A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO WRITING SHORT FICTION,
AND TO BEING A SHORT-STORY WRITER
July 1988
First of all, the short story is short.
That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Takes one back to the grand old days of the elephant jokes. Remember them? (If you’re an elephant, you’ll never forget them.)
Q: Why are elephants gray?
A: So you can tell ’em apart from bluebirds.
A short story is short so you can distinguish it from a novel. And that, it seems to me, is the only thing that absolutely sets the two apart. The novel has considerably more words to it than does the short story.
It may be indistinguishable from the novel in terms of its other characteristics. It may have as broad a canvas, as great a time-span, as extensive a cast of characters. All it necessarily lacks is length.
This is not to say that the average short story does not have a smaller canvas, a briefer time-span, and fewer characters than the average novel. But who cares about averages? If you’ve got one foot in a bucket of ice water and the other in a bucket of boiling water, on the average you’re quite comfortable. Big deal.
Consider John O’Hara. Some of his short stories are no more than vignettes, illuminating incidents in the lives of his characters. Others are distinguishable from his novels only by their length; they observe a character over an entire lifespan, doing in a few thousand words what From the Terrace or Ten North Frederick does in a few hundred thousand. Any number of O’Hara’s short stories could have been full-length novels if their author had chosen to tell them at that length. Conversely, most if not all of O’Hara’s long novels could have been told as short stories; while I’d personally hate to see any of them shorter by as much as a word, I can readily see how a short story could be written about Alfred Eaton or Joe Chapin that would essentially tell the story now told at novel length.
Any number of writers have proved this point by telling the same story more than once, first as a short story, later as a novel. “Flowers for Algernon” began as a piece of magazine fiction, and was quite brilliant in that incarnation; when Daniel Keyes expanded it to book length it lost nothing, and to my mind gained from the transformation. (You may know the book as Charly, the title of the film starring Cliff Robertson.)
A couple of years ago I wrote a longish short story about Matthew Scudder, a series detective character of mine. It was my most successful short story, published in Playboy and anthologized in The Eyes Have It, the Private Eye Writers of America’s first anthology. The story, which I had called “By the Dawn’s Early Light,” went on to win PWA’s Shamus award as well as the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar award.
About a year after I’d written it, I transformed the story into a novel, which I retitled When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. I added a couple of plotlines, but basically I turned a 7,500-word story into a 90,000-word novel. The work succeeded just as well at its greater length; it sold well, was well reviewed, was reprinted in paperback as Berkley Charter’s lead title for the month, and was nominated for both the Shamus award and the Anthony Boucher award. (And missed them both, dammit.)
The point of this is not merely to boast—although I don’t doubt that’s part of it. But I mention it primarily to demonstrate that the same material can serve as well at greater or lesser length. The plot and characters of my most successful short story became my most successful novel.
I hammer this point home because one so often hears people talking about the short story form. I do not believe that there is any such thing. The short story is not a form. The short story is a length.
We all know what a novel is. A novel, Randall Jarrell has told us, is a book-length work of fiction with something wrong with it.
One implication of this definition, as far as the short story is concerned, is that the short story need not have something wrong with it. A short story can aspire to perfection.
There is, of course, some hyperbole here. Some prosaic license, if you will. A novel does not have to have something wrong with it. Novelists are not like the pious weavers of oriental carpets, purposely incorporating an error in the design because only the Almighty is perfect. Nor does a short story have to be perfect—and a good thing, too, because so few of them are.
Still, the novel is ever so much more forgiving. In comparison to the short story, the tautest of novels is a brawling sprawling loose-jointed creature. It has so much space and so much going on that not everything has to be gemlike in its perfection and polish.
One poorly turned sentence, one ill-chosen word, does not in the ordinary course of things sink a novel. But such a weakness can utterly blunt the point of a short story.
I don’t know that this makes one harder or easier to write. What it does mean, I think, is that a short story must reach a higher level of technical excellence if it is to succeed at all.
Faulkner said somewhere that every short story writer is a failed poet, and every novelist a failed short story writer. I think I know what he’s getting at—we use more words to do what we could not manage with fewer. I wonder if he’s right.
There are novelists who cannot write decent short stories. There are short story writers who are utterly at sea when they attempt a novel. There are some who seem equally at home at either length.
I suppose you could say that every poet is a failure, too, that the truly successful wordsmith would be one who could reduce his whole message to the world, his entire primal cry, to a single short word.
