Junot Diaz’s, On My Way To The Novel I Fell In Love With The Short Story, (In Praise of a Form “Unforgiving as Fuck”) forms the introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2016 and to my way of thinking is a must read piece for all lovers of the short story, particularly writers.
Every line is quotable and I especially like the way he likens his life’s course to a series of short stories and ‘the brevity of our moments.’ I’m with him on that. I’m with him on practically everything he says..and I’m archiving pieces like this now in preparation for a Short Story Course I’ve been asked to tutor in Newcastle in 2017 (exciting) – more of that coming up soon…
In the meantime I’m concentrating on the short story form in my own work and it goes without saying that I will be reading lots of stories and collections too.
Here is Junot Diaz on reading and his concerted effort to get to know the form: ‘What happened during that intense blaze of reading was that a new aesthetic standard began to establish itself in me. I went from a grudging tolerance of the short story to a surprised admiration.
It dawned on me finally that this was no intermediate form, a step en route to the novel, but an extraordinary tradition in its own right, not easily mastered but rich in rewards.’
I have been dragged begrudgingly towards the short story. For me the novel as a form, seems to demand in itself a re-inscription of the form, and I have seldom read or written a novel in which about a third of it wasn’t padding and exercise in the format. In fact I’ve written some right shit in which perhaps half of it was homage to the form itself. There are some exceptions, I’ve never yet worked out how writers like Tolstoy manage to get three pages out of something I would hear an agent sing in my ears ‘cut that shit out’ in my own writing. But the short story is alive with ways and means, it has a societal current and currency. For example, listening to people around me, they pre-script with the vernacular phrase ‘yer nar what it is’, before regaling a friend of their troubles or joys. And so as it is in life, it’s in writing too. All of my stories lately could be pre-fixed ‘yer nar what it is’, and thus ergo the writing.