Walter Cummins

During my years in Iowa City I struggled to learn how to write what we called the well-made story. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered I also had been serving the goals of the CIA. Before that, my assumptions about government control of writers had been shaped by the brutality of executions and soul-deadening physical labor in frozen Siberian gulags. In Iowa my only labor was pounding a manual typewriter, grading undergraduate essays, and—for a time—changing diapers. But the CIA was much more subtle than Stalin. It fought the Cold War by supporting literary magazines like the British Encounter and the Partisan, Paris, and Kenyon Reviews, as well as the teaching of writing. Unfortunately, at the same time the Agency was complicit in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. That certainly was a blatant act. To influence what was being written even before submission for print, the Agency slipped funds to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’ founder Paul Engle, then the only game in town when it came to MFA programs, but eventually the model for the hundreds of others that followed, in great part because many were founded by Iowa graduates who spread across the country. In CIA-speak that might be “infiltrated.” The beans of the CIA plot were spilled in the 2015 book Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett, a one-time Workshop student. Thomas Aubry, in The New York Times, explains that the Iowa model endorsed the values of high modernism: “Good literature, students learned, contains ‘sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.’” This was an aesthetic most of us accepted without question. The CIA had been concerned that Cold War writing would follow the model of the political fiction and poetry that reacted to the Depression by supporting Marxist protests and, in many cases, belief in the Soviet workers’ paradise. What concerned us instead was that so much of the now-forgotten work published in magazines like The New Masses was so heavy handed. Even more, we were opposing the “loose baggy monsters” of Victorian fiction with its dominant authorial presence in favor of James Joyce’s belief that authors should just stand offstage paring their nails. We focused on craft, not politics, with Joyce as one model, the standards of Anton Chekhov behind him. Labor organizer Annie Levin, writing in Current Affairs, claims this creative writing programs’ focus “drained fiction of its political bite.” The CIA had been concerned that Cold War writing would follow the model of the political fiction and poetry that reacted to the Depression by supporting Marxist protests and, in many cases, belief in the Soviet workers’ paradise. Such criticism raises a fundamental question about what creative writing is for. We have many outlets for political statements. Should fiction and poetry be among them? Were we wrong to unknowingly submit to the CIA? I suppose it’s necessary to define what writing about politics means. Should it just mean including characters’ views and conflicts, or should fiction and poetry take a political stance and support a particular position? I can’t help recalling what an author from a country under a repressive political dictator told me about the impassioned writers producing manuscripts in their oppositional fury: “All those people risking death for bad writing.” Of course, the influence of CIA-supported high modernism waned in the later twentieth century with the rise of the Beats and their attacks on prevailing cultural values, with a focus on sex and drugs, and their new approaches to writing. Initially, my cohorts at Iowa rejected their violations of craft; but eventually the Beats won. The Beats morphed into the Yippies and their blatant, mocking political protests. Opposition to the Vietnam war had much to do with that. Even those of us committed to well-made fiction and poetry joined protest marches, burned draft cards, and sent angry letters to editors. Now, decades after CIA meddling, we are free to write anything we wish and hope editors somewhere will approve. Those trying to control us are now elected politicians and school boards who fear exposure to certain subjects and ideas—Don’t say gay. Of course, the influence of CIA-supported high modernism waned in the later twentieth century with the rise of the Beats and their attacks on prevailing cultural values, with a focus on sex and drugs, and their new approaches to writing. Initially, my cohorts at Iowa rejected their violations of craft; but eventually the Beats won. Back to the well-made story that had been my youthful goal: That standard for story writing dominated in the mid twentieth century, resulting from the examples of James Joyce’s Dubliners collection and informed by the writing advice of Anton Chekhov, who expressed six points in an 1886 letter to his brother Aleksandr: 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature; 2. Total objectivity; 3. Truthful description of persons and objects; 4. Extreme brevity; 5. Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. Compassion Added to Chekhov were the standards presented by Henry James in his novel prefaces and essays about writing, where he complained about verbose and opinionated prose. Instead, writers should closely observe human behavior, motives, and the world around them with the goal of delving into the "whole landscape of human feeling, emotion and passion." Today, while many stories are variations of the well-made, the story form is open to a wide range of approaches, including the very experimental. Significantly, a developed narrative arc is no longer an expectation. Successful stories instead can create a specific feeling, mood, or "unity of effect." I doubt that today’s CIA cares.

