Part 1: Why I read short stories
I think an appreciation of short stories is an either/or case. You either like them, or don’t. There’s no sliding scale of like/maybe/perhaps/no.
I happen to like them. A lot. I don’t publish a lot of them (although more than some authors) because, alas, they don’t sell very well, giving me the impression that SF readers don’t like them as much as novels.
And I do love novels. Don’t get me wrong. My favourite stories are big, thick sagas high on details, history and high stakes.
But, I also love short stories. I love reading them and writing them. They’re a different species from novels, and a well written short story can deliver all the impact of a novel…but you’ll feel the impact days after reading it, too.
I was exposed to short stories very early in my reading life and have been reading them ever since.
Of course, most of us are introduced to short stories in high school, but none of us is left alone to simply enjoy a story and fall in love with shorts. We’re told what to read. I was directed to Carver, Hemingway, Oates and Chekov. Worse, we’re often told how to read it. Then, to add sin to syntax, we’re forced to surgically dissect a story, ruining it for all time.
For example; I can’t remember the story or author anymore, but I do remember the day my English class was broken up into groups to discuss the story. The five in my group looked at each other self-consciously and tried to figure out the theme, which we found difficult because there was so little action or dialogue in the story to hang a theme on.
Our English teacher stopped by and asked how we were doing. We mumbled a few answers that failed to satisfy her. I squirmed on my chair—and I remember the flat-panel wood-and-steel-frame chairs distinctly because of this moment. The chair I was sitting on rocked, because one leg had pushed through the rubber stopper on the end.
The teacher shook her head. “The theme is suicide,” she said firmly.
We all looked at her. Huh? Where did suicide come into it? The character was sitting in a room, thinking about the lunch date she was going to have with her sister the next day.
Finally, one of us had the moxy to ask where the hell suicide figured into the story.
“The curtains are blue,” the teacher told us. “They’re a symbol of death. She’s thinking about killing herself.”
And off she sailed to the next group of students.
I remember that vividly, because in the story, the curtains had been mentioned once, along with the observation that they were dusty. The curtains had been buried in a much (much!) longer description of the room that had left me with the impression of a bland room in a characterless house that I would never want to visit.
Part of the problem with deconstructing literature in high school is that you’re still a child, lacking decades of life experience that would allow you to recognize symbols and sub-text and sophisticated meanings that aren’t spelled out.
But I’m sorry, just because curtains are blue does not mean someone is suicidal. I don’t have to earn decades of life experience to know that is a very long reach indeed, one that doesn’t hold up on basic examination.
There were zero hints or implications that the character was depressed or thinking about death. The whole story centered around having to meet her sister the next day and how much she was looking forward to it, which contradicts any idea that she’d be on a mortician’s slab by then.
That experience and many others, when I was told by teachers or other students that I was wrong about my interpretation of a deadly boring story, left a deep burn scar on my soul. I have never voluntarily read literature since. I avoid it with deep shudders.
On the other hand, there are fun stories, and these were the kind I read voluntarily. I found anthologies in the school library and consumed them. These were genre fiction stories. Mysteries and suspense, mostly. Some historical tales, or fiction that was so old it had become historical. Fantasy’s heyday, which started around the time Terry Brooks published his The Sword of Shannara in 1977 and hasn’t really stopped since, was still a couple of years away, so there was little of that.
Thrillers were huge but there were few thrillers on the high school library’s shelves. However, my very large municipal library had dozens of them and when I read them, I understood why the school library didn’t shelve them. They were filled with crimes of passion, sexual innuendo, and morally bankrupt characters doing terrible things.
Reading them did not make me yearn to steal millions and kill people who might rat on me. If anything, they taught me that breaking the rules generally wasn’t worth the effort. I had read enough fiction by then to understand that these stories were meant for entertainment, that they weren’t roadmaps on how to live one’s life.
I had been reading voraciously since I was six years old. When I was seven, my family moved to a tiny town in the Western Australian wheatbelt, and reading was my only form of entertainment.
That is not an exaggeration. There was no TV, and radio reception was uncertain. The nearest cinema was a hundred miles away. There was no theatre, no malls. The town had five houses, three general stores, a wheat silo and the school. Not much else.
In addition, the only other kids in the town were boys, who weren’t interested in playing with the one girl in the area. Everyone else at school lived on farms.
So I read. And my mother ordered in books to feed my habit.
Even then, I was reading for fun. For the sense of wonder. For adventure and to live interesting lives vicariously.
