Save the Short Story

The Million Writers Award is a $300 prize sponsored by the Edit Red Writing Community given to a short story published online. They recently published the list of 2007 notable stories, and a top ten list will be published at the end of May.

When that list is published, the public - that means you, people! -  will be able to vote for the story that you think deserves the big prize.

According to Jason Sanford, the founder of storySouth and the Million Writers award, he found it frustrating that the stories from his publication were not getting any attention from the “best short stories” anthologies.  Even though storySouth has an editorial process just as the print journals do, many anthology editors don’t consider short stories published online at all.  Usher in the creation of the Million Writers Award.

This award goes strictly to short stories that have been nominated by a reader or editor. I think it’s great that a reader can nominate a story she likes for an award.

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Someone commented yesterday that a verbose explanation for writing that doesn’t work seems unnecessary.

I admit that my one criticism of the MFA classes I took was that there were professors who pored over and discussed stories to death. Stories that were pretty much unsalvagable. I don’t think that it does a writer any good to hash over work that was probably what I like to call an apprentice-piece. Sometimes you need to leave that behind you and work on new stories.

However, feedback is always important. It’s good to hear what someone thinks about your writing. This someone should not be your spouse or close friend (unless that person is searingly honest, in which case, you may not want to be that close).

There’s a large part of the writing process that includes sharing, which includes constructive feedback. So if people ask to read your work, take them up on it. And then take notes.

Magazines can’t be completely honest and tell terrible writers not to send any more stories because they run a business that is built on those same people who are subscribers. So my inside scoop to you is just to keep reading the magazines you would love to see your story in, because you’ll learn what those editors like.

A few months ago I watched an interview with Steve Martin and he talked about learning how to play the banjo. At first, he was terrible, but then he figured that if he kept playing the banjo every day, one day, he will have played the banjo for twenty years. And in twenty years, he was bound to get better.

So when I see that someone has sent her twentieth story to us, I do give it a fresh look, because she might have learned a lot writing those other nineteen stories.

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Penguin UK launched a digital writing project that married reality games to short story writing. The site is called We Tell Stories and the ambition is to create new forms of the story for the internet age.

I browsed through the site and it’s interesting, but I don’t know about its literary merit. “Fairy Tales” by Kevin Brooks is kind of like an internet version of Mad Libs. You choose the name of the princess and king and what type of characters they come across. This might be fun for grade-school kids.

“The (Former) General In His Labyrinth” by Mohsin Hamid is a very slow-moving choose-your-own-adventure story. And once you go on a tangent, you have to click back (and back and back) in order to get to the original story, which slowed down the action.

I thought that all the interactive clicking bogged down the actual “story” part of the experience, but I think Penguin may just be doing this to launch their contests and push the books they’re selling. I think that this idea could have been executed better, and I’m sure we’ll see more sites like this in the future.

Unfortunately, the contests are only open to residents of the UK (darn!) - but the website is fun games for all.

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Whenever I read the slush for One Story, I usually don’t make comments or suggestions. My reasoning is that in the time I could spend to write up one helpful letter to one author, I could have handled twelve slush responses. Therefore, I send out the ubiquitous form rejection letter so common to all of us. In fact, I got one today! Although it did have my name on it. (Thanks American Short Fiction!)

However, I came across a literary magazine that promises they will not send form rejection letters. Our Stories is a lit mag that does something different:

At Our Stories, we don’t just send a rejection slip or an automated email that says, “Thanks, but no thanks.” At Our Stories, first, you get the shot at publishing and, second, if it doesn’t work out, you get a professional review for your piece. It’s something different, and we think it makes sense.

There are two types of submissions. If you want to submit during their free submission period, Our Stories editors will send you feedback and suggestions on how to improve your story.

But during the Contest Submission period, for a fee of twenty dollars, you will get general feedback, a page-by-page breakdown of your piece and what worked and what didn’t. You can click here to view some of the samples - one sample goes into 4 pages of details! I didn’t get this much critiquing during my time at my MFA program!

Okay, I know I got carried away with too many exclamation points, but actual comments on stories? Feedback from a lit mag? This is huge, people! And of course, if you submit there, you just might get yourself published.

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All of us who read the slush at One Story do so in the hopes of finding that new, unique voice. Sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw. When I first started as a reader, I found Patrick Somerville’s story, Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow. A few years later, when his short story collection had been published, he told me that he owed it all to his appearance in One Story.

When aspiring authors approach me, the most popular question is: “Do you really find stories from blind submissions?”

The truth is, yes. We read every submission hoping to find a great new writer.

I found this blog entry today about a book I had never heard of before. It’s called First Fiction, and it’s an anthology of the  first published short stories by famous writers. We never think of people like John Cheever and Eudora Welty as new writers, sending out that first story into the world, hoping to catch the attention of an editor. I quickly ordered the book, which is out of print, but I found it here and here.

