This week I rant about the Best American Short Story Collection…and more
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Transcript
20241018Podcast
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Julie from StoryADay here with the podcast. This week I’m thinking about how we read and how we write and how the two are intermingled. I went on a bit of a rant with the StoryADay Superstars this week because the next edition of The Best American Short Stories of the year is just about to come out.
It’s going to be in my inbox on Tuesday. Physical inbox that is. And this is the 2023 edition. The 2024 edition is coming out, which will be full of literary fiction’s best stories as judged by last year, Min Jin Lee. This year it’s going to be Lauren Groff choosing the stories and I have a bit of a love hate relationship with this collection and I’m going to tell you why in a minute. But I’ll be reading it. One of the things that really struck me this week is that we do need to read short stories if we’re going to write them.
And not everybody likes to read short stories, but here’s where my rant about this particular collection comes in. This is my collection. collection I like to rant about. You may have other collections, anthologies, stories that you’ve been told you ought to love that you would like to rant about. The rant I have about this collection is that this is one particular type of short story.
This is a collection of literary fiction. These are the kinds of stories that people write when they take an MFA. program, a master of fine arts and creative writing. The people who write them for the most part are in that same world. They teach at universities, they study literature, they love to pick apart other people’s stories.
It’s art. It’s not commercial fiction. Some of it is enjoyable, but it’s not written the same way that a Marvel blockbuster is written, to entertain the masses. The problem I have with that, not anything to do with the art, the quality of the stories, anyone’s right to write that way, I have no problem with any of that.
The problem I have is that this collection is the most prominent collection of short stories that you will find in a bookstore, if it has any collections of short stories at all. And, many of you may have had the experience I had when I first moved to this country and picked up this collection of short stories probably in 1998, I think that’s the earliest one I have, is 1998, and I picked up that collection and I read it and I didn’t really like very many of the stories.
Because they weren’t written for me. to entertain the way that short stories I grew up reading from a collection more like this, the annual world’s best SF, which were really, science fiction, which were pulp, which were written to entertain. There were magazines of short romance fiction that came out weekly, My Weekly and things like that, which came out in Britain, which I had read short fiction that was commercial and written to entertain.
And these Artistic, beautiful, literary pieces in here written by people considering the nature of humanity and Oftentimes miserable about things that didn’t seem that important to me. Didn’t entertain me and I thought, as you may have thought, Maybe I just don’t like short stories anymore. Maybe I just don’t like short stories.
And the problem I have with this being one of the very few exemplars of short fiction in the world, in bookstores, in mass production, is that a lot of people pick this up thinking, oh, I should read short stories. I’ve been told I should write short stories because they help me master my craft, or I should read short stories because that’s what we read at school, and that’s what I was told was good, good for my brain, good for my soul, good for being part of the literary conversation.
And they pick up this one collection that’s available, and if it’s not to their taste, it’s very easy to rule out the whole form. That would be like listening to one rap song, and it not being particularly to your taste, and then ruling out the whole of hip hop. Listening to one Bach fugue. And saying, I don’t like classical music, when you’ve got Sibelius, and Debussy, and Tchaikovsky, and Madrigals, and all kinds of other instrumental music to choose from.
This collection is the one that everyone reaches for, especially when they get serious about writing. And I will read it. And I’ll read through them all. And I will find four. stories out of the 20 in there that I either feel something about, or that I admire, or that I want to pick apart and figure out how they did that, or that I say, oh I need to read more by that author.
I love short stories and that’s the most I ever find in this collection. There’s maybe one or two authors who I’ll then go and say, They might seek out their other short fiction, I might give them a shot as a novelist. Quite often it doesn’t always work out when short story writers make the transition to novel writing.
It doesn’t always go well, because they like writing short stories but there’s not the same market for short stories. It’s hard to make a living as a fiction writer as it is, and short fiction is even harder to make a living at. So most people transition to writing novels whether they want to or not. So I’ll go and I’ll find some authors from this collection who I like and I might follow them but I might not because I might not actually like the kind of stuff they’re doing if they’re in this very literary tradition which I admire but can sometimes leave me a little cold.
And usually with writers I find that I love the language but I’m also interested in their message and if somebody has a very bleak or bitter or down outlook, I’m less likely to want to read their stuff than if they’ve got a bit of a wink and a nudge and a optimism about humanity. Nothing about the quality of the writing in here.
