King on the short story

Status
Not open for further replies.

lostlore

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Dec 6, 2006
Messages
188
Reaction score
18
I didn't see this mentioned here yet, but a few weeks ago the New York Times reprinted Stephen King's "What Ails the Short Story," which is the gloomy essay that he leads off the 2007 Best American Short Stories with.

He basically says that the American short story is practically dead, not very well, bottom-shelved in obscure expensive academic mags and almost entirely ignored by mainstream media. He thinks it's going to get even worse in the coming years, not go back to the "stadium act" it was in the days of the Saturday Evening Post. I remain optimistic and hopeful, though -- not that mags like GQ, Atlantic and Esquire will suddenly go back to carrying lots of monthly freelanced fiction again, but that some clever computer-whiz outsider will start up the commercial-literary equivalent of a Drudge Report, Salon or Gawker that carries lots of good short stories, unafraid of current political correctness and taboos, and makes reading stories popular and profitable again, on the Web...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/King2-t.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
 

Jamesaritchie

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 13, 2005
Messages
27,863
Reaction score
2,311
King

We have talked about this. My problem with it is that King makes the mistake a lot of people make. Short stories were never very popular at all with the reading public. There was a time when most magazines carried short stories, and when some tiny few paid a lot of money for short stories, but there was never a time when the reading public was wildly in love with them.

Even in the "heyday" of short stories, only a few magazines survived for very long. Magazines came and went on a weekly basis, and the circulation numbers were never very good, except for the top few magazines, and polls showed most readers, even then, bought the magazines more for the nonfiction than the fiction.

If you look at the numbers, short stories have always been the bastard step-child of literature. There's always been a place for them, and there's still a place for them, in one form or another, in one media or another, but short stories are never going to be wildly popular with the reading public, whether in magazines, or on the internet,
 

JeanneTGC

I *am* Catwoman...and Gini Koch
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Oct 23, 2006
Messages
7,676
Reaction score
5,784
Location
A Little South of Sanity
Website
www.ginikoch.com
Anthologies and book clubs also give you a false sense of short story popularity. My bookshelves are littered with "year's best" fantasy, science fiction and horror anthologies, which always made me believe there were just TONS of places where these stories grew and thrived. As a kid, it didn't dawn on me that I was reading the majority of my short stories from two magazines, only -- Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen. I just assumed there were many other pubs I didn't know about or my smallish town library didn't subscribe to.

There are still many places that take short stories, and thankfully the internet is giving new outlets in terms of epubs.
 

brokenfingers

Walkin' That Road
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 17, 2005
Messages
6,072
Reaction score
4,324
I agree with James and Jeanne.

Plus with the advent of things like youtube etc - I can see the market/desire for written short stories shrinking even more.
 

WendyNYC

fiddle-dee-dee
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Sep 12, 2007
Messages
2,371
Reaction score
1,765
Location
Behind you! Boo.
My local bookstore carries a wide variety of literary magazines. I asked one of the employees how popular they are and he said that they sell fairly well (but nothing like novels, of course).

I think this is probably NOT the norm, but I just wanted to offer a small glimmer of hope.
 

DonnaDuck

My Worlds Are Building
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Sep 9, 2007
Messages
2,883
Reaction score
294
Age
40
Location
Arizona
Website
www.imaginewrite.net
The thing is, though, with those literary magazines, they never carry very many. They might have 5 in stock and that selling out isn't saying much. If there are enough people writing them, and enough people buying them, they'll stick around. Like King said, they have to change with the market. Granted I'm more apt to read something tangible than sitting at a computer and blur my eyes reading. I'm always looking for good short story collections. I don't think it's dying per se, just being overshadowed by the next big technological thing.
 

bsolah

AW's Resident Commie
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 3, 2006
Messages
5,379
Reaction score
569
Location
Melbourne, Australia
Website
www.benjaminsolah.com
Yeah, I like the point King made about short story writers writing for editors and to 'show off' to other writers. In a sense, he's saying that the short story market is cliquey and introverted and unless this changes, it's not going to grow.
 

DonnaDuck

My Worlds Are Building
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Sep 9, 2007
Messages
2,883
Reaction score
294
Age
40
Location
Arizona
Website
www.imaginewrite.net
I think the poetry market is a lot worse but that's just my opinion. Some of the short stories that get published, especially now, I don't understand. They've got a habit of being waaaaaaaaaaay too deep and it seems that that's what makes "good" writing. Why? Why can't something funny be just as good? Does it always have to highlight the plight of the world in order to be "good"?
 

RickN

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 3, 2007
Messages
448
Reaction score
64
Some of the short stories that get published, especially now, I don't understand. They've got a habit of being waaaaaaaaaaay too deep and it seems that that's what makes "good" writing. Why? Why can't something funny be just as good? Does it always have to highlight the plight of the world in order to be "good"?

Funny? You want FUNNY? You can't have 'funny' in lit-ra-ture! You must expose the oppression of the masses, dwell on the plight of the human condition, and share the pain of the this-ness of your being. If people understand your work -- you have failed!