And there are days when I have a good idea what the word is.
Let’s talk for a moment about the economics of short story writing.
If you don’t care about money, skip this section. On the other hand, if you care only about money, skip the whole article. And forget about writing short stories. Because they don’t make any real sense from a strict economic standpoint.
This has not always been the case. In the 1920s, back in the heyday of the slick magazines, short story writing could be enormously profitable. Some of the top magazines paid as much as a couple of thousand dollars for a story. The dollar has fallen on hard times in the past 60 years. It is now but a shadow of its former self, and yet only a handful of magazines pay that much nowadays.
There are good, sound reasons for this. It doesn’t mean the world has gone to hell and the writers, as usual, are getting it in the neck. The role that the short story once played in American popular culture has been taken over by the television show. The sort of people who used to read four short stories and a serial every week in The Saturday Evening Post now watch Dallas and Dynasty and L.A. Law and look to magazines for topical nonfiction.
Similarly, the role of the pulp magazine, a training ground for a great many writers and a graveyard for a good many others, is filled by the paperback category novel. People who would have read western pulps 50 years ago now read western paperbacks. Yesterday’s love pulp reader is today’s reader of romance novels. And so on.
The result of all this is that there is not much of a market for short fiction. There are relatively few places to sell most stories and the rates of pay are, for the most part, nothing to get excited about. It is virtually impossible to make a living writing short stories nowadays.
(I cannot say it is flatly impossible because I know someone who has been doing it for years. As you might imagine, he writes a lot of stories.)
If you think in dollars-and-cents terms, as most of us have to do most of the time, you will very likely find better ways to spend your time than writing short fiction. Joe Gores, who writes short stories better than most people, told me a while back why he had largely stopped. It took about as much time, he explained, to write a short story as to write a teleplay. For the short story he might get two or three hundred dollars, plus another hundred or so every couple of years from anthology use. For the teleplay he’d get five or ten thousand dollars, plus residuals.
It seems to me, then, that the only real reason to write a short story is because you want to. And this, for a writer, is sometimes reason enough.
In my own case, I nowadays write a short story only when I happen to be struck by an idea that I genuinely like. I can’t make a living this way, but in other respects it’s not a bad state of affairs. Short story writing never feels like drudgery because I do it only when it’s what I want to do. Not long ago, for example, I wrote half of a short story and decided I didn’t like it much. There was nothing really wrong with it, and I knew how to finish it, but I wasn’t crazy about it.
So I threw it away. Big deal. I wasn’t tossing the rent money. I wasn’t making a great sacrifice. As financially unrewarding as short stories are, I can feel free to abandon the ones I’m not crazy about.
And, if short story writing is a lousy way to turn a buck, it’s a hobby with occasional rewards. In my own case, I’ve had two collections of short stories published in book form. They have not made me rich, but they came out in hardcover and got reissued in paperback, and in a sense every dime I get for them is money for old rope, as our English cousins say. Because I already got paid for these stories, some of which I wrote 25 years ago, and they don’t owe me a thing.
And, once in a while, a short story brings in other income. After you’ve written enough of them, it becomes a frequent thing to get picked up for anthologies at $100 or so a shot. Sometimes a television show comes along and dramatizes a story, paying the author several times as much for the privilege as he received for the story’s initial publication.
There are subtler financial rewards as well. Sometimes a short story will draw the attention of an agent or publisher who will want to know if the author has given any thought to the idea of trying a novel. Such an expression of interest is no guarantee of anything, but it doesn’t hurt.
Is the short story a good training ground for the novel?
That depends.
In Writing the Novel, and before that in my WD column, I’ve argued that it’s easier to get started writing novels than short stories. The novel is easier to sell and demands less in the way of technical facility to write. That would certainly seem to make it a more inviting place to start, but that’s just not true for everybody.
In my own case, I must have published 20 or so short stories before I wrote a novel. I could not possibly have done otherwise. When I first started taking perfectly good sheets of blank paper and marring them with words, I was able to write only very short pieces. It was difficult for me to sustain a fictional idea for as much as fifteen hundred words. I had read hundreds of novels, but I was a long way from having the sense of what a novel was and how a human being would go about fitting one together.
By writing a lot of stories for low-paying (and thus reasonably accessible) markets, I learned things. I discovered how to construct scenes, how to narrate, how to characterize. I didn’t amass data on these subjects. I learned experientially, by doing it.