A lot of literary fiction tends to be a little bleak, trauma informed. And it’s not always what I’m looking for. My point to you is that, if you want to write, Or if you just enjoy reading short stories, do not think that this is the gold standard. The best American short stories or, if you’re somewhere else and there’s a British short stories edition, there’s the Penn Faulkner awards, there’s all of these things that serve to support short story writers because they’re not writing commercial fiction and they can’t really be supported except by literary organizations and awards.
And yes, we should absolutely be supporting art for art’s sake. No argument from me there. But if you’re picking up those collections and reading them and thinking, Ugh, this isn’t for me. That doesn’t mean that you’re not meant to be a writer. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you. It doesn’t mean that you can’t appreciate good writing.
You just may have got to the point in your life where you’re like, I don’t want to read this stuff anymore. I don’t want to read things that I don’t enjoy. Except occasionally I might want to read something to help me understand what the state of the art is.
That’s the next point I want to make. The state of the art in your industry is something that you do need to know. So if you’re writing science fiction and fantasy, get whatever the updated equivalent of this book is. This is the
1989 version of the annual World’s Best SF. And this is a collection of the kinds of stories that were winning Nebulas and Hugos back in 1989. There are updated versions of these, there are digital collections of everything that’s been nominated for prizes in the science fiction and fantasy world. I imagine that there’s similar stuff for everyone. Romance. I’m not sure how much short romance there is out there. I imagine that there’s I know that there’s stuff for mysteries and thrillers. And there’s probably stuff for spy novels. There’s probably something coming for romanticy. There’s certainly anthologies of all of these things.
And we do need to be reading in our Genre, because there are genre expectations which your readers are looking for. If I write a science fiction and fantasy story and make it heavily introspective and concentrating only on beautiful language and don’t include a lot of science fiction or spaceships or futuristic anything.
I’m going to be disappointing the science fiction writers. They may appreciate the beautiful language, but they’ve come for the science in my science fiction. And so there are norms and tropes in every industry, every area of the industry, every genre. And if you want to write short fiction, A, it’s good to know how short fiction differs from novels, which we all read.
And you only really figure that out by reading lots of it. But you don’t have to read stuff that’s not the norm in the genre or mood that you want to be writing in. Where do you find this stuff? You find it in lists of prize winners. If you’re in science fiction and fantasy, there’s things like the Nebulas and the Hugos, which always put out long lists, as well as the short list, as well as the winners.
There are anthologies both the monthly type and the ones that collect the best of a particular. Something with a particular theme, or something with particular types of writers, something wrapped around a particular mood. You can find those kinds of things. There are podcasts, which are, audio periodicals.
Things like Escape Pod, and they have Pseudopod, and various other things in that family, which deal with different types of genres. There are collections like this massive book behind me here, which is the big book of science fiction. There’s the art of the short story. There’s a Halloween one here.
There’s the Oxford book about the American short story. There are all kinds of collections of stories that you can pick up. And you don’t have to love them all. But you do have to familiarise yourself with the norms both because you want to know what readers are expecting and because having that kind of knowledge in your head when you sit down to write makes it so much easier.
I sat down to write a story this week, and I knew I wanted my opening scene to be A bunch of space colonists who’d gone down in a shuttle to a planet. Something had gone wrong, they were stranded, and now they have to get out of this situation. And I knew that I had read a story, once upon a time, that was quite like this.
Similar scenario it’s not A groundbreaking scenario, if we go out to colonize the universe or planets, or if we travel anywhere, at some point somebody’s going to get stuck. There’s going to be a crash, there’s going to be an obstacle. If I’m writing a story, there has to be an obstacle, otherwise it’s not a story, it’s just me writing about people on a planet, or on a journey.
But if there’s no obstacles to their goals, then it’s not, there’s nothing for the story to do. So I pulled down the Big Book of Science Fiction edited by Anne and Jeff Van Dammere because I knew that in there I had read a story and I happened to remember in this case that it was Surface Tension by James Blish, which is going to go in, my story is going to go in a completely different direction from where that story goes, which is a great story and you should read it, by the way, if you like science fiction.
Fascinating story. But I was curious. What does a really good story that has stayed with me for years, living somewhere in the back of my brain, how does a story like that open? What needs to go into an opening of Colony Ship Crashing on a Planet in order to hook me as a reader? So I went back and I read the opening page of Surface Tension by James Blish and I was surprised by how quickly I had all the information I needed to know.
