by Alfonso Reyes ||

We all, as writers, learn about the short story before just about anything else in our prose classes. It’s the perfect medium for workshopping (ie., no longer than your peers’ attention spans and just enough to showcase your skill), and if you want to submit to a journal (again, attention spans of the editors) or apply to a grad program (which typically requires a 10-20 page portfolio), you’re all set. But is there anything else to the short story? Is it just a stepping stone to every fiction writer’s magnum opus—to their Great American (or otherwise) novel?

Consider for a moment the other traditional genres of creative writing: poetry and creative nonfiction. Poets aren’t expected to debut with an epic, nor are they expected to labor over one for the majority of their careers; poetry collections are the norm, and recently, with poets like Rupi Kaur and Courtney Peppernell retaining their mainstream popularity, two-to-three line mini-poems have stayed in the limelight. As for creative nonfiction, essay collections are just as popular as memoirs, and unlike in fiction, there doesn’t seem to be as much of a clout requirement for a successful collection of shorter works. What makes fiction different?

In my opinion, the issue isn’t with the short story—it’s with the literary fiction community. In an environment where outside of a few limited spaces, endurance is seen as a virtue and longer works are praised for their ability to hold a reader captive for days or even weeks rather than hours, the myriad qualities of the short story as an art form are tossed aside. Unlike the common misconception that the novel is akin to a feature film while the short story is simply an episode from television, it’s easier to think of it as the opposite. Novels, with their extended plotlines (and the details that directors always miss) are more like entire television shows, with a cast of characters that you grow attached to and plenty of time devoted to each plot development. The short story, on the other hand, is like a movie: the scope can be grand and the characters rich, but everything needs to be more or less wrapped up in an hour or two. Except for a few rare cases, movies are not disregarded or looked down on for this quality; rather, we praise the script writer and the director for crafting such a compelling story and world in such a short span of time. In many ways, we do this in fiction, too, but only for well established writers whose novels have already convinced us enough of their skill that we feel picking up a short story collection is a safe investment.

I would go so far as to argue that short stories are arguably more difficult than longer works like the novel. Sure, there are some benefits to writing a shorter work that can’t be ignored—I once spoke to an established poet about her process, and she laughed about how her partner, who writes creative nonfiction, could write one essay longer than her entire book of poetry. We talked about how much easier it is on the conscience to toss out a two- or three-page poem or leave it in a desk drawer for later than a 50-page essay or novel draft. The same is true for a short story. If something isn’t working after 10 pages and I’m halfway through, I’m not going to feel as bad setting it aside and working on something else than I will when on page 150 of my novel, I feel stuck. That being said, short stories are just as much a feat of artistic ability as longer works. The nature of the short story is almost poetic. With so little space, each sentence has to pack a punch, and each word needs to fit perfectly in the puzzle. If there’s an odd line of dialogue or a strange synonym on page 37 of a novel, I’m less likely to notice than I would in a piece that I’m reading over the course of 37 minutes. The short story writer doesn’t get the slack to drag on in exposition or be lazy with their diction; they need to emotionally affect their reader in what limited space they have.

So maybe that’s why the literary community has largely left the short story for emerging writers to play around with—it’s just plain hard to do well. We trust the big names in fiction to give us short stories because we already know that they can write (although whether they’ll be good at short fiction is another discussion entirely), but after seeing so many lukewarm short stories, the community has their defenses up. I’m not arguing that emerging writers should move away from the short story, because I think it’s a great way to flex the writing muscles without committing to months of labor, but I’m arguing that writers all over embrace the short story for its limitations and its virtues. Ultimately, the short story is like a liquid; it’ll fit where you want it to go. It can be a quick exercise or a portfolio piece, but its also capable of brilliance, and it’s time we give it the credit—and chance—that it deserves.