To Write As If No One Will See What You’ve Written: Why the Short Story Won’t Go Away

Every now and then, like clockwork, a piece surfaces questioning the relevance of short stories in our current times. The Guardian mused in 2018 about what exactly a short story is and why we should bother reading them. These articles feel like rituals, reminiscent of those found in works by Shirley Jackson and Kafka. We're presented with a troubling genre or character, scrutinized, and questioned about its place.

Why does it not belong? The feelings evoked are complex—a mixture of sympathy, guilt, disdain, and disapproval. Could it be simpler to abandon this entity, discard it, or suppress it? The supposed disdain for short stories stems from a historical association with middle school English; a five-question quiz on a story like “The Lottery” or “The Gift of the Magi” often follows.

Reading them is often equated with homework, not pleasure. Short stories, much like middle school students, possess an awkward size. They don’t seamlessly integrate into today's media landscape. Unlike personal essays or poetry, they have yet to find their niche on the internet, despite numerous attempts. A brief spark of hope emerged when Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person" went viral in 2017, but it was a fleeting moment.

Why is this? Since a short story can be read in one sitting, just as Poe defined it, shouldn't this make them more appealing, similar to Modern Love columns or Gossip Girl rewatch podcasts? Not really. Short stories require intense focus, sometimes demanding a suspension of the usual language rules for a brief period. It's challenging to read one after another, especially on your phone.

They don't come across as relaxing. There are short stories with varying emotional depths, but it's easy to comprehend why readers shy away from committing too much attention to them. Short films exist in diverse emotional states, but the idea of frequently over-committing your attention is understandable. Perhaps we are drawn to longer forms of content in today's world.

Television series outpace standalone feature films. Franchises like Dune or Spiderman are popular. Fantasy series stretch across thousands of pages. The preference for quantity over intensity seems to prevail. This also holds true for fiction scholars—people who presumably value stories the most. Outside of creative writing programs, few literature professors teach classes or write books on short stories.

Literature professors often focus on novels, as if shorter forms of fiction are nonexistent. This observation highlights a crucial aspect of short stories: even those who should respect them often feel ashamed to be linked with them. The subversive strength of short stories is inversely proportional to their popularity and academic credibility.

Throughout the genre's short history, great short story writers have been admired, but during their lifetimes, writers such as Poe, Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Heinrich von Kleist, Isaac Babel, Jane Bowles, and Lu Xun were not popular. Some of them even met tragic ends, like Schulz by a Nazi and Dumas at the hands of the NYPD. Today, such writers are only celebrated after their demise.

Short story authors embody the spirit of artists: insightful, rebellious, and content with their marginal position in a culture that intermittently appreciates them. This is why I encourage my students to embrace the short story's obscurity, not for its intrinsic value, but because it offers a platform for nearly anything. One could publish nuclear codes within a short story, and it might take months for anyone to notice.

Some of the greatest short story authors—Bruno Schulz and Henry Dumas—were tragically killed in the prime of their lives and only gained recognition posthumously. Short stories should embody the same principles: audacious, defiant, and unapologetically defiant. Writing short stories should be like creating wild and irresponsible art, capable of challenging the status quo.