Thursday, April 26, 2007

Short Story Tricks

Well, Scott Pack is bigging up the short story anyway, and says he has something up his sleeve...
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3 comments:

Jan said...

Interesting stuff
I've creative writing classes; people are forever wondering where to send.

9:17 am
Unknown said...

I find myself intrigued, I want to know what he has up there!

10:01 pm
mythusmage said...

A novel is a great, galumphing thing, a sort of Winchester House of prose. A short story, done right, is more like a Japanese garden in a very constrained space. It is more like a poem really, in that every word counts, and you must be skillful indeed to evoke setting and events with economy and style. When you have just a thousand words to tell the tale, you have to be cruel with your verbiage and cull with a cruelty more often seen when a hard winter is coming, and one has not the money to support all the yearling pigs.

It's not easy, and not everyone can pull it off. I've seen masterful storytellers fail miserable at the short story, and third rate talents produce gems. Some need the discipline the short story imposes, while others simply cannot work under such limitations.

"Non-genre" short stories have a further problem in that the reader really doesn't know what to expect. Unlike mystery, horror, science fiction, or fantasy, the non-genre writer doesn't have many short cuts and tricks to work with. Without an orc, how do you identify the villain? Without an easily identifiable villain, how do you confound expectations. The tropes of genre fiction used poorly can be the worst sort of crutch. But used well can make crafting the tale so much easier.

General fiction? In general fiction, the non-genre story, you can't rely on such things, for good or ill. Thus the labor of writer and reader is made so much harder; and when the average person finds a task a chore, it becomes a real effort to persuade him it is worth his while to undertake it.

Now make the book a multi-author anthology. A variation of styles, a variation of qualities. And many of the authors new to readers, or bearing unfavorable reputations from other encounters. It all comes together into a package that would put a teenaged boy off his feed.

And to make matters worse, there's the lack of short stories in our lives. I know of just two magazines publishing short stories, and four, maybe five, in the field of science fiction and fantasy. On-line there are more, but most are labors of love produced by hobbyists and dilettants. About the only two on-line fiction magazines I know of that are being treated as serious, commercial enterprizes are Baen's Universe and The Grantville Gazette, and the latter just recently started paying professional rates. (Both, by the way, are published by Baen Books.

Publishers want to see the short story do better, publishers have to start pushing the short story better than they have up to now. On-line short story magazines at first, then print when the audience has grown. They also need to listen to their audience, and accept what their readers say. If people tell them Mr. "Wonderful Stylist With Numerous Literary Awards" can't maintain suspense and atmosphere, don't publish the guy.

For that really is what has killed the short story. Writers have forgotten that their job is not to impress the denizens of a live-in diploma mill, but to entertain the masses. You can produce the most marvelous prose ever put to paper, but if you can't tell a story, you aint shit.

Well, there are my thoughts. be concise, use words sparingly and well, and remember that you are telling a story.

12:39 am

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