Although people often use these terms interchangeably, for a closer comprehension of how short stories are made, it’s useful to define each one specifically. The best distinction I’ve found is that of E.M. Forster as restated by Janet Burroway: A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order. A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance. That plot arrangement may often ignore the chronology to adjust the timing of revealed information for maximum impact. The placement of backstory is a common example of such reordering. While backstory is usually considered as the story before the story, it’s more accurately what happened in the chronological story before the starting point of the plot arrangement. The plot may open with a situation in the middle of the story that creates questions about what happened chronologically. If you recall my piece on backstory, I began with a paragraph in which Harvey buys a cheap wine to bring to Ophelia’s party as a deliberate insult. That raises the question of why he is angry with her. The backstory example I concocted explains that in the past Ophelia upset Harvey by constantly referring to his ex-wife, Vicki, when he brought a new woman, Rosamond, to one of her previous parties. The chronological story would begin with the events of that earlier party and then move to Harvey seeking revenge with what happened to his attempt, which we don’t know yet, leading to the conclusion of the story. A alternative might begin with Harvey’s divorce and Ophelia’s angry reaction to it. In that case, the story sequence would be Harvey and Vicki getting divorced, Ophelia upset, Harvey bringing Rosamond to Ophelia’s party, Ophelia’s deliberately calling her Vicki, Rosamond breaking up with Harvey, Harvey plotting revenge, Harvey insulting Ophelia by bringing bad wine her next party, and then what happens next, which still hasn’t been imagined. Those story elements offer the several plot arrangement possibilities. For example, it could start with the scene of Ophelia calling Rosamond Vicki, followed by his plotting to get even, buying the cheap wine, and so on, perhaps with the insertion of Ophelia’s reaction to his divorce as backstory. Or to make the emotions more emotionally overt, the opening could be Harvey deliberately spilling the wine on Ophelia’s lace tablecloth and she slapping his face. Would he spit wine at her? If so, what happens next would have to be highly charged. An example of that opening: “When Harvey knocked over the glass on Ophelia’s lace tablecloth, he said, ‘Oops,’ but the others in the room could tell it was deliberate. After a gasp everyone just stared at the spreading stain, and Harvey wondered what he would do next. If Ophelia slapped him he might throw the rest of the wine in her face, spit on her.” Here’s an optional opening: “When Harvey left the lawyer’s office after he and Vicki signed the divorce papers, the two of them glaring at each other, he found a message from Ophelia on his phone, two words in capitals: YOU BASTARD! With a slash left, he deleted.” Either choice would mean a different plot structure with a unique sequence of events and placement of backstory. As a result, tone and pacing would vary greatly, the spilling starting at a height of the tension, with some immediate action to follow. Ophelia’s text, which isn’t a dramatic scene, calls for Harvey’s thoughts about why she is so furious and his reaction to her, contemplation rather than action. Others involved in the sequential story are Harvey’s ex-wife Vicki and Rosamond, who broke off with him after Ophelia’s undermining. The plot arrangement could give either a role, even a crucial one. Let’s say the ex-wife calls Harvey to defend Ophelia, which ends up changing the written short story into a three character dynamic, with Harvey driven to have insights about his relationships with both women. Or Rosamond could become the catalyst, her assertions forcing Harvey to reconsider what kind of a man he’s been. Whatever plotting choices the author makes the chronological story wouldn’t change. At this point the outcome awaits the results of Harvey’s insulting Ophelia at the party. All of these choices are not unusual in short story writing. The author often doesn’t know the core chronological story in advance, just coming up with a situation and then writing more and more to develop it and see where it’s going to lead. It’s a version of I don’t know what I’m going to say until I’ve said it. That’s the way it’s gone for me and other short story writers I know. In fact, knowing the chronological story often comes last. The start is the raw situation. Then a plot emerges, events depending on other events that can be arranged in a variety of plot sequences until an ending emerges. Finally, once the short story is written, the chronological story becomes clear. Ironically, the plot precedes the story. The unwritten Harvey-Ophelia story is an example. For me, it began with the idea of a scene of Harvey buying the cheap wine to get back at Ophelia. Then, because I had to come up with a reason for him to want revenge, I invented what happened at the previous party. But I still have no idea what his plan will lead to. Perhaps if I concocted a scene in which the ex-wife calls, she will say something to prime my imagination. We write to discover. If I knew the chronological story at the beginning, I’d have no reason to bother telling it.

