length – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

Poets and Writers: Authors on Short Stories

By chance, I surfed my way into Poets and Writers online today and was very fortunate to fall into their videos of “Authors on Short Stories”. I was pleasantly surprised to find that perhaps the author who is the subject of many, if not most, of the videos is Stephen King, who answers questions, discusses the craft of writing short stories, and reads from his works. You should not miss his talk on the difficulty of writing short stories and the trickiness of writing novellas. There is also a video with comments by several current short story writers on the difficulty of writing short stories, which echoes Mr. King’s comments on the difficulty in writing short stories.

I was surprised, though I probably shouldn’t have been, to hear Mr. King talk about the artistry of Raymond Carver in writing short stories. I have read one collection of Carver’s short stories (Where I’m Calling From) and they are nowhere near the horror genre, though they are great examples of mainstream literary storytelling as an art form.

Mr. King’s point about Carver’s stories is that he was a master of keeping stories short, which Mr. King finds difficult to do. He says that he often starts a story and before long it is ballooning into a novel. Raymond Carver had a great ability to keep his stories very short. As I mentioned, I have read a Where I’m Calling From and all the stories in it tend to be very short. I am guessing in the 2,000 -5,000 word range at most. Although I tended to find them boring at the time I read them in the mid-eighties, I have to admit that when I look back on them now, I am amazed at the depth contained in each.

Though I am only a fledgling writer with few stories to my credit, I am already learning that I share one thing in common with Mr. King: I find that I often start writing a short story and before I am very far along with it, it balloons into a potential novel, of which I have about three or four that I work on from time to time. In fact, as I have mentioned in a previous post, I have started exploring the distinctions between short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels, because so many of my planned short stories are developing into novelettes and novellas.

It is amazing how a story seems to take on a life of its own and grow whether you want it to or not. It is very difficult to keep a story to within a limited number of words. King mentions that this is one thing at which Carver excelled. As I said, when I read Carver’s stories, I found them boring. But now that I am pursuing the craft of writing much more seriously than I did then and I reflect on King’s statement, I can appreciate the enormous difficulty Carver must have had in keeping his tales so compact. I am only now starting to appreciate Carver’s artistry. I should probably go back and read more of his works just to better my own writing. I guess I am maturing in my art.

However, just because this post is turning out to be longer than I had intended does not mean that I am maturing in my art. It just means that once again I am being longwinded and that I have a tendency to ramble.

If you have a chance, it would be worth your while as well to check out the works of Raymond Carver. Though he is not an author of horror, he has a lot to offer to the study of writing as an art.

Thoughts? Comments?

Slattery’s Tao of Writing, Part 4: “Warehouses and All”

Lovecraft in the Agony of ContemplationIllustration by MirrorCradle — Lovecraft in the Depths of Contemplation
Illustration by MirrorCradle

A problem I have encountered over the last few months is that most of the short stories on which I am working are too long for most publications, but too short to publish as novels.

Most magazines accept short stories of about 2,000 words. Above that, there seems to be a law of inverse proportions : the more words your short story has, the fewer publishers who will take it. Unfortunately, lately I find it difficult to write a story in less than 10,000 words.

Usually, I start with a simple concept for a story, but as I write, I see more and more details coming to light, details I think are important to understand what is happening in the story. I keep whittling down the words, contracting here, expanding there, omitting this and that, keeping the story as lean and muscular as possible while fleshing out the story enough so that the reader can live the story vicariously, but somehow the story keeps growing.

There is a school of thought that stories are out there in the literary ether, just waiting for the right author to come along and give them birth. That is certainly the way it seems at times. We could expand that comparison even further and say that stories are also like babies after birth and each will eventually grow to a certain size–whether we want it to or not. But we have much more control over the size of a short story than we do the size of a baby.

Here is a link to one of my earliest stories, “Sudan“, which was published by Ascent Aspirations several years ago. It has 2,095 words. It is not a work of horror. It is by my current standards rather amateurish. I based the story on a rather poignant story told to me by a former US assistant agricultural attache to Sudan, whom I met in Luxor, Egypt in 1989. That story lingered in the back of my mind for some time, almost haunting me, as if it had always been waiting to be told to the world and it refused to pass up this chance, before I finally wrote it down. It was published by Ascent Aspirations in August, 2002.

