for a link that says something like “publications.” Most likely, unless they exclusively write romance or YA (which are the only genres that don’t really do short form publishing), they’ll have a few short pieces published, possibly even a short story collection*.
Pick up an anthology. America’s Best is a good place to start. They publish one every year by a different editor and there are also versions for SFF and horror. From there, if you find a story you vibe with, you can read that author’s other work or subscribe to the magazine that published it. The Pushcart also publishes an annual anthology.
If you read a short story collection by a single author, you can find many if not all of those stories serially published in various magazines. Find those magazines and subscribe to them.
The Libby app has a magazine rack feature. Depending on your library card(s), you should be able to search through the “literature and culture” tag and find some lit mags there.
Some resources:
Weightless Books, where you can subscribe to genre mags and have new issues sent directly to your eReader
Library of America’s Story of the Week
The New Yorker Fiction & Writer’s Voice podcasts
*An anthology is a book of short stories by multiple authors. A short story collection is a book of short stories by a single author.
Even if vampires have no cause to read short stories, the rest of us—mere mortals with limited time on this earth and a TBR novel list bigger than the Library of Congress—have so much to gain from embracing the short story.
If you have any questions about short stories or the craft of writing them, feel free to send us an ask. I’ll do my best to answer.
Beth Weeks (she/her) received her MFA in Creative Writing and Pedagogy from Miami University in Ohio. Her work has appeared in The Write Launch, Barren Magazine, and others. She is a recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant for Feminist Writing and the Jordan-Goodman Prize in Fiction. Her work has been supported by the Millay Arts, Jentel Art, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Hambidge Center residences, as well as the Tin House Workshop and New York State Summer Writers Institute. Her website can be found at bethweeks.com.
A compelling reminder that short stories are their own art form not condensed novels. Their power lies in delivering emotional and thematic impact with precision, proving that a few pages can linger in your mind just as long as a thousand.
back with this, too, which underscores the tryhardism (and therefore potentially lethally weak point) in literary short fiction: https://substack.com/home/post/p-148211258