Although the mantra “show, don’t tell” have been spoken thousands of times in creative writing classes and workshops, the injunction is essentially meaningless. For one thing, it sets up a false opposition, an either-or, as if there is an opposition between showing and telling. But all writing is telling, achieving one overall result because, when a dramatic scene or exchange of dialogue exists, the showing conveys information. That is, it tells. It would be impossible not to. What “show, don’t tell” is really trying to say is, “don’t tell with flat, dull prose.” Bad imaginative writing happens when telling provides information without an iota of showing. But showing doesn’t have to be dramatic scenes or dialogue exchange. The telling must be alive, animated, not merely related. Unlike, say, reportorial journalism that tells us what happened, imaginative fiction makes us experience what happened. Good writers have found a number of alternatives for accomplishing that animation. Techniques of animating include: visual details, lively verbs, personal voice, rhythms, attitude toward the telling—e.g., between the lines messages. The central point is a liveliness behind and beneath the informational content of the words. The language should convey a complexity embedded in and inseparable from the words. Here’s an example of showing while telling in a paragraph from a Lauren Groff story titled “The Wind”: They were so far out in the country, the bus came for them first, and the ride to town was long. At last it showed itself, yellow as sunrise at the end of the road. Its slowness as it pulled up was agonizing. My mother’s heart began to beat fast. She let her brothers get on before her and told them to sit in the front seats. Mrs. Palmer, the driver, was a stout lady who played the organ at church, and whose voice when she shouted at the naughty boys in the back was high like soprano singing. She looked at my mother as she shut the bus door, then said in her singsong voice, You got yourself a shiner there, Michelle. The opening sentence is told information, facts about the location of the children’s home—far from town in the country. But the next sentence does not just report that the yellow schoolbus arrived. Instead, it can be seen “yellow as sunrise.” Next, it doesn’t just pull up slowly. It’s emotionally agonizing, and by implication to the narrator’s mother with the anxiety of a beating heart. Stout Mrs. Palmer as church organist reveals something about the community this family lives. Her voice is auditory for the reader. The final sentence is actual showing, integrating action and dialogue. This paragraph from Tessa Hadley’s story “Because the Night” is even more visual, just about every told sentence a variation of showing: Kristen wore the gauzy, flowery, frilly Ossie Clark her mother had been married in, pulled up above her Brownie belt so she didn’t trip on it; Tom would be in his soldier suit, red jacket unbuttoned, his pistol in its holster slung low on his hip. Their gym daps gave them extra silence and speed. Kneeling among the baked-dry leaves on the stone floor of the greenhouse with the well, they made plans. If the weather had been fine, the glass panes would hold in their pocket of heat long into the evening, pungent with the green smell of tomato stalks, even though no tomatoes ever grew in there anymore—only fleshy, tall weeds that spurted up wherever the rain leaked in, then died and parched to ghosts in the dry spells. The greenhouses were built of brick to about waist height; an aisle ran between raised beds of dry earth and shelves of empty flowerpots. The first two sentences describe what the children are wearing, the third telling about their sport shoes. The next describes their placement on the greenhouse floor. What follows integrates showing of the greenhouse with details of its history, action verbs like “spurted,” “leaked,” “deaded,” and “parched.” Only the final sentence is pure telling. Clearly, the Groff and Hadley paragraphs don’t merely relate information in a series of dry factual sententence. They bring the information to life by animating it through visual details, evocation of emotional responses, sensory allusions, vivid verbs, and the rhythms of the writing.

