The Short Story is Alive(?)

A few entries ago, I came to the realization (for about the thirtieth time) that writing is what I’m supposed to be doing, to be the focus of my creative energy. Close on the heels of that, I received a response from a publisher that was looking at my short novel, “28 IF”. Their comments were that, while the material is “strong”, there is “a little too much philosophizing and not enough action”. I don’t really take offense to that; in fact, the philosophizing was always supposed to be the focus.

I’ve also, from a different source, heard some about the marketing aspects of my story. If you’ve checked it out (it’s presented in its entirety in older entries if you haven’t) it’s structured around the Beatles’ final album, Abbey Road, and incorporates all the lyrics from the album. This source pointed out that it would be a huge legal hassle to obtain the rights for publication, and what publisher in these times would want to take that upon themselves, especially for an unknown author? Again, I have to say that when I wrote the story, marketability was not what I had in mind. I just had an idea that I wanted to get out of my head and into the world.

But all this feedback got me thinking. Of the four major works I’ve started working on (three novels and one screenplay), all derive their structure from someone else’s work. “28 IF” was based on the tracklist of “Abbey Road”, my two unfinished novels are based on Dante’s “Inferno” and Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, and my screenplay “Syzygy” was originally conceived to follow the tracklist and imagery of Tom Waits’s album “Bone Machine”. In that last instance, I did thankfully stray from the original concept, but what keeps coming around is the idea that I’m not clear at all on how to create a long-form structure of my own. I always have to provide myself a guide to follow, even if I don’t always strictly adhere to it.

So maybe, after all this, the short story is really what I should be focusing on. I haven’t been in recent years, because it seems like the market for them has really gone downhill. That wasn’t always the case… when the Internet was first becoming a true marketing force for fiction, everyone was saying that short fiction, especially “flash” fiction that’s even shorter than short stories, would be the main thing, something that someone could digest all in one bite. That doesn’t seem like it’s come to pass. There are exceptions, of course… Joe Hill’s “20th Century Ghosts” and my former high school classmate Julie Orringer’s “How to Breathe Underwater” have been acclaimed short story collections by first-time authors, but on the whole, it’s novels that are the bread and butter of the book industry.

A long time ago, I promised myself that I would follow my muse as closely as I could, letting my mind, and not the market, dictate what kind of books I would write. I wouldn’t try to fit into any particular genre, or write for any defined audience rather than myself. Now I understand that I should extend that promise into the *form* of what I write, as well. If my mind is geared toward writing short stories, then that’s what I should write. One of my literary heroes, Ray Bradbury, wrote almost exclusively short stories. Even his most popular novels, “The Martian Chronicles” and “Dandelion Wine”, started out as story collections until he found a way to string them together. Maybe I can do the same.

And who knows? There may be an untapped market for short fiction out there that I’m just not aware of. I read a book recently that takes place in the 1920s, and I found myself being genuinely envious of a time when a writer could pound out a heartfelt story in a few days, send it to a literary magazine, and have it almost immediately published and read by thousands of people. Even back in the 90s, I picked up more than a few horror anthologies, and found some that contain little gems that I go back to an reread every once in a while. I have to do some research and see an online version of that exists.

Bottom line: I want to write what I feel, what I’m passionate about, what I can’t *not* write, and have somebody else figure out what to do with it. One of the more terrible directions I see the book industry going in is that, as publishers begin pulling back as an economic necessity, a whole set of existing safeguards that protect the reading public from crappy books are being lowered. In another ten years, the New York Times bestseller lists might not be populated by the best authors, or the most worthy books, but by titles whose authors have best learned the art of self-promotion. I can’t see how a person can create quality work, and at the same time work hard enough to get themselves noticed single-handedly. I’ve talked to enough of them on the phone, when they were trying to get their titles posted for sale on Borders.com. Not a single one of them had a title that seemed worthwhile, and when they would send me a sample copy, they were often laughably written and grammatically inexcusable.

I didn’t mean to go off on a tangent about the future of the industry, but my point is this: I’m going to write what I need to, in the way that I need to, and figure out what to do with it later.