At the same time, I validated myself as a writer. I was writing stories and getting paid (if you can call it that) for them. I was seeing them in my print, under my byline. I was developing a confidence in my ability to put words on paper in such a way that people would actually read them with something approaching pleasure. I would need every bit of this confidence when I leaped into free-fall and essayed my first novel.
And, while I was writing, I was reading other people’s novels. The writing I was doing enabled me to see past the surface of the books I was reading. I read less as a pure reader and more as a writer, and I began to develop an intuitive sense of what a novel was and how a mere mortal might set about writing one.
Just about a year after I first sold a short story, I wrote my first novel and in due course placed it with a publisher. Perhaps I could have gotten to the same place by spending the same amount of time writing novels instead of short stories. But I don’t really think it would have worked as well for me.
There’s another way, too, in which the short story can constitute a superior training ground. And that’s purely the result of its length.
Because short stories are short, you can write ten or twenty or thirty of them in the time you might spend writing a novel. And you will almost certainly encounter more variety in those ten or twenty or thirty stories than you would expect to encounter in a single novel. You will very likely employ different narrative voices, explore different fictional themes, try out different settings, and put together not one but ten or twenty or thirty plots.
This is not to say that you will learn more from those stories than you would from a novel. You might. You might not.
In a classroom situation, however, I’ve come to believe that short story writing makes for a much more interesting and stimulating couple of months. I proved this to my own satisfaction a few years ago when I conducted a three-month workshop under the auspices of Mystery Writers of America. The first time I led the workshop, most of my students were working on novels. Each week they would bring in another chunk of their novel and everyone would read it. In several instances they had been working on their novels long before the workshop began, and they would still be at work on them after it was over.
It made for a dull and static class. The weeks went by and the manuscripts got longer, farther from their beginnings if not discernibly closer to their ends. I never felt that Student A would learn a great deal from Chapter 14 of Student B’s novel that he hadn’t learned anywhere in Chapters 1 through 13. And God knows I got bored reading the same stuff week after week; I can only assume everyone else did, too.
At the short story workshop, everybody brought something new each time. Occasionally I would give assignments, so that a week’s work would be united by subject or theme or some technical aspect. The students got much more involved in the class; it may not be entirely coincidental that, unlike the first group, they bonded early on and took to going out for coffee in a body after the class session ended. And, while this is by no means the only criterion, or even the most important one, several of the students sold stories written for the class.
And I had a good time, and learned a lot—which was why I had gotten involved in the class in the first place.
To write short stories, read short stories.
That ought to go without saying. To write anything, one is well advised to read deeply and widely in one’s field. The object is not merely to see how other people do things but to install in one’s subconscious mind a synthesis of what works and doesn’t work.
It’s also sometimes important to know what has already been done. This is more often the case with short stories than with novels, because some short stories work largely because they incorporate a wholly original idea. (A novel generally depends less upon its central idea.) If you are going to write short fiction in a particular category—mystery-suspense, say, or science fiction—you will have a better chance of selling if you are familiar with the greater body of work in the field.
What should you read?
Not just the best stuff. If you just read classics, you may despair at ever producing anything a fraction as good. And, because the very best short stories seem to have sprung all of a piece from their authors’ foreheads, or even to have been dictated by some celestial being and only transcribed by the human whose byline they bear, it’s often hard to learn from the very best work. The bones don’t show. You can’t see how it was done.
Mediocre work is easier to learn from.
Similarly, the best way to get a sense of how some admired author does what he does is to read a whole ton of his work, one story after the next. This, incidentally, is often a very ill-advised way to read for pleasure. Subtle ways in which a writer repeats himself, imperceptible when the stories are read at intervals, become apparent when you read them one after another.
I recall reading a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, one right after the other. A character in one story had lead-colored eyes. I thought it a nice touch. A character in the next story had eyes the color of pewter. A few stories later, someone was described as having eyes the color of yet another base metal. Antimony? Tin? I don’t remember. What I do recall is that what had looked like acute observation initially soon began to look like a trick, and none too subtle a one at that. And I would never have noticed if I had read the several stories a few days apart.
When a story runs to no more than 1,500 words or so, it’s called a short-short.
Once again, one hears talk about the short-short form when what we’re really dealing with is not a form but a length. It’s a popular length with both readers and editors, and you often hear editors complaining that they don’t see as many good short-shorts as they’d like.
