I really like writing short stories but I've noticed that loads of people don't think the same way I think. What do you think?

I love reading and writing short stories. Of all literary forms, I believe they are my favorite. They blend elements of poetry and prose. Which authors' short stories do you enjoy?

Message edited by its author, Aug 7, 2007, 10:56am.

Short stories are good. While I'm waiting on the book to find a home, I write short stories that fill the void. It's easier to place them, that's for sure.

Still, patience is the overwhelming abode of any writer.

Yes, and sometimes one may publish bits of one's novel as short stories first. Publishers like that; it gives the novel a push-start.

I've written both. One of the nice things about short stories is it tends to be a smaller investment of time and energy. I can be a lot more experimental with a short story, because if it falls apart on me, I've only lost a few weeks or a month. If I do the same with a novel, I'm out 6 months or a year's worth of work.

A few weeks or a month! I'm jealous. It takes me up to three years (or more) to finish a single short story. Ack!

Three years? Jeez, I'll bet those things are GOOD when you're done with them!

Harlan Ellison once wrote a short story in a bookstore window. I've done stories in one day, though they tend to take at least three or four long sessions at the keyboard. Novellas take a bit longer - my latest 25k opus took me about a month. And my novel took over a year and a half.

But I'm a pulp writer, with no pretensions to the higher calling of literary quality; I write horror and science fiction and crime and humor, and if you wanted to call me a hack, I certainly wouldn't be offended. To me, story trumps style every time, though I like to think I'm pretty good at the mechanics.

And this has gone far afield, for which I apologize...

To answer the original question: Sorry, luiz, but people in general much prefer novels to short stories. You wouldn't think it, judging by the amount of shorts that get published in magazines, but it's a sad-but-true reality that probably no one in the world is making a living writing short stories exclusively. But by all means keep writing them! There ARE markets that will pay you, and it's a wonderful thing to bring new tales into the world. And, who knows - maybe there'll be a renaissance in short fiction one of these years and publishers will start promoting collections like they do novels.

And once in a great while movies are made based on short stories. But that's pie in the sky stuff. (smile)

I write what calls me at the moment.

I am constantly amazed at people who write so fast. I have students who crank out the best stories in a few days. I really have to struggle to get my ideas down. It's not fair.

Luiz, keep writing those stories.

My boyfriend is currently writing a novel set in a fictional universe, and also writing short stories in the same universe. His plan is to try and get the shorts published first, and then see if he can get the novel out there. Do you experienced published folks think that's a good approach?

It's a great approach! I'd caution your boyfriend about doing too many things at the same time (a bad habit I'm constantly trying to break) and to just focus on one tale, then another rather than trying to build one big synergystic conglomeration...

Many authors have started in short stories and then moved on to novels with great success, and many authors have used the same universe for both lengths - there are Perry Mason shorts and novels, Hercule Poirot shorts and novels, Known Space shorts and novels, Harry D'amour shorts and novels - and a thousand more examples.

But be warned - the short stories MUST stand on their own. Don't let him fall into the trap of writing shorts without resolution, shorts that lead toward some greater unrealized payoff. Ideally, he published five or six of the shorts and he gets interest from agents and/or publishers. It happened to David Conyers and I--when we wrote our shared-world tales, we had no idea we would eventually get them published in book form. But one day we realized we had seventy thousand interlinked words, decided to collaborate on one novella to end the collection, and it all got snapped up by Chaosium in less than a month.

So it CAN happen. Best of luck to the both of you!

Theresa, I share your (smile), because generally movies made from short stories are...what's the word...oh, yeah. Awful. If Hollywood ever goes near 'The Lottery' or 'The Whimper of Whipped Dogs' I'm gonna head down there with harsh language on my tongue and mayhem in my heart.

That's not to say it can't be done. 'The Killers' wasn't bad, and 'Hellraiser' was a fine adaptation of 'The Hellbound Heart', but most of them turn out like 'The Mangler' or 'Children of the Corn'.

Oh dear, no not "The Lottery." I'd race you for the door. No, I was thinking more along the lines of the movie SMOKE SIGNALS, which was made mainly from the short story "This is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona" by Sherman Alexie. Other aspects of Alexie's work were integrated, but it was mainly just that once story that provided the plot of the movie. There are other short stories made into movies, but I'm blanking out on them right now. Maybe others in the group know some movies based on short stories? They can be great for movies because they lack all that subplot business.

And, yes, do remember that the stories have to have resolution in a way that chapters do not.

