Kelley:
Recently I have been reading a short story book by Jeffrey Deaver called “Twisted Stories.” Reading the book, and comparing it to similar books I have read by Stephen King and Dean Koontz, leads me to one question I have about short stories.
I like to think I am good at reading character, in people in general. So my question is can a good writer, reverse that type of process, and give a reader a good solid character in a short story?
It’s especially obvious in Deaver’s book that characters take a back seat to get a good shock by the ending. Surely you can manage a short story while still giving your character some depth if movies can do it, it’s a very similar format in pacing and length. Thoughts?
I absolutely believe that three-dimensional, emotionally true characters are possible in short fiction. I would have to put a fork through my forehead if I didn’t (grin), since those are the kinds of stories I try to write.
I agree with you about Deaver and many, many other writers of short fiction, particularly in crime/thriller genres. I’ve read very few short stories in those genres that paid much attention to character. In those stories, the point is the twist at the end, the shock (the big reveal, they call it in screenwriting). Some science fiction is like that too, although much more SF these days tries to focus the “cool idea” through the lens of character. Some people are more successful than others.
And some writers just don’t do short stories very well.
And some writers believe short stories are not to be taken as seriously as longer ones, which makes me exceedingly grumpy. There’s a school of thought that says novels are “better” than short stories because they are longer, more complex, require more carefully blended layers. Et cetera. I think it is certainly true that novels are more work than short stories; they take longer to conceive and longer to write. What pisses me off is the assumption that doing more work automatically makes a work more worthy, and therefore short fiction is automatically lightweight not just in word count, but in intrinsic value. Stories certainly can be lightweight, sure — you’re reading some right now. But they can also be luscious and dense and have as much layering, pound for pound, as a novel; and to create compelling character in 5,000 or 15,000 or 25,000 words is neither an easy nor a less worthy thing to do.
Not sure I agree with you about Stephen King. I think he’s a master of character. There’s no one who does a particular American voice and manner like he does, and with such obvious love for his characters, even the real shitheels. I love his work. If you’re not finding enough character in the shorter stories to interest you, then I highly recommend any of his novella collections (writing as either Stephen King or Richard Bachman): Different Seasons (amazing stuff, including Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body), Four Past Midnight, and The Bachman Books, which are actually short novels but rip along so fast they feel like novellas.
I’d love to hear anyone’s recommendations for short fiction with great characters. Let’s talk.
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And if anyone wants to start a different conversation, just use this link (or the Talk to me here link on the sidebar). It may take me a little time, but I will respond — I love these conversations.
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Edited to add: Jocelyn just turned me on to the short review “where short story collections step into the spotlight.” A brief wander through the site already tells me that there are plenty of collections out there dealing with character-based fiction…. so let’s all go find something good to read.
Also check out their blog.
In my poor, benighted days back before I saw the light, I thought much the same way—that short stories were a “lesser form” than novels. Then I started trying to write them.
Hrrumph.
In many ways I find short stories harder to do than novels, because everything has to be done so economically. And the character aspect is more critical because you don’t have time to build a relationship, it has to already be there (if not exactly between the character and reader, without a doubt between the character and the writer).
I just finished reading David Marusek’s collection “Getting To Know You” and I can tell you, without character as the anchor, these stories would be little more than macabre cool idea stories. It is the emotional weight of the character that turns many of them into legitimate tragedy.
I think one of the differences between crime fiction and other forms is that in the crime/mystery genre, the MacGuffin informs all character—it being the reason they’re drawn together in the first place, and the subject being life and death makes it immediately personal–but in most others, character informs the MacGuffin–since there may be no obvious reason these people had gathered around this idea/event.
Maybe.
I’ll look for the Marusek collection, thanks. And while I’m here, I will point readers toward a couple of your stories that I really like, “Gestures Too Late on a Gravel Road” and “Private Words.”
And FYI for the people coming back for the comments, I edited the original post to include a link to a site I’ve just found, the short review. I’m looking forward to exploring it.
I’m with you on the relationship between the character and the writer. I think it makes an enormous difference in any fiction, but the more I ponder on it, the more I agree that it’s got to be there full throttle right out of the gate in a short story.
I get really bored with a lot of what I call New Yorker fiction, you know? Where the tone is cool and considered, the characters feel as if they are people I am watching from across a very large room, and then instead of ending it just
Lucius Shepard is another writer whose characters are alive right from the start, and he’s writing mainly short fiction.
