Tag: short stories

Word Count

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What is the perfect length for a story?  Well, I’m sure there is no agreement in the world on that.  And I must confess I have enjoyed books that go over a thousand pages (counting the “Lord of the Rings” as one story) and short stories that barely cover a handful of pages.

But I have an opinion and since I get to throw it out onto the internet for as long as I can pay for my hosting costs, I feel I should elaborate.  After all, I have to write my five hundred words tonight.  Although that length is hardly a perfect length for a work.

I believe that between 10,000 and 35,000 words is the sweet spot for telling a story.  I think that’s somewhere between a long short-story and a good-sized novella.  So, I’ve rejected the majority of modern novels and definitely all of the thousand-page potboilers that have been in fashion for the last few decades.  And look, that rejects the “Lord of the Rings!”  Well, hear me out.

I think long books are by nature composite creations.  They consist of a bunch of chapters strung together to get our hero from Point A to Point B.  And in my opinion each chapter (or at most a few chapters together) is a separate story.  This is like a play or a movie having multiple acts or scenes.  You string those together and you tell a larger story.  But usually in a movie or a play there is a climactic scene when all of the emotional power of the story is unleashed.  If the writer is exceptionally skilled, he can drag out the emotional interest from the beginning of the story until this climax.  But no matter how well-written the longer story is it doesn’t have the same impact as a shorter work that can be digested in one sitting.  Even a long movie has the danger that it can overtax the watcher’s attention and patience.

I think that if I kept my work within that 10,000-35,000-word range I could make the maximum impact on the reader.  Of course, 10,000 is really close to the minimum that can result in a rich word-picture.  But I think if an author works carefully to paint a vivid sketch of a scene even the 10,000 should yield a memorable story.

Of course, I am painfully aware that the commercial market for shorter fiction is essentially nil.  I was reading recently that science fiction short story magazines and collections don’t sell at all.  So that guarantees that authors will continue to pump out door-stops.  And honestly, the longer episodic genre books are perfectly enjoyable just as they are.  But in my opinion the true masterpieces of writing are a shorter type of story that weaves a tapestry in front of the reader’s mind in a unified effect that goes from beginning to end in a single story arc that satisfies the reader’s interest in the subject and provides a legitimate conclusion to the story.

Well, anyway that’s how it seems to me.

Short Fiction Collected

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I have an old beat up collection of Ray Bradbury’s short fiction.  It’s called “The Stories of Ray Bradbury.”  It was published in 1980 and contains about a hundred of his stories.  These stories appeared earlier in a number of short story collections that came out over the years that Bradbury was writing.  And he also wrote after this collection came out so there’s nothing original or definitive about this collection but it contains most of the short stories that his reputation was based on.  And because it is such a large selection (almost nine hundred pages in a 9.5 X 6.5 hardcover volume), there are great stories and poor ones.  There is fantasy, horror, something like science fiction and even nondescript fiction.  And because it was written over the course of about forty years it changes.  The emphasis, the stylistic touches, the topics all change.  But the voice is always recognizably Bradbury.  For the most part he is interested in the people.  The science is not the story.  In fact, most of the time it’s just the excuse for poking and prodding the people and watching them react.  It’s a pleasure to walk through this old volume and relive old stories and find out how I’ve changed over the years.  Have my preferences changed?  Yes.  But my likes and dislikes have mostly remained the same.  Possibly I’m a little bit more sensitive to the quality of the prose rather than the surprise in the ending.

It’s interesting to consider that science fiction short stories have been declared a dead field.  No one buys the stories either in book collections or in magazines (paper or electronic).  And that strikes me as a sad situation.  So many of these short stories contain wonderful ideas and characters and images that stir the imagination.  But somehow, they no longer have any value in the present world.  Can that be the permanent state of literature?  I guess it could be.  Capitalism is ruled by the law of supply and demand.  So, there’s no demand for short stories.

Well, that’s too bad.  Maybe the future will include a manner for artists to exhibit their works for people similar to how musicians currently perform concerts.  A live presentation where the audience listens to the story or watches a video presentation of it in a format that can’t be pirated and therefore has value as a single use experience.  All that’s left is the memory of the story.  Of course, that’s what movies were but now they’ve also lost their value.  So maybe not.  But I find a book of short stories to be a treasure trove.  A hundred stories and maybe fifty are very good and ten are wonderful.  That’s a pretty impressive collection.  I think any prolific author would be satisfied with that track record.

One thing that Bradbury liked to do was string together some of his short stories into a larger framework.  He did this with turning his Green Town stories into “Dandelion Wine” and his dark carnival stories into “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”  And what that shows me is these short stories can be the seeds for longer fiction.  But if no one reads them and rates them how will these seeds ever sprout.  Oh well.

Thoughts on Jack London’s Short Story, “To Build a Fire”

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When I was young, every high school English curriculum would include a review of some classic short stories and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” was inevitably among them.  And rightly so.  Within the space of seven thousand words London casts a spell that draws you into the inhuman realm of winter in the Yukon.  We barely have a thumbnail sketch of the protagonist; “the man” and his unwilling accomplice; “the dog.”  But we learn the tragic details of what can happen when a man ignores the physics of arctic winter weather.