Let’s distinguish between two kinds of backstory: 1) Situational information that relates to the characters’ ongoing condition and 2) specific past happenings that inform the dramatic issues of the present story. Situational information can emerge just from descriptive statments. For example: Stephanie reached across the rich leather seat of her Porsche for her Gucci bag. Alma Sue felt the rattles of the old pickup truck in her bones as she drove down the dirt road to the feed store. Those sentences tell us quite a bit about Stephanie and Alma Sue’s worlds and their life styles. It’s almost impossible not to give that kind of information when writing fiction. In fact, it could be argued that these examples are not really backstory because they don’t appear to relate to any dramatic issues. But if the sentences that came next were the following, the stories would have the basis for conflict. Stephanie found just a five-dollar bill in her wallet. She didn’t know how she would make the monthly payment on the car’s lease since Donald ran off with the au pair and emptied their bank accounts. Alma Sue broke into a broad smile. Now that they’d discovered uranium on the farm, she’d junk that old rattletrap and get herself a Porsche. Those sentences refer to events that happened before the present story began to bring the two characters to this new point in their lives. The reader knows each women has experienced a significant change but not yet how those changes relate to the specific issues the stories will dramatize. More setup is necessary. Let’s consider another scenario in which an opening does merge situational informational with details of a dramatic tension to be worked out in the full story. Just before turning the corner to Ophelia's flat, Harvey changed his mind. When her invitation had arrived, sure she had sent it by mistake, he immediately decided to show up and bring nothing to her party. But at the last minute it struck him to backtrack to an off-license on the High Street for a bottle of the cheapest Chilean plonk, rummaging through a bin for the ugliest label he could find, dull gray with barely readable lettering. This opening conveys a lot of information, indications that the story is set in England, where the main street of a town is usually the High Street, where an off-license sells alcohol for consumption off the premises, and where plonk refers to an inferior wine. Much more central to the plot is the tension between Harvey and Ophelia, why he is so determined to appear at her party and insult her. The story will need at least one specific incident of backstory to reveal the source of that enmity. Where it appears will be a major plot decision. It could be the climactic culmination, or it could come at some midpoint. If midpoint is the author’s choice, it will explain the tension but not resolve it. Something dramatic will have to happen between Ophelia and Harvey afterwards. Let’s try a midpoint backstory. Before that happens the author will have to present how Ophelia greets Harvey and, especially, how she reacts to the wine. One possibility is the look on her face when she opens the door and sees him. It could be surprise, as if she has forgotten she had invited him, or it could be feigned delight that carries over to her reaction to the wine. Then she would turn and abandon him, leaving him in the midst of a group of people he knows only casually, with his sense that they are uncomfortable having him there. Ophelia reappears with a wine glass for him, saying loudly for all to hear, “Harvey brought this. It’s Chilean.” Then she would ask him, just as loudly, “Where’s Rosamond?” He would mumble, “Rosamond was over months ago.” “How sad,” Ophelia would say, “You made such an appealing couple.” This point is the transition to actual backstory. “I’m surprised you know her name.” Harvey would say. Then the summarized story would go like this: At the last of Ophelia’s parties, where he had been eager to introduce Rosamond, Ophelia insisted on calling her Vicki, apologizing for the mistake at first, then doing it again and again every time she feigned introducing Harvey and his date to more people, finally sputtering laughter and blurting, “I can’t help it. Harvey and Vicki were married for ever so long. Her name just pops up automatically.” Rosamond, more and more furious, finally hissed at Harvey to take her home. They did try one more dinner after that, but it was stiff, and he knew she would never be able to transfer her anger from him to Ophelia. An alternative for revealing the backstory might be to have a tipsy couple come up to Harvey, remembering how funny they thought it had been last time with Ophelia constantly calling Harvey’s date Vicki. They tell him they had laughed about it for a week. This approach would have the backstory come out through dialogue. With the revelation of the source of the Ophelia-Harvey tension mid story, something important must happen to bring that tension to a climax, something that arises from the backstory explanation of that tension. Why did Ophelia want him there? It’s up to the author’s creative imagination to decide why that will be. Flashback: A flashback is a form of backstory more appropriate for the length of a novel than a short story because it is a fully developed scene that shifts away from the immediate action to dramatize a past event. If the Harvey-Ophelia story had, instead of revealing the Vicki incident through exposition or dialogue, stopped the action to include all the details of that previous event, it would have been a story in a story and, therefore, a flashback. For a short story such full elaboration is usually excessive.