Readers like them, too. They seek them out, anyway. How many times have you picked up a collection or a magazine of short fiction, checked the contents page, and read the shortest stories first? You are not alone. Millions of people do this. They don’t necessarily enjoy the shorter stories more, or even expect to enjoy them more. Perhaps the underlying thought is, “If this is lousy, at least it’ll be over soon.”
Short-shorts are at once easier and more difficult than short stories. Easier and more difficult to write, easier and more difficult to sell.
Just as the novel is a more forgiving form than the short story, so is the full-length short story more forgiving than the short-short. With only 1,500 words to play with, you had better make sure they’re the right words, and in the right order.
In addition, a short-short often isn’t much more than a developed idea. Since the idea plays so great a role in the short-short, it has to be a strong one.
(In a novel you barely need an idea. “A boy grows to manhood.” “A family evolves through five generations in a Texas town.” “A marriage falls apart and then is saved.” Twenty people could sit down at the same time and pick one of those ideas, and twenty publishable novels might result. With hundreds of pages to move around in, it doesn’t matter how many times the idea has been used, or how ordinary it is.)
The same elements that make the short-short difficult also make it easy. Because the idea is so important, a sufficiently good idea can sometimes make up for weak execution. Similarly, with so little space to move around in, the unpolished writer has less room to make mistakes. His story may be no more than one extended scene, and in any event will probably not cover a great timespan or carry a large cast of characters. For the new writer who finds it difficult to get his arms around a big story, the short-short may feel safer and more comfortable, more manageable.
A large proportion of short-shorts have a surprise ending of one sort or another. A surprise ending does not have to be wholly unpredictable to every reader in order to be successful. The more sophisticated readers—and editors certainly belong to this group—know that a surprise ending is nothing to be surprised about, and tend to anticipate them; thus an editor may purchase (and a reader enjoy) a story whose ending he sees coming, as long as the story remains effective and as long as the ending seems to be one that will take most people by surprise.
Sometimes, though, a particular editor will see your ending coming all the way from page 1, and will consequently be unfavorably disposed toward your story regardless of its other excellences. Conversely, sometimes a rather pedestrian surprise ending will take one particular editor utterly by surprise, and will do so without seeming to have come from out in left field, or to constitute cheating the reader. The editor will buy the story—and it may be the same story the first editor rejected.
Which goes to show that, once having decided you’re happy with a story, you must market it relentlessly.
Speaking of surprise endings. If you are just starting out, or even if you’re not, you may someday write a story—probably a short-short—in which we find out at the end that the characters are a) dead or b) a dog and a cat or c) Adam and Eve. Or d) all of the above.
Don’t ever do this.
You don’t need an agent.
Nor, if you are only writing short fiction, does an agent need you. If, as we’ve already established, there’s no really sound economic basis for writing short stories, what do you figure 10% of that economic basis amounts to? If you write a story, send it around to half a dozen markets in turn, and finally sell it for $300, at least you’ve got something to show for your efforts. You won’t rush out and buy a Corvette, but it’s something.
If an agent does this, he makes $30. If he’s one of those grasping swine who charge a 15% commission, he gets $45 for his troubles.
Not too surprisingly, most agents don’t want to bother doing this. An agent may accommodate his book-writing clients by marketing what short fiction they also happen to write, but he’s doing them a favor. And it’s not always all that much of a favor; since the agent doesn’t deal much with magazines, he may not be as closely in touch with the market and its requirements as the writer himself.
Some magazines, however, have announced that they are unable to consider unagented manuscripts. What’s a short story writer to do?
Don’t rush out and tell everybody, but I’ll let you in on a secret. Just because a magazine says this doesn’t mean it’s 100% true. If you present yourself properly, if you know how to back in the door so it looks as though you’re on your way out, if you can slither in through the keyhole instead of dropping down over the transom, you can get read.
I’m not going to spell out how to achieve this. If you can’t figure out a way, you probably don’t have a sufficiently inventive mind for fiction-writing anyway.
One more thing about agents. Just because an agent won’t drool at the prospect of marketing your short fiction doesn’t mean he won’t be impressed by it. He’ll only want you as a client if you’ve written or are writing a novel, but he may be more favorably disposed toward you as a novelist if you’ve amassed some decent credits with your short stories.
