Many of my favorite fiction writers started out as poets. When I read a story I am much more interested in how the story is told than the story itself. The stories that come from poets tend to have a musical quality that must stem from paying extremely close attention to language.
Alice Fulton, who has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her poetry, is debuting her first fiction collection, The Nightingales of Troy: Connected Stories.
In an interview with The Boston Globe, the author is asked whether she considered writing this collection of short stories as a novel:
No. My initial intention was to learn to write fiction by writing short stories, because I had this notion that I could write them and throw them away if they didn’t work. It would be much harder to discard a novel. This was my way of learning different narrative techniques as well, because the short story allows that, whereas a novel would have demanded continuity of tone and style. I had a vague intention of evoking the linguistic qualities of particular epochs. “Happy Dust” has some qualities of 19th-century writing; the 1920s story is spare, more modern; the 1930s one seems to have a WPA feeling; and “The Real Eleanor Rigby” I tried to make as effervescent as a lava lamp.
The rest of the interview can be read here.
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Today I searched for something newsworthy on the short story and came across this article from the Northwest Florida Daily News. It’s a shorts story. I hope this doesn’t happen to any of you.
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I found a book at my local library the other day and it is a must read for every writer who is submitting to literary magazines and getting rejected. It’s called “The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile,” written by Noah Lukeman.
I’ve been getting several of those sad little slips of paper lately and thought that this book couldn’t hurt. To be truthful, I don’t read very many “How to Write” types of books because many of them seem to be 120 pages of fluff and only 2 pages of any real advice. But this one is different. There’s a good chapter on adjectives and adverbs — basically, a lot of writers use tend to use too many of them — it’s a huge red flag that the rest of the manuscript isn’t worth reading.
In the short story world, you could say that the first five paragraphs are the most important ones. Many literary journals don’t have enough of a staff to read your whole story, so it must grab a reader right away. One important point Lukeman made is that:
“Agents and editors don’t read manuscripts to enjoy them; they read solely with the goal of getting through the pile, solely with an eye to dismiss a manuscript — and believe me, they’ll look for any reason they can, down to the last letter.”
That’s pretty true, which brings me to a pet peeve I have. There’s an area on the submission manager where most people write a note to the staff and about 15% of people write “enjoy!” in this space. When I told my sister about this, she said to me:
“I bet you hate that because you immediately think — I will not enjoy!”
This is so true. I hate when people tell me what to do. I try to remain neutral, but you’ve already annoyed me with that little, “enjoy!” (It’s especially annoying with that exclamation point.)
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While I was at the Lit-Mag Fair this past weekend, I got a great poster from the boys and girls at the Salt Hill booth and I told them that last year the girls from Pindeldyboz gave me a beautiful poster which is hanging up in my bathroom. I also display volume 2 in the cabinet and on more than one occasion someone comes out of the bathroom with the magazine and says, “This is great! What is a Pindeldyboz?”
When I asked them where Pindeldyboz was this year, I was sadly informed by John Holliday that Pindeldyboz is no longer in print. I will miss their printed issues, which always had great covers, but the good news is that the magazine is still up and running — and now it’s free online.
Kelly Shriver’s short story from their February 21 issue,”The Ethical Dilemma of a Sandwich Down the Pants,” is one of ten stories in the running for The Million Writers Award (That’s another reminder for you to vote if you haven’t done so already — you can cast your vote here until July 17).
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Personally, I think that the short story is closer to a… short story. Why do people constantly need to define the short story “as” something else? Is an orange closer to an apple or a tomato? Hmmm? Let’s debate that everyone.
According to the Russell Smith article about Caroline Adderson’s latest short story collection:
“People want novels. Actually, they don’t even want novels, they want biography and self-help. Actually, they don’t want books at all, they want reality TV shows about losing weight - but okay, of those who do want to read books, and of that small number those who want to read fiction, most want novels.”
“At a panel discussion in a public library, she (Adderson) said she thought that the pleasure of the short story did not lie so much in its story as in its language. This caused some raised voices in the question-and-answer period. In a second discussion, she expanded on this: The short story, she said, was closer to the poem; the novel was closer to drama (plays and films).”
The rest of the article can be found here.
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The Literary Magazine Fair is an annual event hosted by the clmp every year. Tomorrow (June 15) it will be held at the Housing Works Used Book Cafe (126 Crosby Street). All literary magazines will be on sale for only $2!
A lot of literary editors will be there (including me) so come join us and I hope to meet some of you there. I’ll be the one wearing the One Story T-shirt.
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I suppose it was inevitable that a short story about two gay cowboys would eventually be set to music. Apparently, Annie Proulx’s short story, Brokeback Mountain, which had been made into a movie a few years ago, has been chosen to be re-written as an opera and scheduled for City Opera’s 2013 spring season. This is what we in the biz refer to as a story that’s “got legs.”
You can read more about it here.
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It’s not every day that a 28-page short story from 1911 makes headlines. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, The Disappearance of Lady Frances, is on the market for about $500,000. This story is hand-written by Conan Doyle and bound for the author.
“The story follows the cocaine-snorting, pipe-smoking sleuth as he solves the case of a rich, unmarried aristocrat who has vanished on the continent and is later found in a secret section of an old woman’s coffin. If sold, it will be the most expensive piece of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia since the original manuscript of The Sign of Four fetched $470,000 (£243,000) at Sotheby’s in New York in 1996.”
You can read more about it here.
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The Twitter Writing Contest results are in and the story that won first place was written by Ron Gould:
“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.
The challenge was to write a story in exactly 140 characters. It’s amazing what people came up with.
Check out all the runner-ups and their stories here.
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