Story Openings Story openings now have several goals to accomplish. The first is to engage the reader immediately and create a desire to engage with what will happen. That goal has become more crucial in recent years when readers have so many more choices to fill their time, and not just fictions on a page. Magazine editors abet this pressure because they are bombarded with submissions. Editors don’t have the time or patience to indulge a leisurely writer. More and more decisions as to what stories they will read through are based on the appeal of the opening. Many editors admit that if the first page doesn’t grab them, the story submission will be rejected immediately, the rest unread. People opening a book or a magazine often judge as quickly. A second task of the opening is introducing the dramatic issues of the story, in most cases the frisson of conflict or uncertainty that will become the basis of the plot.. A third task of an opening is to quickly establish the “world” of the story—its place, its space, its time span, its linguistic tone. Here are some examples from real stories. Let’s assume they’ve passed the first text of creating a reader need to learn more about the situation described in just a few sentences, Here is the opening of Nadine Gordimer’s story “Blinder”: “Rose lives in the backyard. She has lived there from the time when she washed the napkins of the children in the house, who are now university students.” Even a reader who was unaware that Gordimer was writing about South Africa during the years of apartheid would recognize that Rose is a servant relegated to a backyard who works for a family affluent enough to afford tuition for their children. At one point Rose had to clean the diapers, nappies, of those children. Those sentences suggest these opposite circumstances will have an essential role in the story and that something will finally cause a clash. Alice Munro also refers to university students in the opening of her story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: “Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs cooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish.” The conditions introduced here are more complex that those of the Gordimer story, much more than just the contrast of poverty and financial security. In fact, the details result in more questions than answers. Why is this upscale home so sloppy? Who is Grant, the one who regards it as luxurious and disorderly? In this case, the details provide a set of unknowns. John Updike opens “Personal Archeology” with this long sentence: “In his increasing isolation--elderly golfing buddies dead or dying, his old business contacts fraying, no office to go to, his wife always off at her bridge or committees, his children as busy and preoccupied as he himself had been in middle age--Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land.” Although this litany reveals a great deal about Craig Martin’s present condition, it also tells much about his life before this moment in his old age, his career and lifestyle. What he no longer has informs his immediate need to fill his time. As little as the reader knows about what happens next with Rose and Grant and Fiona, it’s clear that Craig’s story will be about his confrontation with the emptiness of his now life. His new interest implies that he will discover something significant about the land that may relate to his personal need. The opening of practically any successful story of recent years can be analyzed similarly. In essence, it captures the reader with a why.

Joyce’s Dubliners after the collection’s publication in 1914 established the model of what a short story should be for decades. A protagonist behaves with a misguided notion about the situation he or she confronts but finally has an illumination that exposes the error and achieves an authentic understanding. Epiphanies occur throughout the collection, but the opening story, “Araby,” usually serves as the ideal prototype as it was taught in thousands of classrooms. A young boy fixated on a friend’s sister seeks to go to what is billed as an exotic oriental fair to bring back a gift for the girl. He encounters frustrations and delays, not arriving at the fair until it is closing to realize that it is just a sham and that he has been deluded. The story concludes: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” Not all epiphanies are so self-mortifying, but they share the conclusion of a central character experiencing a fundamental insight. Thousands of fledging story writers took that as an absolute, the one right way to conceive of a story plot, imaging a situation of essential misunderstanding that is finally exposed, often with a shock of recognition. In effect, the story serves as a learning experience for the protagonist. Many of the major works of literature involve significant discoveries, including Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Pip in Great Expectations, Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Huck in Huck Finn, and on and on. In a play or novel, the personal revelations are often multiple, steps building to the big climactic realization, while a short story almost always is limited to one crucial grasping that serves as the resolution of the plot. The character in many ways becomes a different person, usually