Writing Short Stories

[Walter Cummins]

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.