The Short of It

You first came to the short story because, given your youthful energy level and relative lack of a managed approach to tasks, a story was something you could do in one sitting--starting with an opening concept, such as standing in a ticket line to purchase tickets for a musical or a ballet, ending twenty-five or so pages later when the main character reached the ticket seller.  

The ending was a moment you learned about some many years later in a conversation with Bobbie Ann Mason, a writer you came to admire greatly, where endings meant a place where the energy runs out.  Thus your concept for a story was one or more persons gathered to do something, perhaps only to engage in hanging out or some other pursuit of pleasant result, taken to a natural point where they had nothing more to say or,thematically, to do.

About you were collected short stories by Jack London and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.  Through a fortunate accident, you also had the short stories of the Irish writer, Frank O'Connor.  Through an unfortunate sort of accident, most of the writers you knew were screenwriters, who gave you scripts to read and who spoke to you of construction in ways that convinced you how lacking your education.  This drove you to used book stores and anthologies of stories that were constructed in ways that were mysterious to you.  Because the writers you knew seemed always to have enough money not to have to nurse drinks at places where music was played, even enough money to bring with then dangerous-looking women who ate minute steaks, drank red wine, and tapped their heels nervously.  One such writer was Steve Fisher, whose editor you would some day be.  But not yet.  From Fisher you gained a lifelong love of the pulp mystery story, which had a construction you could understand if not duplicate, at least nohting ways the editors of pulp magazines would appreciate.  

You were too young yet to even dream that some day, as regional president of Mystery Writers of America, you would reach a point where you had enough money to bring dangerous-looking women who ate minute steaks, drank not only red wine but red French wine, and tapped their heels nervously, nor was there the slightest hint that Ray Bradbury would call you a son of a bitch or that Irwin Zucker would teach you how to say "No more steaks" to the French waitresses at The Cafe de Paris on Sunset and Highland or at the Belgian restaurant, Frascatti, on Sunset at Crescent Heights.

All that had to come through hundreds of permutations on your basic short story recipe to the point where you were able to throw recipe away and be content to watch men and women engage situations that were more organic, more reflective of them being caught up in individual scenario and more or less looking for ways in or out of events, institutions, consequences.

While you were learning such things, you were still not making enough money that anyone would want to sue you, a fact that became an issue when the noted trial lawyer, Melvin Belli, in the heat of an editorial squabble, told you, "If you had any money, I'd sue you," to which you reflexively replied, "If I had any, I'd let you."  Although you amicably resolved your differences over a round of drinks and the book you were trying to get out of him was finished and published, the damage was done and you knew that you needed to learn more and move on.

In many ways, Fitzgerald still remains a great favorite of yours among short story writers.  So does Alice Munro because she takes the rules of construction into her own fine, Canadian hands and says, often with a little push, "This is where you get out," as though you had mistaken her frankness and honesty for an invitation to greater intimacy, a much more effective way of stopping a story than having your principal character order two orchestra seats to Lost in the Stars.

Lorrie Moore.  Tim O'Brien.  Junot Diaz.  Edna O'Brien.  John Cheever.  Louise Erdrich.  Men and women as pestered as you are, writers who have lost their own vehicles in the metaphorical large parking lot in the shopping mall--all of whom have kept the light on for you.

novelette

novelette--a narrative running between 7500 and 25000 words; an arbitrarily defined narrative whose length is longer than a short story and not quite so long as a genre or category novel.

All of Alice Munro's short stories have the feel of novels, but this is because her ability to evoke characters, situations, and settings is so commodious and accomplished. It may be positively said of her that she has compressed novels into a shorter form; it may also be said that it is difficult to read one of her short stories without feeling as though it had the texture and layering of a novel. 
 Many of Munro's short stories have elements commonly associated with novels, elements such as multiple point of view, protracted time span, and extensive shifts in locale (or at least significant shifts from urban to rural settings).

Although technically a novel because of its theme, throughline, and ensemble cast of characters, George Orwell's Animal Farm is often spoken of as a novelette, perhaps as a mild rebuke or patronizing response to the author because of the political views expressed in the work. E. B.White's iconic Charlotte's Web is rarely spoken of a novelette and generally regarded as a novel intended for younger readers. 

 The Orwell and the White are of an approximate length. For a better perspective, try thinking of the serialized story that once appeared in monthly magazines. These had a reduced length, ensemble cast of characters, possible shifts in point of view, and possible shifts in time frame. Such stories were edited with an eye to cliffhanger episode endings and overall space considerations. 