more authentic. Such a progression seems a natural for a story plot, a shift from the darkness of misapprehending to the light of insight. Mysteries start with dense unknowns and end with clear solutions. Romances—from Shakespeare and Jane Austen as well as pop fiction—move from people out of touch with their actual emotions to the admissions of love. But the character’s epiphany doesn’t have to assure a solution or a happy ending, just a grasp of what’s really going on. It can even reveal a disturbing truth and often does. Story epiphanies rely on the dramatic enlightenment of a major character. But an effective short story can be based on very different premises, alternative paths to an impact that may occur apart from the goal of a character’s illumination. It took a 1997 essay by Charles Baxter called "Against Epiphanies" to counter the dominance of the epiphany story in the 20th century after Joyce. He argued that such stories mimicked the idealistic emphasis on self-help and personal improvement in American culture. He also noted the frequency of false realizations that deceive people in real life. Some writers reacted to the essay as blasphemy, but it led many other writers to consider the limitations of epiphany stories and their formulaic inclination, opting to find other ways to tell a story. One basic approach was to consider who was having the illumination. An obvious answer was that it didn’t have to be a character in the story. Characters could be left to wallow in uncertainly and confusion while the revelation could take place in the mind of the reader, who would be the one to finally grasp what the story situation was all about. Consider a story that probably has been read and taught as much as Joyce’s “Araby”—Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” In the Joyce story, it’s obvious that the boy’s goal is to go to the fair and acquire a gift. In the Hemingway, set in an isolated Spanish rail station, all that’s overtly presented is the conversation of an unnamed man and woman and their actions in and around the station. The story never explains where they are headed and why. That’s all between the lines. Instead of offering an explanatory climax, the story just seems to stop: … He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him. “Do you feel better?” he asked. “I feel fine,” she said. “There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” On the surface the story portrays a snippet of the interaction of two people. But any adept reader would get that she is not fine and many would decipher the reason why. Getting what the story is really all about would be the reader’s epiphany.

The short answer, of course, is that they don’t sell nearly as well as novels. But the core question is why they don’t sell. Let me suggest two possible reasons—story worlds and story characters. A reader has to adapt to the distinct world of every new individual story, even in a collection by the same author. Let me use a travel analogy. You arrive in a city for the first time ever, and it probably takes a few days to first your way around—the shops, the restaurants, the metro stations and bus stops, the route back to your hotel. You may even have to pull out a street map or ask for directions a few times. Eventually, you know your way around and feel confident that you won’t get lost. But then you move on to the next city on your route and have to go through the same process of orientation. The same with people. You’re invited to a party with a group you’ve never known and have to associate names and faces, who is connected to whom and how, along with the nuances of their personalities. After a while, some of those one time strangers become close friends, people you know intimately. But then another party and a whole new group to get to know. It’s that way with short stories. Who are these people? What is the place they inhabit? What’s the issue that confronts them? Finally, you get what’s going on and feel comfortable that world. When reading a story collection you have to go through that adjustment again and again. When reading a novel, you’re usually at home after a chapter or two, and even if introduced to new people or places along the way, they fit into a familiar reality, expanding what you already know and possibly enriching it. It’s similar to a new house being built or a new family moving into a neighborhood you know well. They integrate into the existing scene. Each new story, instead, means the upheaval of a relocation. In short, it’s much more comfortable to read a, say, three-hundred-page novel than a three-hundred page story collection. The novelist presents questions and uncertainties that make the reader eager to learn what’s going to happen next to people you already know or think you know. The answer could come as a surprise, but that’s satisfying, like a new insight to the neighbor next door. A good novel offers the pleasure of spending hours living in and learning about a fictional world with characters you’re eager to know more fully. A story reader seeks the satisfaction of a fulfilled happening that can be experienced in, say, a half hour. The impact may linger in recollection for quite a while, but it’s not an ongoing relationship like involvement in a novel. Readers who buy books are more willing to pay for involvement.