I slogged my way through the entire The Short Stories of John Cheever once, just to see what the fuss was about. He epitomizes that whole New Yorker thing you mention. I found maybe two whole actual stories in the entire 900-plus-pages. Elegant style, but essentially he was writing vignettes.
I’ve gotten into heated arguments over story length with people who defend the 1000 to 1500 word length “slick” publication seems to demand. Unless you’re a genius, a thousand words is just getting started. Difficult to do character and plot in less than three thousand. Four to six thousand seems more like it. My own work has averaged seven thousand plus.
But more than that, there seems to be an underlying assumption that “breaking a sweat” is eschewed in New Yorker fiction (unless it’s in bed). That having to actually go through, you know, Things in order to achieve the cathartic transformation that signals character growth or change is somehow passe or distasteful. All such transformation must be entirely internal, triggered by some sort of revelatory experience over hor d’oeuvres.
At novel length, this aesthetic becomes insufferable.
We seem to be in a time wherein so-called genre fiction, regardless of which genre, can be lumped together as fiction in which Stuff Happens.
Neither of these is quite on-topic, but wanted to post a couple of vaguely relevant links:
1. Way back in 2000, I wrote an editorial for Strange Horizons titled “Brevity Is the Soul of Fiction: A Paean to the Short Story“; thought y’all might find it of interest.
2. In 2004, I posted a blog entry linking to a great many sites that review short sf. Something like half of those sites and blogs are now defunct, but several of them are still going.
–jed
@hnu — Definitely yes on Shepherd (and nice to see you here!)
@Mark — Go ahead, make me laugh some more (grin). Hor d’oeuvres, indeed. I agree with you on the aesthetic of “stuff happening.” What interests me is that it’s this same aesthetic — sans character work — that some lazy writers, cynical writers, and tourists use to pump out the Johnny Cardboard In Space stories that so often seem to be the only thing the wider world thinks of when they think of science fiction. Well, they say, it’s sci-fi, it’s not supposed to be deep, ya know?
Urk.
@Jed — Nice to see you here too. And thank you for the links, I appreciate them. I enjoyed the editorial, especially what you said about focus and personal scale. That’s certainly where I live as a reader and a writer.
Ha, ha: “”Johnny Cardboard in Space stories…” What a succinct summing up, Kelley!
I’ve been mulling over this discussion of short stories for weeks, now, liking to feel assorted stories bubbling up from the swamp of my years of reading. How does Chekhov fit into these ideas…what about Raymond Carver…and finally two stories kept tugging at me so that I went pawing through the shelf here at the library until I could find and re-read them. The first I first read in a high school anthology: Wallace Stegner’s “Blue Winged Teal” (which appears in his collection, THE CITY OF THE LIVING) In it a grown son is hanging around his father’s life, post loss of mother, and he alternately seethes with youthful anger and melts with a very human longing for insight. In high school I couldn’t “get” why it all mattered, but the use of the duck imagery haunted me for years. Rereading the story this week, I’m amazed at what a small universe of living breathing people and compelling complex emotions a short story can hold. An imaginary world is EVOKED, as Jed H suggests can be true when not every detail is filled in. And in the story, recognizeable bar room, small town events tease the reader into meeting hearts that are challenged. Stuff Happens, as Mark T. says seems to be true in genre fiction AND insight accumulates without being shouted about. But what about a story where very little happens? There’s a Eudora Welty character that has been walking and walking through my mind ever since I met her, probably when I was browsing off assignment in grad school. That would be Augusta, that bent over granny moving through the woods in “A Worn Path.” It could be she snuffles and gimps along in my brain cells because I so prize walking where leaf shadow dominates. Or? because it’s a very very quiet story and I frequency crave the mystery and delicacy of unspoken realms. (Far too many words in the world for me.) So there she is, just making her way. It’s a pilgrimage, it’s a clash of cultures, it’s a tragedy…and it’s “just” a short story.
As to the “stuff happening” bit….firstly, superlatives should always be eschewed (ahem).
Secondly, there is stuff happening and then stuff seeming to happen and then seeming like stuff happens. You can arrange them in the proper hierarchy as to what would make a story worthwhile.
I seem to recall a short story from long ago that involved little more than one person trying to come to a decision, and talking it over with, of all things, a pen. Then the decision Happens. It was significant because it was an important aspect of Stuff.
See rule about superlatives…
Mark, I seem to recall that story too .