It was a very spare opening with lots of conversation, the characters were set up in very brief interactions among the characters. I had the sense of the setting, I had the sense of the stakes in very few lines. And I don’t know about you, but I tend to overwrite a little. Because I’m a discovery writer and I’m writing to find out who are these people and what does it look like and blah, blah, blah.
And looking at that story, I was thinking, okay, so if I want to write like James Blish, I’m going to write this very spare. I don’t think I’m going to do that, but. Even folding in my preferences for, the level of description I want to do and all that kind of stuff and stake setting, I looked at that and I was like, okay, so in these first few lines, I need to establish all this stuff and it’s okay to leave out these things until later, because, this story that has been stuck in my head for years didn’t tell me Very much about the rest of the crew.
It didn’t tell me very much about the setting. It didn’t set up how they were going to tackle this problem. I was completely surprised on about, halfway down page two, when their solution for the problem was nothing like I thought it was going to be.
Even though I’d read the story I’d forgotten what their solution was going to be. None of that needed to be in the opening paragraphs and I was still hooked because I was sufficiently interested in the characters and their circumstances. So that reassured me as I set out to write my story that I could leave some stuff out.
There were certain things I wanted to include. But everything didn’t have to go into the open, which in turn allowed me to make progress on my story. And it’s going to go in a completely different direction, and it’s going to be nothing like the story that I used as a touchstone, as a reference. But I know I’m on the right track if I open my story in such a way that people know some of the same things that I knew reading Surface Tension by James Blish.
And this is why I encourage you to read widely in the form that you’re writing. If you’re writing romance novels that are in a series that are regency where there are seven sisters and they all need to get married, make sure you’ve read a lot of those, right? Read a lot of those. And you don’t have to be afraid that you’re going to be copying because there are certain.
norms that you need to use and your way of expressing that your preferences, your values, your life lessons are going to be going into those stories. So I just don’t even worry about people saying, Oh, I’ve read something like this before. Yeah, you have, but you haven’t read this before. And people who like particular types of stories and genres, they’re going to be annoyed at you if you’re lazy.
If you write a time travel story and you don’t even acknowledge that there’s a problem with time travel in that if you go back in time and you kill your own grandfather, you don’t exist. You’ve gotta acknowledge those things or write around them or, make it clear that’s not what this kind of story is about.
Don’t just be oblivious of all of the norms in your field. But you do get to use the same kinds of setups because we are humans and we go through life and we are born, we grow, we make friends, we fall out with people, we fall in love, we have children, we get jobs, we die. And amongst all of that there are some common experiences.
So you’re never going to write original. And it can be handy to have stories in your head that serve as touchstones for you. Like when I pulled down that story and looked at how does he open a story about a ship crashing and the survivors have to do something about it. You know I could pull that one down, I could pull down, there’s a C.
S. Lewis story I’m thinking of that has a similar kind of thing. Obviously Ray Bradbury’s got his Martian Chronicles, which is not so much about people crashing, but it is about people isolated on a planet. There’s the Martian, I’m on a Mars kick apparently because I’m thinking about Ken Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and, the challenges of being in an extremely alien environment.
Those are all things that I could pull off the shelf and look at and think, how am I going to handle this thing, that thing? So reading widely is not optional, because we learn from reading, we get inspired by reading. But it’s also really handy to just have that mental library. It’s not You need to remember every story you ever wrote and I happened to remember the name of this story and think I want to write a story today.
I wanted to start this way. I remember this story and I remember who wrote it and which book it was in, right? And so I went and found it. You don’t even need that. You need to just know that there, you need to be familiar enough with these types of stories that you can either look them up or you can pull them from your mental memory bank and go okay, how does this work?
I am going to encourage you to read widely in whatever area you want to write. And if you don’t like this collection, the Best American Short Stories of whichever year, if you generally find that buying and reading this is a waste of your time because you don’t like these stories, There is nothing wrong with that, you do not need to read them, unless you want to get published in Ploughshares, or Zyzeva, or the Sewanee Review, or one of these publications that they pull from.
Then you need to read this, and you need to figure out what these authors are doing that gets them published in those publications. If these do nothing for you and leave you cold, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve got different tastes. You can read them. I read them largely because the writing itself generally provokes a reaction in me.