Funny? Bah! This is lit-ra-ture, not Scooby-Doo!
 

RoadBuddy

Registered
Joined
Oct 6, 2007
Messages
20
Reaction score
4
Location
Indiana
And remember the small-town newspapers that used to (I'm talking the sixties) print stories by the episode, stretching them out over weeks--sometimes months.

True, they are seldom found except in literary journals that live on the dusty bottom shelf at Borders. Shame, really.
 

RickN

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 3, 2007
Messages
448
Reaction score
64
That was a joke. A deliberate misuse of the word literature.

Yep. My college English professor was a somewhat pretentious type and always pronounced it 'LIT-ra-ture'. He also had an odd fascination with Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan.

My wife-to-be and I were in that class together back in 1981 and we'll still laugh about that guy sometimes.
 

Shadow_Ferret

Court Jester
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 26, 2005
Messages
23,708
Reaction score
10,657
Location
In a world of my own making
Website
shadowferret.wordpress.com
Hmm. I'm not sure I totally agree with James. There was a time people read short stories -- The Pulps.

And when I first started writing, there were a lot, or at least it seemed like a lot, of short story markets. Writer's Digest even had just a short story market and the paying market's secton was pretty dang thick. Not sure if they still put one out now.

And if you could break into the top publications, Playboy, Redbook, Esquire, you could make a decent living because they paid top dollar.

But I'm going on memory and I haven't paid attention to the short story market in years since I started attempting to write novels.
 

lostlore

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Dec 6, 2006
Messages
188
Reaction score
18
And remember the small-town newspapers that used to (I'm talking the sixties) print stories by the episode, stretching them out over weeks--sometimes months.

True, they are seldom found except in literary journals that live on the dusty bottom shelf at Borders. Shame, really.

Newspapers used to print poetry, too, and that's how a lot of our greats first appeared, like Poe. The Christian Science Monitor's editor a few years back wrote something about the lack of poetry and short stories in our public space, and how awful it was that this has happened -- but he wouldn't take the chance of printing poetry, either.

My theory as to why this has happened is because of the changing of popular fashions from the late 60s onward -- not only have stories and even poetry become generally much more rough or at least cussword-ridden than ever before (how many stories do you ever see in lit journal that compares to an O Henry story in that it would be suitable for a popular newspaper?), but unlike the newspaper-friendly styles of Poe, Whitman, Frost and others, postmodernism is so hard to parse, and newspaper editors know that their readers aren't going to "get" anything from them on the first or second read.

Ted Kooser has a weekly column, American Life in Poetry, in which he introduces a good recent poem from an American poet. The stuff's not obtuse postmodern porn, but it's just good readable poetry. And the amazing thing is that the whole column is free for any newspaper (or web site) to pick up and run. It's also posted online: http://americanlifeinpoetry.org/

Now, I think it's a fabulous incredible thing, but it's also very sad and depressing to consider how very few papers and sites have picked it up. Check your local paper. I bet you won't find it there.
 

lostlore

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Dec 6, 2006
Messages
188
Reaction score
18
There was a time people read short stories -- The Pulps.

People read them in the slicks too but at the time (1920s, 30s, early 40s) there was no television at all and even radio was marginal, so aside from walking down to the movie theater reading magazine fiction was about the only popular entertainment you could get.

And when I first started writing, there were a lot, or at least it seemed like a lot, of short story markets. Writer's Digest even had just a short story market and the paying market's secton was pretty dang thick. Not sure if they still put one out now.
They do but they've combined it with agents, added lots of articles and other things -- if you look back to an edition from even the early 90s, there's a whole lot of listings and the subtext is that if you're good you can make a living at it. Now all that's gone -- in the 2007 edition, you'll see that the listings for commercial markets are about a dozen thin pages, that's all.

And if you could break into the top publications, Playboy, Redbook, Esquire, you could make a decent living because they paid top dollar.
You still can make a decent living writing magazine articles but the perks are fewer and the rights-grabs are nearly universal now. For the biggest mags I don't know of any who don't take all rights for first-timers and even regulars sometimes. Your article may also appear online and in their archives and you can't resell any of it since you no longer own the words, but the pay hasn't increased to reflect all those new rights.

But I'm going on memory and I haven't paid attention to the short story market in years since I started attempting to write novels.
The interesting thing about the decline in short story markets is that books pay much more than they ever did. In the post WWI heyday of the slicks, writers could get a dollar a word for a short story -- and that $10,000 would translate to something like $150,000 today. But by the same token the advances for novels were often more like $1,000 so if you wrote quality and couldn't write more than a novel every year or two you couldn't live on it, and had to write stories.
 

J. R. Tomlin

Banned
Joined
Aug 29, 2007
Messages
598
Reaction score
64
Location
Oregon
Yeah, I like the point King made about short story writers writing for editors and to 'show off' to other writers. In a sense, he's saying that the short story market is cliquey and introverted and unless this changes, it's not going to grow.
AN excellent anaysis.
 