The reputation of a significant novel can survive a weak and even a bad ending. For example, Judy Berman writing “Fantastic Novels with Disappointing Endings” in Flavorwire cited a number of fictional favorites with that problem, including The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, The Secret History by Donna Tartt (“After the book’s big mystery is revealed and manipulative ringleader Henry murders his blackmailer, good-ol’-boy Bunny, the group’s dissolution and plunge into utter lunacy takes a bit too long while the characters’ outsized, artsy personalities nearly verge on self-parody”), Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (“Plenty of great novels end with a protagonist causing her own death, whether on purpose or by accident, but Yates makes the couple’s predicament so bleak and inescapable that we can guess the outcome halfway through the novel—and the lack of subtlety or surprise makes the ending feel preachy”), and Room by Emma Donoghue. I can add some of my own examples, as I suppose any reader could. The fact that many novels, such as the works above, satisfy readers suggests that a novel’s ending is not absolutely crucial. I recall the statement by a group of European contest judges admitting that they gave first prize to a novel with a poor ending because they believed so much else about it was so strong. It’s clear that readers can spend a number of hours so happy with what they read for several hundred pages that they are willing to forgive a lapse in the final ten or twenty. A short story, on the other hand, relies on just the right ending to succeed. Its totality takes only ten or twenty pages, with the narrative tension building on each one demanding that the conclusion offer an ideal resolution of that tension. Otherwise, it’s been a failure for reader and writer. With that need, a story is like a poem, both forms accumulating to a point where the final words—paragraph or lines—bear the full aesthetic burden. Over the twenty years I edited a literary quarterly I remember the dozens of times I was engaged with a well-written story submission, only to be upset by a failed ending. I really wanted that story to deliver on its potential. So often story didn’t. The short story is a very demanding form that leaves no room for error.

When I finished my MFA in fiction, I submitted to the groupthink of my classmates who argued that the way to go for our futures was novel writing. A successful novel meant getting an agent and ultimately achieving fame, fortune, book signings, grants, awards, and for those of us in teaching careers, tenure. We’d become household names, and some of us did, at least in the literary realm. I wasn’t one of those names even though I devoted the next five years to novel drafts and even found an agent willing to shop them around. Two even came out as paperback originals. But soon after they appeared in racks on newsstands they embarrassed me. They still do. In fact, one of my ongoing nightmares has been ending up in some deep circle of Dante’s hell and having to endure those novels read aloud to me again and again for all eternity. After those five frustrating years I admitted to myself that I wasn’t a novelist and didn’t want to spend the rest of my life groping at becoming one. One realization was that my novel’s plot demanded certain chapters to move forward, and I had to force myself to write those chapters. My heart wasn’t in them. How could I deceive a reader to take them seriously? I also didn’t want to spend a year or two delving into the nuances of certain characters as they encountered my concoctions of developing circumstances. As much as I enjoyed reading novels, let some other writer with the patience to turn out thousands of words, trash them, begin all over again, and endure the agonies of all those crucial chapters. What I really wanted to write were short stories. Although some readers assume they are just truncated novels because they involve characters, scenes, and a dramatic question, a story is a very different literary form that calls for a unique approach to fiction making. Although many writers can adapt to the different demands of both novels and stories, I know novelists who have no idea how to write a story. They come up with an idea they think could be a story and find that developing the situation to their satisfaction would take hundreds of pages. And many months. As much as they want to work out a plot, perhaps even more, novelists want to explore a set of characters and their evolving relationships, the effects the behavior of one has on others. Novels present ongoing a series of actions with ongoing consequences. For the most part, for the novelist plots exist as a means to realize the complexity of characters. It’s the opposite for stories. The characters exist for the exploration of a situation. While the characters—at least the central characters—must possess an inherent interest, just one important thing happens to them and that thing creates the tension to be resolved. That was the form of fiction I really wanted to write. In the time I would have devoted to a novel draft I could turn out a dozen, imagining and working out a number of unique circumstances. Ultimately, I published well over one hundred stories along with several collections. Many of those stories are still more vivid to me than they novels I wrote. Rereading them wouldn’t be a punishment. Of course, I’ve never achieved fame and fortune. Now and then an agent would like a story of mine and ask if I had a novel. Not me. I’ve sacrificed the big bucks.