Sometimes it’s good and I go, oh, how did they do that? And sometimes it makes me go, oh my goodness, I can’t believe somebody thought this was good. Either way, I tend to have a strong reaction and that’s a good thing. Any collection that you read, you’re not going to like everything in it. And you’re going to wonder why the editors selected this story or that story.
If you are in a good place, your reaction is likely to spur you to write something because you’re going to go if that could get published, then I’m going to write something better.
Speaking of which, I’m reading stories from this week’s Story of a Critique Week, and I am. enjoying a lot of very good writing. There’s some stuff that people are asking questions like, I don’t know if this works, and this is really first draft y, and I’m not sure, and there’s some stuff that I’m reading and going, Dang, this is good, this is close to ready.
I’m not quite sure what to say about this. But every meeting that we have, and we had one this morning, people discuss the stories, and the author invariably says, I don’t know what to That’s really helpful. Thanks for pointing out that part that wasn’t quite working. I knew it wasn’t, but I wasn’t sure.
And then everybody smiles and goes, yeah, you thought you were going to get away with that. You’re not, you have to clarify that part. And sometimes people say I knew something wasn’t working, but I wasn’t sure what, and Two or three people in the critique group have been able to say, You lost me here, or I was confused about this, or that seemed to come out of the blue.
And then the writer goes, Ah, got it, I understand. So showing your work to other people is really helpful. And next time I run a critique group, week here at Story A Day, which if you’re listening to this in real time will be February. I generally do them in February, June and October. I encourage you to look out for that, just to get fresh eyes on your writing.
Because if you do want to get published in one of these collections or anywhere, having people who will read your work and do the critical questioning of it that you are too close to it to do is very helpful. I, in the interest of reading a lot, I tend to go through phases where I read a lot and phases where I write a lot.
And then when I’m writing I tend to be pulling and like just getting inspiration from stories I’ve read previously. I have noticed that January tends to be a time when I settle down with a bunch of short story collections and read a bunch. And I’m doing it now as well, largely because This short story collection comes out now and a lot of the prize winners for next year are being publicised.
Things that probably will win prizes next year are being published or hyped or submitted to things so it’s quite easy to find long lists of short stories at this time of year. So I’m going to be doing a lot more reading. So I’m going to be reviving my reading room section at the Story A Day blog. I don’t love reading stories.
I’m thinking I have to write a report on this, so I only post stories that I’ve read that I really liked and have something that I think I can share with you as writers that is useful. So if you come over to the blog and look out for the reading room section you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I’m going to be doing that again. I’m really currently trying to resist the idea of starting a book club around short stories and short story anthologies. I really want to do it but I’m trying to figure out how to fit that in. Because I do a lot of stuff around here already. But I do think it’s so important that we read and discuss what we’re reading and what’s going on.
talking, speaking to us. We do it in the superstars group within that critique week and if you apply and join us just for critique week you’ll get that. I do think there’s a need for us to do it even more. So I’m currently resisting the idea of starting a book club but that usually means that I’m figuring out a way to get over my objections.
So watch out for that and if you’re interested, in that kind of thing, like maybe once a month turning up and talking about a bunch of short stories that we’ve read that month. Send me an email julietstoryaday. org and let me know you’d be interested. It won’t be free because I need to eat but it might be something that’s useful for us to do because as you’ve just heard me talking for 26 minutes it’s really important to read short stories if you want to write them.
And if you don’t think you like short stories, I bet there are short stories out there that you do oh, I meant to go off on a rant about not reading just classic stories or studying classic stories because they’re not what’s getting published now, but that’s essentially what I want to say. Don’t just read classic stories because they’re free and because everybody talks about them.
Yes, they’re part of the tradition, but they’re not what’s getting published now, and I don’t think they would get published now because tastes change. So if I run a book club, it won’t be on classic stories in general. It’ll be on what’s publishing now. That’s what I have for you this week. This podcast has been a little, the timing has been a little sporadic in terms of how many episodes I’m releasing at the moment.
That’s a function of summertime. Summertime has ended, so I’ve also got some interviews lined up. for the next few months. So there’s a new sort of season of this podcast coming and I think you’re going to be hearing from more guests because I don’t want you just hearing from me.
I have lots to say but I’ve said a lot of it. There are 300 episodes of this thing. I’ve said a lot of it. I’m learning more stuff all the time but I think it’s interesting to get guests in here to talk to you as well. So keep an eye out for that. Share the podcast if you’re enjoying it and most of all, Keep writing.
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