 In the 1950s and 60s, Cosmopolitan Magazine editorially trimmed such novel-length mysteries as Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying and Bill S. Ballinger's A Portrait in Smoke to make them fit in one edition. These and other novelettes (see also novella) appeared later in unedited hardcover and paperback book form.

Because of its word length and the subsequent decision to package it as a part of a hardcover book, Houghton Mifflin packaged Philip Roth's narrative, Good-bye, Columbus as a novella. Had it been given first appearance in a magazine, it could easily have been called a novelette.

In the belief that younger readers are less likely to stick with the 210,000-word length of Moby-Dick, or the 600,000 words of War and Peace, YA novels such as Gary Soto's Afterlife cap at 40,000 words or under. Books for younger readers tend to cap at less, with such nineteenth century titles as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Uncle Tom's Cabin remaining as pre-TV anomalies.

Hints: Write the story for its length. Revise it for its length. Send it forth into the world at whatever length you have felt best presents it. Depending where it is sent, if it is under 40,000 words and over 200,000, expect an argument.

A Bubble or Two off Plumb

elliptical--an oval orbit rather than a circular one; a lengthening of or deviation from a conventional path taken by a formulaic novel or short story; behavior of one or more characters that is plausibly off orbit.

A character, scene, situation, or story may vary from the predictable. So far as endings are concerned, the adjective named after the renowned Russian short story writer and dramatist, Anton Chekhov, tells it all: Chekhov enjoyed and used elliptical endings in which the terms of the resolution were neither certain nor spelled out. It wasn't so much a matter of the good causes losing out to the bad ones as it was a blurring of the lines between good and bad, between happy and unhappy, fulfilled and unfulfilled.

In an elliptical story, a reader can come to the ending, there to experience feelings of dissatisfaction or frustration, but these feelings would be reflective of what the characters were feeling at the moment of conclusion. See the ending of James Joyce's short story, "Araby." See also "A Painful Case" and "A Little Cloud." None of the fifteen stories in the collection, Dubliners, is particularly circular in orbit nor, like many of the Chekhov stories, do they push a reader to a conclusion but rather let the events speak to the individual reader.

William Sidney Porter, writing as O. Henry, is one of the least elliptical of storytellers, relying on a formulaic ending framed on some reversal of logic or morality for its payoff. Such stories of his as "The Gift of the Magii," charming and warming in their intent, contain no hint of the ambiguity resident in the elliptical story or in the elliptical motive of a character such as, say, Bartleby in Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener."

A twenty-first century writer interested in a more uniform orbit and less ambiguity in his or her work would do well to compare stories of Joyce, and that other iconic Irish writer, William Trevor,with such commercially oriented short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald as "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." Modern readers are less forgiving of being led by the author toward a conclusion than readers of genre magazines. Even then, modern readers expect an eliptical approach such as found in the works of Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Raymond Carver.

The Short Story

At the moment, the most famous American invention is intransigence. There was a time when we were known for positive things: jazz, bourbon whiskey, baseball, basketball, and, some would say, the short story.

There can be no question about our intransigence as it relates to such painful subjects as Iraq, foreign policy, womens' reproductive rights, the right to privacy, guns, and so-called faith-based initiatives. Such intransigence comes from distrust, which is generally used by those in power to manipulate those who wish to be in power.

On a happier scale of measurement, there is little question about jazz, which also extends to bebop; bourbon, baseball, and basketball. Arguments about the origin of the short story, even if they become acrimonious, are still lively and instructive, as opposed to our intransigent position at the table, which is not only acrimonious, it is frustrating and frightening.

My take on the origins of the short story sets its birthplace in the early tales of Washington Irving, relishing in its infancy and gaining coordination in the tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose early collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales, were reviewed by Edgar Allen Poe in an iconic moment where Poe, as though he were taking dictation from Aristotle, fresh off his Poetics, set forth a standard for what the short story could and should accomplish.

While Poe was writing some of his own ventures into the short form of fiction, a young man in the Midwest was busily listening to tales, some of them fanciful in origin, others as rooted in heritage as jazz was rooted in the blues. In time this young man extended his range of interests and activities to the West, where he lived and worked among miners, cowhands, and the vast undifferentiated audience of unlettered men, waiting for the beginnings of The Industrial Revolution.

Do I need to tell you that the young man took on the name Mark Twain?

In one way or another, Twain helped spread the allure and effect of the short tale from its oral tradition to the printed page, influencing writers throughout Europe and stirring up additional interest here. In what I shall claim as my own invention, the blog leap, a convenient compression of time, the American version of the short story was off and running, championed by the likes of Jack London and not to forget the short story writer we are always too quick to forget, Rheingold "Ring" Lardner.

