The Ambitious Short Story
Steven Millhauser wrote an essay about the short story in the New York Times:
The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t forget its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. “Hoo ha!” cries the novel. “Here ah come!” The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.
For all its short storiness, he says that the short story has a “littleness (that) is the agency of its power.” I think we can all agree with him.
Read the rest of it here.
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“The Power of the Short Story” copyright (C) Wayne C. Long
May 13th, 2008
Power?
Power, you say!
Yes, you read it right, my friends. P-O-W-E-R.
The short story writing form has been, and is, a powerful societal force. A force for good. A powerful mirror that can focus a spotlight on issues where bigger literary forms wax verbose and can take hours to get their message across to readers hungry for the truth. Hungry, but pressed for time.
In several of my LongShortStories I have chosen as the story’s theme an issue that needs spotlighting. An issue that resides at the fringes of the mass media. An issue where the lives of individual world citizens have been infringed upon. Or worse yet, unnoticed.
Take mental illness, for example. My short story “School Days” focuses a bright light on how one man’s life in a mental institution lead him to a career choice even he could not have predicted. And to an outcome no one would have guessed. Who cared about this societal throw-away fictional person? I did. And I still do. I gave him voice.
I care about the plight of Native Americans. Or, as many of them like to be called–Indians.
In America there is a country within a country. My Indian friends call it “Indian Country,” a country whose written treaties with the majority Whites have been unilaterally broken by the government set up to protect indigenous people’s rights to original land claims, mineral and fishing rights, among many others.
These original Americans have voices that must be heard, for the good of the environment and for the larger society to which we all belong. I have chosen to drive home some of their messages by crafting short stories around them. Many of my readers have thanked me for this.
One only has to look at some of the codified rules governing supposedly civilized societies such as ours to find things breaking down under the crushing weight of governmental greed, inefficiency, and just plain abuse of the inalienable rights of its citizens. I call attention to these in my stories. The short story imparts its power to the people.
Let’s not forget humor and the healing power of a good belly laugh. The short story has the innate power to cut to the heart of things ridiculous and make us laugh at ourselves and some of our most cherished institutions. Give me black comedy any day! Short satire? Bring it on! Heh heh heh!
Down through the ages, brave writers and social commentators have chosen the short story form above all other weapons in their literary arsenal–to lift up the weak and voiceless. To expose the folly of the pompous and the selfish in our midst. Fellow short story writer Charles Dickens did just that–masterfully and with great clarity.
Perhaps the single most important reason I employ the power of the short story is this:
The short story has been systematically marginalized and brutalized by big-city accountants in the so-called publishing world, bent on maximizing profit over art. Advertising revenue over creativity. Systematic, mass dumbing-down of American taste and traditional values.
And yet, the short story lives! Some, like me, say that it actually thrives! Thrives–in the imagination of readers everywhere who will vote with their collective artistic conscience–to support fledgling short story efforts like LongShortStories who have found a more receptive home on the Internet, free of the strictures of the now-teetering traditional publishing world, free of the impersonal rejection machine that is corporate “literature,” and free to express its still small voice to an ever-widening pool of wonderfully supportive readers and discerning thinkers the world over.
The power of the short story? Yes, it is this and much more!
Like “The Little Engine That Could” children’s story, short story writers like me and my fellows have taken on the battle cry of that little train engine … “I think I can! I think I can!”
And you know what?
We are!
Comment by Wayne C. Long — October 8, 2008 @ 9:56 am
My favorite form, the short story is the perfect foil when writing or reading.
Comment by Steve — October 10, 2008 @ 1:32 pm