Kate Thornton

Still Happy to be Here. Or Anywhere
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 3, 2006
Messages
2,809
Reaction score
899
Location
Sunny SoCal
Website
www.katethornton.net
My friend Michael Mallory has had success with serialized childrens mysteries in the Sunday Los Angeles Times.

I think there's more interest and money in genre shorts than in literary shorts.
 

Will Lavender

Everything is what it seems.
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 6, 2007
Messages
1,801
Reaction score
355
Location
Louisville, KY
We have talked about this. My problem with it is that King makes the mistake a lot of people make. Short stories were never very popular at all with the reading public. There was a time when most magazines carried short stories, and when some tiny few paid a lot of money for short stories, but there was never a time when the reading public was wildly in love with them.

Even in the "heyday" of short stories, only a few magazines survived for very long. Magazines came and went on a weekly basis, and the circulation numbers were never very good, except for the top few magazines, and polls showed most readers, even then, bought the magazines more for the nonfiction than the fiction.

If you look at the numbers, short stories have always been the bastard step-child of literature. There's always been a place for them, and there's still a place for them, in one form or another, in one media or another, but short stories are never going to be wildly popular with the reading public, whether in magazines, or on the internet,

This may be true in theory, but I've heard of authors making a living on short stories alone. And this wasn't very long ago -- thirty, forty years.

I heard Harlan Ellison say once that he could live for months on a sale to Playboy. Ray Bradbury says in the preface of one of his books that there was a time when he wrote nothing but short stories because they paid the best. Kurt Vonnegut joked once about how radically short story markets had changed; he said in the '40s and '50s, a writer could be paid "quite handosmely" for short story sales.

I agree that short stories have probably, on the whole, never been on top of the literary heap, but it's hard to argue that right now short stories are in a bad shape. As King says, when the academics got to them the stake started being driven in.
 

BuffStuff

No more being nice to Pee D
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 5, 2006
Messages
227
Reaction score
25
Location
Massachusetts
I can only think of a mere handful of writers (less than five) who make a living primarily writing short fiction and those are all writers whose names became established decades ago, back when the short story market was in healthier shape. In the early-mid 1900's there were a much larger number of writers who could support themselves very well writing short fiction. Back then, if you were pretty good you could make an okay living writing short fiction. In the current state of the market, you can't just be good or even very good, you need to be superlative to try to accomplish the same task. And even so, the money is no where near as good (relatively speaking) now as it was then. Jack London, Robert E. Howard etc were making damned close to a killing writing short fiction even before they became "big".

It is sad, yes. But not something that I can see changing. The average person who wants to be entertained for an hour would rather watch a tv program than read a short story. As far as money is concerned, the novel is the writer's domain. People (I'm including both readers and writers) just don't seem to have the same level of appreciation for the short form as they do for novels. Look on Amazon.com at reviews of shorter novels and you'll find many people complaining "I wish it were longer, it's only X pages" and I've read interviews with big time writers who say that they only write short works when asked to write them for an anthology etc.

I'm very cautious in how I say this because I have no evidence to back it up, but I theorize that the short story form tends to give the exact opposite of the experience that most readers are hoping for.

The short story is closer to how we experience 'stories' in real life. It's peeking in a window and getting a glimpse of people we don't quite get to know and will never know again. The 15 minutes of small talk with a stranger who helps you change your tire when your car breaks down. You'll never see him again, but maybe that 15 minutes will stay with you forever because of it. There is a sense of...almost sadness that I feel when I read a short story because the reader never quite gets to know the character's inner and outer life in the same way as with a novel.. but conversely, the short story has always appealed to me as more 'human' and realistic because of it.
 

gp101

Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 16, 2005
Messages
1,067
Reaction score
246
Location
New England
Some of the short stories that get published, especially now, I don't understand. They've got a habit of being waaaaaaaaaaay too deep and it seems that that's what makes "good" writing.

This is why I ended my subscriptions to Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker. Blah. The stories got stranger and verbose. Literary masturbation.

If a magazine, newspaper, or other medium wants to make money, they need a pretty broad audience. And let's face it, they all want to make money. The short stories being churned out today don't meet that criteria. You don't have to write something simple or cater to the lowest common demonator, but something entertaining would be nice. Lots of short stories used to serve a purpose like movies--they were escapism and lent themselves to your fantasies. Lately, they seem to dwell on convoluted misery or strange coming of age slash finding your true self mantras. Not very entertaining to the general public, of which I'm a card-carrying member. New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly get away with "literary" pieces because of their high-brow readership. They no doubt feel they're reading real literature and I'm sure force their way through the ss like a person would with cod liver oil, thinking it was good for them. Yes, I've read some amazing ss in both those magazines over the years, but--for my taste--those stories are far, far outweighed by absolute boring literary self-love.

When will they learn the mainstream prefers sex to masturbation?
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.