Like Twain, Lardner used regional dialect and attitudes, a true sociologist as well as a ranking humorist. Before Lardner, our baseball heroes were all good-natured man, perhaps under read but by no means lacking in acuity. After Lardner, we began to see them for all their humanity and bigotry and superstition, at once making them more real and more heroic.

Meanwhile, in Europe, a famous mentor was working with a famous student. Gustave Flaubert was willing to mentor Guy de Maupassant, provided de Maupassant followed Flaubert's instructions to the letter. One such letter was that de Maupassant was not to even consider sending his stories to potential publishers until he had one hundred of which Flaubert approved. De Maupassant quickly provided the hundred stories and Flaubert, after making editorial suggestions , ultimately gave his approval. Within ten years of that approval, de Maupassant had become synonymous with the short story, a sky rocket in the literary heavens.

The modern short story--the twenty-first-century short story--is no longer American; it has a world view and an international pedigree although many argue that another short story writer, Ernest Miller Hemingway, gave the form a considerable boost. Well, maybe so, but you'd also have to factor in John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, Bernard Malamud.

Not to forget those two estimable Canadian writers, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, also keeping in mind the Brit, Somerset Maugham, and from Ireland, James Joyce, Frank O'Connor, and arguably the most emotionally and technically deft writer at work today, William Trevor. The Russians have added to it, and we also get the Wasabi bite of Haruki Murikami from Japan, as well as, ah, she is splendid, Jhumpa Lahiri, from beautiful downtown Cambridge (Mass., not England), but with a Bengali flavor.


In spite of protestations from literary agents and publishers, new collections not only appear sporadically, they appear in ever increasing numbers, attesting to the bottom-line mentality in which demand creates supply.

Having invented the blog leap of time to make a point, the point I'm after is the way the short story in addition to its already solid dramatic structure, has begun shaping the long form, the novel. At the forefront is a collection of short stories that began to take on their final form in The Lion's Den, the Saturday morning workshop I co-hosted with Leonard Tourney before he moved off to take a post at BYU. Jean Harfenist's A Brief History of the Flood (Knopf, 2003) appeared as neither fish no fowl; it is not a novel, but they more or less let the browser think it is. Every one of the chapters was placed as a short story in a literary journal. Arranged in a more or less chronological order, A Brief History can, indeed, add up to a novel. Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine becomes another example, taking us away from the more or less conventional novel format of a single narrator or a select group of narrators to a kind of ensemble cast effect.

Because of its length, a novel has the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to portray change. A short story simply doesn't have the room, and so it doesn't deal with change so much as it takes us up to a point of awareness which the protagonist may or may not experience (see , for instance, "The Peacock," or "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver). Thus the short story is a living, breathing example of opaqueness and ambiguity; the modern novel, although unlikely to tie up all relevant loose ends, has the space to be more attentive to resolving a theme. For convenience sake, you might consider the short story as a concerto to the novel as a symphony. In dramatic terms, the short story is more like the one-act play, the modern novel more of a piece with the modern two-act play.

Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood get past conventional and editorial discomfort with a short story having more than a single point-of-view; William Trevor writes so well in omniscient point of view that he is effective with it in short fiction as well as the novel.

If you were to look at the point of origin of stories appearing in the three major best-of-the-year collections of short stories, you'd be sure to discover that the great majority first appeared in The New Yorker, with the likes of Granta, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Paris Review as also-rans. The Gettysburg Review would be more likely to place candidates were it not for the fact of its editor producing a continuing stream of editorials best described as self-indulgent.

Many of the short stories of Annie Proulx that appeared in Open Range rank among my favorites, and because of my long association with universities and because of my politics, and because of the author's ability to evoke complex feelings I have a special fondness for Tobias Wolfe's "In the Garden of the American Martyrs."

The 2006 edition of The Best Mystery Stories contains at least four short stories that demonstrate how the demands of the mystery genre are not necessarily a lead weight, holding the short story down.

Many of today's younger--under forty--short story writers are bringing the energy of their discovery to the form, using it as a building block for learning to write in the longer form, but investigating the dramatic potential as a step-ladder to their own voice.

Ever have the experience of blowing a paper bag full of air, twisting off the top, then using that air-filled bag as a weapon to scare someone by popping it unexpectedly behind them?

The many times I did that as a kid, I never thought I'd be using the memory of the experience as a metaphor for the short story. A finite container, filled with one's own breath, suddenly brought to a surprising explosion. What a lovely metaphor for an art form that may help America earn back a reputation that has been too long in the unemployment line.