The late mystery editor Lee Wright told a friend of mine some years ago that anything you happen to publish in a magazine can’t hurt you, but that it might help you. In other words, if someone in the business reads a magazine piece of yours, fiction or nonfiction, and thinks it’s lousy, he won’t hold it against you. He’ll figure maybe the editor screwed it up, or maybe it got cut too severely, and anyway it’s only magazine writing, it’s ephemeral, it doesn’t matter. But if he reads something and loves it, it’s to your credit.
Short stories should be fun.
They’re demanding, certainly. All good writing is demanding. Even when it flows effortlessly, he who writes it is taking pains, consciously or unconsciously, to get it right.
All the same, a short story rarely involves the sort of drawn-out exhausting labor of a novel. While novels, too, can be fun, they typically include stretches that are about as enjoyable as trench warfare, long hard sessions of slogging through mud. Novels, too, commonly contain chunks where the writer has some trouble figuring out what to do next. (An outline is no sure protection against this. You wind up trying to figure out what to do now that you realize the outline doesn’t work. Same difference.)
While short stories can similarly evolve as they are written, and ought to hold some surprises for their authors, it is possible to hold an entire short story in the mind in a way that one simply cannot with a full-length novel. The author may not be wholly in control—I suspect you are never entirely in control of good writing, that it must have a life of its own and be given its own head—but he has less sense of being out of control. There’s the story, clear in his mind, scene by scene. All he has to do is write it down.
And it won’t take forever to do it, either. Some short stories are written in a single session. Others take a few days. It is, of course, possible to spend an infinite amount of time on any piece of writing, but unless something goes awry it rarely takes a productive writer longer than a week to finish a short story. It is thus possible to complete the work before any of the initial inspiration and enthusiasm for it has faded.
It is also possible to take greater pains with a short story. Stanley Ellin, an absolute master of the short story, would rewrite endlessly as he went along. He wouldn’t write page 2 until page 1 was just as he wanted it, and confessed that he had once rewritten his opening paragraph more than 40 times. Mr. Ellin went on to write hefty novels, and abandoned his perfectionism when he did. You can’t work that way on a novel—you’d never finish it—but you can if you write short stories, and are willing to spend a great deal of time on each of them.
If you want to sell a mystery short-short to Woman’s World, pick up the magazine every week and read the short-short. Buy every back issue you can get hold of and read those short-shorts, too. Subscribe to Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock and read them cover to cover. Go to the library and read detective story anthologies and single-author collections. Get Woman’s World’s guidelines and study them.
When ideas come to mind, play with them until you see how you can fit them into the framework of a Woman’s World short-short and tell them in however many words the stories run. Work on each one until it’s just right, and then send it to Woman’s World. When it comes back, send it someplace else. If it sells, congratulations.
If you want to sell a short story to The Atlantic, read all kinds of short stories. Chekhov might be a good place to start. Read novels, too. Also cookbooks, encyclopedias, back copies of TV Guide, and the backs of cereal boxes. Look at sunsets. Cultivate your garden.
When you get an idea for a story, write it. Don’t pay any attention to whether the theme or length or style is appropriate for The Atlantic, or indeed for any particular market. Concentrate exclusively on making it the very best story you can write. If it gets completely out of control and runs on for 80,000 words, do not despair. You have not failed as a short-story writer. You have succeeded as a novelist.
This probably won’t happen. In all likelihood you will wind up with a short story. If you think you could improve on it, do it over. When it’s as good as you can get it, stop.
Then read it and try to guess what magazine’s requirements it comes closest to fitting. Submit it—to The Atlantic, perhaps, and then to The New Yorker, and to Harper’s, and to Esquire and Playboy and . . . well, it’s your story. You figure out where to send it. After the higher-paying markets have all returned it, try the low-pay ones. When you run out of them, send it to the ones that pay in copies.
If, somewhere along the line, it sells—congratulations. And, if it doesn’t, so what? You’ve written a good story, and that’s largely its own reward.
Meher Baba, the Indian holy man, was a powerful spiritual leader and teacher. He was also the sort to make Calvin Coolidge look like a blabbermouth. At one point Meher Baba did not utter a sound for 18 years.
The greatest teachers don’t really have to say a whole lot; much of their message seems to be transmitted at the psychic level, and being in their presence is of itself a transformational experience. Nevertheless, when a fellow goes 18 years without saying a word, his occasional utterances get listened to with respect.
One thing Meher Baba liked to say was: “Don’t worry. Be happy.”
If you’re going to write short stories, those words belong on the wall over your desk.