It will be an interesting exercise to see how I would have judged these stories. And I think it’s an interesting book for anyone who enjoys short stories.

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Jhumpa Lahiri talks with The Star, Toronto’s newspaper, about the short story.

“In the wider world, there is a terrible hierarchy that people have between stories and novels. There is a sense that bigger is better and smaller is a diminutive, lesser thing. It’s maddening to me because I don’t understand it. I just think that if one is a serious reader of fiction, that argument doesn’t really hold very much water because some of the most remarkable works of fiction are short.”

I know I’ve already written about Jhumpa Lahiri, but I find it interesting that reporters everywhere have been asking her about why she writes short stories instead of novels and what the short story means to her. She speaks so beautifully about short stories that I hear myself saying, “Yay! Short Stories!”

The rest of that article can be found here.

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This year at AWP, several of my friends urged me to check out Subtropics, the lit. mag. published out of the University of Florida. I remembered reading and liking one of their stories, “Gringos,” by Ariel Dorfman, in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, so I picked up the latest issue.

Then, a few weeks later, I gave Rachel Carpenter a ride in my orange Honda Element (the half-SUV/half-Clown car) after a reading. She saw the current issue of Subtropics on the backseat and said, “You’re reading this magazine? I love this magazine! I’m in their second issue. But that’s not the reason I think it’s a great magazine.”

And just this week, Court the Jesters published an interview with Subtropics editor David Leavitt under the subject heading: “The Dire State of Fiction’s Not a Myth.”

For those of you writing short stories, he recommends reading them:

“…we’re told that fiction is on the skids, is tanking, that no one buys novels or story collections any more. There’s a paradox here, and a problem that reveals itself when you actually read these stories by people who don’t bother to read fiction themselves. At the very least the MFA programs preserve the idea that writing is a craft and that established writers should train younger writers as established musicians train younger musicians and that writers should read great literature in order to learn from it.”

The rest of the interview can be read here.

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While I was a graduate student at NYU, one of our assignments was to present a short story of our choosing to the fiction seminar class and lead a discussion on the story’s structure. It was kind of the equivalent of a dress-making class, where the teacher asks you to deconstruct a dress and explain all the different pieces and why they all work.

At the time, I had been carrying around a story I had found in a magazine entitled, “A Temporary Matter.” I carried it around with me because I found myself rereading it over and over again and discovering new ideas after each reading. Most of the class chose pieces written by established writers, so when I presented this one to my partner, I was afraid he would veto it.

Instead, he called me up later that night and said, “Where did you find this? It’s the perfect story.”

The very next year the author of that story, Jhumpa Lahiri, won the Pulitzer Prize for her short story collection.

Her new collection is entitled, “Unaccustomed Earth.” I read an interview with her and she was asked if, as the mother of two young children, she couldn’t find the time to write a novel so she had to resort to writing short stories.

Her answer:

I don’t think of short stories as a secondary option, ever. I happened to have some ideas for stories, that I had on the backburner when I was working on The Namesake and it was all very natural to return to those ideas when I finished that novel. In a sense, when life is very overwhelming, working on stories can be slightly more manageable because they are single pieces you can wrap your head around a little more effectively. But having said that, I felt I wrote these stories over a period of many years. It was not that I wrote one, and went on to write a collection.

The rest of the interview (along with her glam photo) can be found here.

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I came across this interview with a Nepali author named Ramesh Vikal. It’s cute because he starts the interview by talking about this book he’s translating from the English language, an interesting science fiction novel written by a 19-year-old girl named Mary Shelley. At no time during the interview does it come up that this girl wrote this book 200 years ago!  But I guess it will be new to the Nepali, once it’s translated, of course.

It’s interesting to think that a novel that is required reading for every American high school sophomore, with all of its film adaptations, is getting a fresh reading somewhere in Nepal.

When asked about the current environment for the short story, he said:

Well the environment for writing stories is in progress. But it is too little I should say. The number of dedicated short story writers is very few.

And when asked if he’s working on any stories:

I haven’t been able to write any stories at the moment. It is in crisis.

I’m not sure what he thought was in crisis, his writing or the short story.  Perhaps both?

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I remember the first time I read the Tobias Wolff short story, “The Liar.” The story is told in first person, but there is one scene where the main character describes his mother going to church. I always use this story in creative writing classes to show how a first person narrator can effectively describe a scene he does not take part in. And the beauty is that the reader doesn’t even realize it.

Here is an article from the LA Times Book Review by Marianne Wiggins about the book. In it, she writes:

“…the short story. When it’s done well, the economy, the rigor, the precision that the form demands are hardly noticed by its consumer. But it is more difficult to write, in its line-to-line execution, than any other narrative conceit. And Tobias Wolff is a genius at it.”

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