January 18th, 2011 / 12:16 pm
Random
Kyle Minor
Random
“We Are Not Experiencing a Short Story Renaissance”
So says Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter, and fiction writing teacher at Ball State University (and formerly in the M.F.A. program at the University of Pittsburgh.) The reason the story has become a dominant form is that the university workshop encourages the writing of stories, not the writing of novels. Her quite reasonable questions: “Do students write stories because they really want to or because the workshop model all but demands that they do? If workshops are bad for big things, why do we continue to use them?”
Here’s the whole essay, at The Millions.
This essay was great. I agreed with like every word of it.
i really don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with teaching the short story, though i do think there should be more of a focus on writing short stories for a performance setting. reading groups aside, novels just aren’t as conducive to a communal setting, and i’ll be damned if i don’t like a good short story in my ear when i go jogging.
i really don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with teaching the short story, though i do think there should be more of a focus on writing short stories for a performance setting. reading groups aside, novels just aren’t as conducive to a communal setting, and i’ll be damned if i don’t like a good short story in my ear when i go jogging.
i really don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with teaching the short story, though i do think there should be more of a focus on writing short stories for a performance setting. reading groups aside, novels just aren’t as conducive to a communal setting, and i’ll be damned if i don’t like a good short story in my ear when i go jogging.
I’d be interested to hear how undergrad workshop leaders deal with this. I’m struggling to find a way myself…
The publishing pressure was left out entirely. As a literary writer one kind of needs publications to be taken seriously by a press. Novels are what publishers want, stories what mags want. Stories are free, novels are to get paid (sort of).
The other issue that’s not addressed is the maturity and authority required to pull off writing a novel. As a grad student I could write a publishable story but was told, rightly, that I wasn’t ready for a novel. I didn’t want to hear it but it was true. It’s rare someone under 35 can really pull it off.
Finally, there’s the low-res model that pairs writer and mentor longterm without workshops, and this seems better suited to long form.
Good essay, and it’s true that the recent glut of short stories is due more to academic coaxing and modern workshop techniques than a genuine rebirth of the form. That said, Zusya’s right – novels aren’t really communal projects due to their size and depth. NaNoWriMo has tried to address this, but I don’t know if that model works in a university setting.
I enjoyed this essay but I think that there’s a problem with approaching this from an either/or perspective. I love writing short stories and I’m enjoying writing “the big thing,” and it would be great go find a workshop model that could accomodate both the short and long form effectively. I have to believe we can do this if we put our minds to it.
I argue for the other way–FLASH. But it is odd to teach as base model a form that is much less read than the novel. There are novel-writing classes in the university, though. I have always wondered how they workshopped. I’ve never taken one myself because the novel terrifies me.
Were I a teacher, I would not adopt a workshop process for the novel, as I also have profound doubts about that’s possibility, but instead would adopt an intensive in-class study of novels themselves (at least 6-12 of them in the year), with a particular eye to the writerly experience of reading a novel, while handling the manuscripts myself along with one other touch which I think is important. Whatever standard we do develop for length and other such criteria being laid out, they would feed their manuscripts every 2 weeks, let’s say, into a kind of communal website designated specifically for this class, where we would carry out the process of discussion and track the evolutions of the various texts. This way we can develop the beginnings of a novel, a novella, or even a full novel, while meaningfully studying novels themselves.
I suppose that would make it kind of like that one website, authonomy or whatever; a kind of collegiate serialization.
In any case, it’s the only thing I can see which meets the practical and pedagogical concerns of the issue, without sacrificing too much to one or the other.
If you look at literature-time, which is more epic, eras in 50-year blocks, we ARE in a renaissance. Chekhov, Mauppassaunt, etc, really spawned something. It’s a modern form and the 20th century was producing short story writers, and readers, before the workshop. Of course, the workshop really amps up the production of story writers, and one could probably trace the explosion of story writers in the 70’s and 80’s to the adoption of MFA programs across the country. Probably it has as much to do with supporting more TEACHERS in these programs. Writers who were sometimes well-known for their stories but probably wouldn’t have been able to make a comfortable living and also continue to writer without the support of the institution. But still a renaissance no matter what the causes.
If you look at literature-time, which is more epic, eras in 50-year blocks, we ARE in a renaissance. Chekhov, Mauppassaunt, etc, really spawned something. It’s a modern form and the 20th century was producing short story writers, and readers, before the workshop. Of course, the workshop really amps up the production of story writers, and one could probably trace the explosion of story writers in the 70’s and 80’s to the adoption of MFA programs across the country. Probably it has as much to do with supporting more TEACHERS in these programs. Writers who were sometimes well-known for their stories but probably wouldn’t have been able to make a comfortable living and also continue to writer without the support of the institution. But still a renaissance no matter what the causes.
Yeah but the difference is before TV the form used to have a popular readership.
I loved the essay and don’t view her comments as a slight against the short story. We’re not experiencing a short-story “renaissance” just because there are more venues that publish short stories and more indie presses. Most of the people who read these publications are still other writers. There will be a short story “renaissance” when there is an actual commerical demand for short stories.