Pubspeaks

Writing and Publishing the Literary Short Story: Highlights of a WIW Pubspeak, July 19, 2007

By Kate Blackwell, WIW Member

Overview

Perhaps the biggest distinction between fiction and nonfiction writers is that nonfiction writers already have something to say when they begin. Fiction writers don’t. The most we have is a question. We write in order to discover something.

Writing a story always takes longer than we expect. The modern short story is demanding; it depends on subtlety of language and structural pattern, at least as much as it does on character and situation. Unlike the novel, the ending of a story is crucial. Not because it resolves the narrative events (frequently it doesn’t), but because it reveals what the reader’s experience means.

The American short story’s hey-day ran from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, thanks to mass circulation magazines that have since disappeared or radically cut their fiction. Financially, the prospects of the story writer have probably never been dimmer. At the same time, there seem to be more stories being written today than ever before – experimental, daring, playful, short-shorts and sudden fiction, as well as fully realized stories that allow a glimpse into an entire world.

Process

Beginning: Writing Alone. You won’t find your voice or your material in workshops or MFA programs. You must put in time writing alone. Most of us begin by writing what we see in front of us: a kind of journalism of undigested facts, which rarely turn into good stories. Soon we begin foraging in the past. Memories are far more value-laden and malleable than the all-too-concrete, change-resistant present. We remember for a reason we’ve forgotten. What is it? There’s a story.

A caveat: memory fuels our fiction, but it doesn’t give us the story; imagination does. If a writer is too wedded to what she remembers, she won’t be able to invent anything, or, equally fatal, she may include things that don’t belong in the story because “that’s what happened.”

Middle: Finding a Writing Community. At some point, writer friends who can comment on your work are helpful and even necessary. We can find these friends by taking workshops, attending writers’ conferences and artists’ colonies, and going to readings. Forming a writers group that meets regularly is often a wise step. The comments we get from writer friends aren’t right and they aren’t wrong; they are different from our own views. That is the value of critiques. They show us our biases, challenge our assumptions, and prod us to ratchet up our language or the stakes of the story.

End: Publication. We can try the dwindling mass circulation magazines, but for short story writers, the world of the small literary magazines is one we must enter sooner or later. Here is where most short fiction finds a home, if it does. When we complain about publishing in small magazines that pay us nothing and which nobody we know reads, we must remember that they – no one else – nourish us through the years of writing before we publish a book.

When I had enough stories for a collection, I sent my manuscript to small presses, both university and independent. My experience was ultimately a good one. The qualities necessary here – as all along the writer’s journey – are persistence and patience.

Kate Blackwell has been writing short stories for 20 years and teaching fiction workshops for 14 years. Her collection of stories, you won’t remember this, was published in June by Southern Methodist University Press.

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