At the age of thirteen, when I moved to a much larger town and started high school, I was introduced to the perils of literature, while simultaneously raiding the shelves of the high school library. Even then I split the two forms of reading into “have to” and “want to” and I ignored literature as much as I could.
As for the “want to” reading, if the story was good, I’d read it. But I especially loved the short stories, because I could delve into different worlds quickly, absorb them and move on. I could be delighted by a story ending far more frequently when reading shorts, while a novel required days of effort to reach the pay off.
Then, when I was fourteen, Star Wars was released. They didn’t call it A New Hope back then. It was the first and only movie, and I was obsessed with it, and wanted to live in that story world as much as possible.
I began reading all the science fiction I could get my hands on.
Also, I began writing SF. In fact, I wrote the first unofficial and completely unsanctioned sequel to Star Wars. My English teacher caught me writing it instead of whatever exercise we were supposed to be doing in class. He read it, then told me to write something original, which I did. The resulting space opera romance was my first original story. I haven’t stopped writing since.
Science fiction, especially Golden Age SF (generally, SF from the mid 1930s through to the early 1960s), which was all our rural libraries had on the shelves, was thick with short stories, for that was where nearly all the classic SF authors got their start. The magazines were stuffed full of short stories.
Some of those magazines are still in business, including Asimov’s Magazine, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There are some who linger in different forms, like Amazing Stories. Other magazines didn’t last. But the short stories in them did survive, for a great many of them found a second life in anthologies. These collections of SF shorts were published and found their way onto library shelves, and then into my hands.
I wallowed in short stories for a great many years. I didn’t remain exclusively in SF, either. I read everything. The only genre I refused to read was literature.
When I was an adult with means, I bought the books instead of borrowing them. Many of those anthologies I was forced to sell to raise money to move to Canada in the late 1990s. But I remember them well. Some of them I would love to re-acquire, but they’ve never made their way into ebook form. There was an anthology of flash fiction I remember particularly well, including a one sentence story called “The Sign At The End of the Universe.”
The single sentence story is:
To which the editor had added the perfect note: Relative to what?
I would credit both the author and the editor for this mind-twisting fiction if I could, but I can’t find mention of the story or the anthology, despite heavy research.
It thrills me to this day just how much SF is still to be found in anthologies. There are collections put out every year. However, the other genres have not fared as well. There are far fewer suspense and mystery anthologies and there are virtually no romance short story collections or anthologies.
Just in case I’m leaving you with the impression that all I read were short stories, let me clarify that I spent a lot of time reading. Even when I went to high school, my family lived on an acreage outside the town, so hanging out with friends wasn’t possible. My reading habit continued without interruption. I read novels of all genres, and probably split my reading time fairly evenly between shorts and longs. I was omnivorous.
One of my favourite authors to collect was Isaac Asimov. He wrote SF (check), and lots and lots of short stories (another big check mark). Later in his career, he also aimed to write at least 200 novels or non-fiction books, which he managed to do. I collected his Opus 200 that celebrated that achievement.
Opus 200 is a book of interstitial essays interrupted by novel and non-fiction book excerpts. It remains one of my favourite books to read, because not only did Asimov like talking about himself and his writing, he managed to make it sound fascinating. He was patently in love with writing and learning. I think my drive to write a lot of stories came from him. He made it sound like fun. And he certainly made the research and acquisition of knowledge that would be required to write many stories sound even more intriguing.
Opus 200 wasn’t the first collection of Asimov’s to feature his interstitial essays. A great many of his short story collections contain interstitials (interstitial = “in-between”), and I always enjoyed them. They gave me a glimpse of the publishing industry that I would one day be a part of. They also let me see how a productive fiction author works and thinks.
I also grew to like interstitial essays in any collection or anthology. Editors of short stories sometimes add a few words of their own, and authors putting out collections of their short stories frequently do. They all give you a glimpse of the author’s life or the editor’s love of fiction.
So when I started putting out boxed sets (known in traditional publishing as omnibuses), I added interstitials between the novels and short stories.
Under my real name, I have published two novel length tales that are all one “frame” story chopped up by short stories. The frame story acts as the interstitial scenes.
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Short stories have been with me since I first learned to read, and they’ve shaped how I experience fiction—both as a reader and as a writer. They’re compact, potent, and often unforgettable. Next week, I’ll be diving into the other half of this passion: why I write short stories. (Spoiler alert: it’s not just because they’re fun… although that’s part of it.) Stay tuned!
Latest releases:
Quiet Like Fire
Solar Whisper
Ptolemy Lane Tales Omnibus