In 2009, I came across www.sixsentences.blogspot.com, which challenges writers to tell a story in six sentences or less. The assistant attache’s story still touched me after twenty years, so I decided to see if I could tell it in six sentences. I did. I changed the title and location and submitted it as “Warehouses and All“.

While the original Ascent Aspirations version was good, I believe the Six Sentences version is much better, more powerful, more poignant, perhaps because it is more compact.

Both these stories have exactly the same meaning. Which length suits it best? It is hard to say. Ultimately, deciding the length of a story depends upon the effect the writer wishes to instill in the reader. I do not think there is any way to concoct a rule of thumb about how to determine the length of short story. The writer must simply have a subjective feel for what length is appropriate. That is part of the art of writing.

There are probably many wonderful stories out there that cannot find a publisher because they do not fit the space constraints of most publications. The reality of the literary world is that publishers do have space constraints and if a writer wishes to be published, he will have to conform to those constraints. But this should not be seen as a brutal, demeaning demand for an author to butcher one of his stories as if he were a literary Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac on a stone altar. It should be seen as a challenge, an opportunity for personal growth as a writer, because then one is forced to look seriously, impartially, critically, and clincally at the work, and to ask oneself, “What is it that I really want to say? What do I want the reader to experience? How can I make this more powerful, more meaningful? What is the essence of this story?”

You may find that while it is challenging, it is not impossible to pack the meaning of 2,095 words into six sentences and still achieve the effect you wish to impart.

Now, if you will pardon me, I have to go listen to my own advice.

Thoughts? Comments?

Ginsberg’s Breath Units

Allen Ginsberg, 1978

Photo by Ludwig Urning

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…

So run the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl“, considered by many to be one greatest works of American literature. One aspect of the poem that has always fascinated me is that Ginsberg wrote it in what are often called “breath units”, i.e. each line comprises the amount of words that should be spoken with one breath. I have experimented with breath units or something similar in both prose and poetry. One example is my poem “Faust“, which was published by the Hollins Critic in 1992.

I have found that when used in prose, breath units can be effective in breaking up rhythm in order to emphasize a point. For example, imagine a sentence as equivalent to a breath unit. Write a very long sentence and try saying it in one breath. It is as if you are trying to say something in a hurry. Use that long sentence to describe fast-moving but extended action, such as a martial arts masters exchanging blows in a match. To me, it seems as if I am in the fight while trying to describe it. Now use three to four of these sentences to describe the entire match. Then use a very short, indicative sentence to describe the final blow dropping the defeated master to the mat.

Here is an example of the use of my use of breath units in my story “A Tale of Hell” (published by Midnighttimes.com in 2006). Note that here I start with two short sentences, then follow them with three long sentences, and then conclude with one short one for emphasis.

He wanted to make love. He did not want just sex. He was not interested in his own orgasm as much as he felt an overpowering desire for the smooth texture of Theresa’s skin; the velvety brush of her nipples across his face; the sight of the light playing upon the delicate, minute hair covering the back of her neck; the tickle of her breath as it flowed around the contours of his ear. Above all else, he wanted to hear her voice, that voice that sometimes changed into a shrill nag when he wasn’t paying attention to what she said, or when he forgot to pick up something at the store, or when he neglected to call and tell her he would be late for supper. Now it dawned on him: over the years she had put up with a lot more crap than she should have. He wanted to apologize.

I have no doubt there are other technical names for this technique when used in prose, but I do not know them. It is a technique use occasionally. To my mind, prose breath units should be used sparingly or they lose their impact. I think they have a great potential in horror literature if used properly, because they can lead a reader very fast to a point that is suddenly emphasized by an unexpectedly abrupt hall–sort of like sprinting around a corner only to run face first into a brick wall.

So, I guess the question for tonight is: are you familiar with this technique and do you know it by another name?

By the way, I had never thought of it before, but isn’t that first line of “Howl” very much in the horror vein? I am wondering if “Howl” couldn’t be used as an example of horror in many ways, though it was almost certainly never intended to be viewed as a work of horror.