‘At the man’s heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolfdog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man’s brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink along at the man’s heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.’

…

‘Already all sensation had gone out of his feet. To build the fire he had been forced to remove his mittens, and the fingers had quickly gone numb. His pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pumping blood to the surface of his body and to all the extremities. But the instant he stopped, the action of the pump eased down. The cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow. The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. So long as he walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed away and sank down into the recesses of his body. The extremities were the first to feel its absence. His wet feet froze the faster, and his exposed fingers numbed the faster, though they had not yet begun to freeze. Nose and cheeks were already freezing, while the skin of all his body chilled as it lost its blood.’

…

‘A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.

…

He drifted on from this to a vision of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek. He could see him quite clearly, warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe.

“You were right, old hoss; you were right,” the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek.

…

Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog’s experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.’

London reveals the emotions and thoughts that race through the mind of the man as he tries to escape the consequences of his terrible mistake.  But at every turn he’s thwarted by the limitations that cold have imposed on his failing body.  And we listen to his thoughts as his time runs out and he accepts his fate.

Jack London created a remarkable story.  There is no filler.  The story only includes what is needed to paint the picture of a tragic human tale.  And I will say that if I ever write anything half as good as, “To Build a Fire,” I will consider myself an accomplished writer.  Well done Mr. London.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 24SEP2024 – Death of SF Magazines

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I have always enjoyed the shot story format. For a while, in the 60s & 70s, some of the big name authors were competing with each other to write a complete story on the back of a picture postcard. Some of these were amazingly good!
As for Analog, I gave up on it a long time ago (30 years?). Their Science Fact articles were all doom and gloom:
“We are all going to die and thee is nothing you can do about it!”
Or:
“Here is why FTL travel, Nuclear fusion, laser defenses, etc. won’t work and cannot work.”

And, to me, the Fiction was woke before woke was a thing. So I stopped buying after I realized I had a years worth of issues that I had not read and could not motivate myself to read.
I suspect that Analog (and maybe the others) got infected by the same liberal women who took over the NY publishing houses.

Another datapoint: I recall talking to a successful SciFi author in the 80s who switched from writing short stories to novels. When asked why, he said: “Its just as hard to sell a short story as a novel, but novels pay a hell of a lot better.”

BTW, Photog, another non-woke publishing house is Chris Kennedy Publishing.
You might consider sending him a copy of your novel.
https://chriskennedypublishing.com/

In Praise of Brevity

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Warning:  What follows is profound.  Extinguish all smiles and assume an air of philosophical introspection.  It will probably help to slightly furrow your brow.

Polonius said that “brevity is the soul of wit.”  And since Polonius was a windbag I feel that I am in good company praising it.  Maybe it’s because of Amazon and the payouts on Kindle reads.  But for whatever the reason we live in the age of the mega-novel.  More than that, we live in the age of the endless book series.  Sometimes that’s a not a terrible thing.  I’ve been enjoying the Galaxy’s Edge series.  They’re a lot of fun.  But hand in hand with this emphasis on long novels, short stories have sort of disappeared.  I freely admit that statement is an exaggeration.  I’m currently reading a collection of short stories taking place in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter universe.  There are short stories to be found.  But I can only imagine the meager income an author would earn if he limited his efforts to short stories.  I mean, what does Amazon pay an author if someone reads a ten-page short story?  Five cents?  You could see how that would limit grocery purchases.  So, I do not fault the authors who need to eat for gearing their output to the five hundred-page novel.  And the same goes for the series.  Characters that have proven popular are the obvious candidate for more success for an author.

But I want to throw my weight behind short stories.  A good short story is like a good poem.  It is concentrated creativity.  Without a doubt, Dickens or Tolstoy can create an epic creation of many hundreds of pages with a huge cast of characters that are lovingly depicted in amazing detail.  Reading this work is a feast of literary pleasures.  Without a doubt.  But if a master craftsman writes a short story barely two dozen pages long it can be a revelation.  Like some kind of minimalist sketch, he can use a few brush strokes to bring life to a story or a character.  And the effect can actually be more vivid than the grand epic.  Carefully done, the few words can resonate with the soul where the hundreds of thousands merely numb.

I love short stories.  Let me clarify.  I love really well written short stories.  Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, Jack London, Kipling.  And in science fiction, Sturgeon, Ellison, Dick, Aldiss.  These authors have produced short stories that stand out as original and memorable.  They leave an impression on the mind that can be indelible.  And of course, not every short story they did is in that category.  But that’s okay.  It’s the exception that proves the rule.  After all it was Sturgeon’s Law that says that “90% of everything is crud.”

 

I’ll list a few of my favorite short stories.  If you feel like playing leave a few of yours in the comments.

To Build a Fire by Jack London

Counterparts by James Joyce

The Dead by James Joyce

And Now the News by Theodore Sturgeon