I have never really considered myself a short story person. I’m not really very good at writing on that scale, and for most of my life I’ve never been particularly good at reading that literature.
In a lot of ways, I think 2008 will be/is the year that I decide if I can make a go of this “writing” thing. I mean I think it’ll take longer than a year to decide if I’ve been successful at this writing thing, but I think in a year and some change I can decide if it’s something I want to do.
So you might think, given this that I would have made some sort of new years resolution to write a certain number of words every day or week, or to write a novel, or something. Instead, I resolved to keep a record of my reading, and by doing so I hoped that I would read more (though technically I didn’t actually resolve to read more.) Which makes sense, at least to me. It’s important to read, to be familiar with the literature of discourses you hope to participate, and after a very eccentric introduction to science fiction and fiction in general, not to mention several years of hiatus from the genre, I thought it would be good to spend some attention to this shortcoming.
And then there’s the issue that I really don’t grok short fiction very well. Or it is, at least not something that I’m drawn to. I like stories that draw me into their world, that ask me to think about an idea not simply in a “isn’t this interesting,” or “imagine the implications of this situation,” but rather think about all of the possibilities that grow out of the journey/story of the characters in this setting.
So I bought Dozois/Stratham anthology The New Space Opera earlier this year and have read many of these stories, and I’m almost entirely caught up on Escape Pod, and I’ve been reading 365Tomorrows, and I have a stack of old SF magazines that I’ve been picking my way though.
And I still don’t get it.
I mean, I can appreciate a story, and I can almost write a short story,1 and I feel better about being able to speak intelgently about short stories (what people are doing, the mechanics, and so forth), but I don’t get it. I’m going to keep reading short stories of course, but I think at this point, I’m going to stop guilting myself into reading more of them.
So there!
Onward and Upward!
One of my problems is that I often forget that short stories don’t have to be super short–I sometimes just assume that short stories have to be 2000 words or less–for example, it’s not unusual for a short story to be about 6,000 words.
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