Congratulations on your shared world tales. What an interesting process. It often happens that way. You're working along, working hard, not thinking in terms of a big project and suddenly it comes to you: you can make something "bigger" from what you've done. It's happened to me that way, rather than the other way around (announcing my intentions to make a big project first). It happened that way for my novel. I wrote a short story and then thought it would be interesting to explore what had brought the character to that point.

Good luck to your boyfriend, Eruntane!

Message edited by its author, Aug 7, 2007, 8:02pm.

Oh, MEMENTO and RASHOMON were short stories first! And I know there are a bunch more.

Or Brokeback Mountain, a wonderful movie made from a masterpiece of a short story.

I think there are some people who just naturally gravitate to the short story form, others who just naturally gravitate to the novel form, and others who skip back and forth with ease.

I'm a novel type. I like being able to sink into a world and really live there for a while, long enough to really get to know the characters and follow them through a whole range of situations and challenges. Short stories are like hard little polished gems - they essentially share just one idea with the reader, but share it really well, without a lot of distractions. I've read a few short stories I really liked, and I have written a few, but in general they just feel too abbreviated to be a comfortable form for me.

Oh, I didn't know that about Brokeback Mountain.

One of the things that attracted me to writing short stories is their kinship to poetry. The brevity forces me to choose my words carefully and to reach for metaphor rather than lengthy description. This is particularly good for me because I have a bad tendency to be long winded. I find short stories very gratifying to write. I love reading them for much the same reason. I pay a lot of attention to the author's choices and marvel at how I'm guided through an often complex change of consciousness in just a few short pages. I like the comparison of a short story to a polished gem very much.

There's much to be said for sinking into a soft chair with a novel, too.

Message edited by its author, Aug 7, 2007, 9:59pm.

About movies from short stories, I believe "The Last Mimzy" is based on the short story Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Lewis Padgett. I never saw the movie, so I'm not sure. There was also a movie based on Flowers for Algernon and there was a really bad made-for-TV movie based on The Lottery. Sorry!

I was a slow reader when I was a teenager. Novels intimidated me while short stories offered a sense of accomplishment. It was wonderful to be able to read an entire story in the same amount of time it took me to get through two chapters of a novel. I believe short stories gave me the encouragement and interest I needed to stick with reading and to become the bibliophile I am today. As a busy mom, homeschooling my three children, I will still reach for the short stories. They give me the opportunity to escape, to dream, to think, and to rejuvenate. I also don't feel like I'm neglecting my responsibilities to finish the tale.

The movie AWAY FROM HER which was released in May is based on a short story by Alice Munro: "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" from CARRIED AWAY: A SELECTION OF STORIES.

The movie SHORTCUT TO HAPPINESS, which came out in July, is based on "The Devil and Daniel Webster.

It appears that the short story is alive and well.

"The brevity forces me to choose my words carefully and to reach for metaphor rather than lengthy description."

You are so right, Theresa, about the value of the short story as a writing exercise. One of the two short stories I have published is one I kept rewriting to see how far I could pare it down without losing anything essential to the story or mood. I think I cut about 15%, just by trimming a word or phrase here and there, and maybe a handful of sentences. And when I reread it, it was much improved. I was amazed. I do this with novels, too, now, though with a long work it's too time-consuming (or maybe I'm just too lazy) to go through it as carefully as I did that short story. But the practice makes me write more tightly even in a first draft.

I do wish more of the mainstream magazines would publish short stories. I used to enjoy the fiction in Redbook, for example, which was not terribly literary, but great to pick up for some quick light reading in a doctor's office or someplace. I often find myself skipping the short stories in The New Yorker, because they are generally so depressing.

My new book (released in november) is a collection of rather wierd short stories. My brain had to let go of them, so it could focus on The Big Novel... (In a totally different universe, style and genre.)

I love short stories, actually. But I have literally thousands of novels on my bookshelf and maybe just half a dozen or so compilations of short stories. Strange, when I come to think about it.

Hi, I'm currently taking a "Writing for Children" course and have read over and over again it's hard getting into the biz.

I was thinking of switching to learning about how to write a book of short stories?

Any suggestions or any online courses I could check out on this?

Thanks a bunch and "Happy Reading and Writing!"

:)

I wrote a book of short stories called Small Worlds: A Miscellany. Search my Author Button name and you'll find it. It doesn't have the link to Lulu.com which publishes it, and I didn't put it here because I don't want to spam people.

Short Stories are constructed somewhat like poems because they are meant to be dense and filling but short and compact. Kinda like if you put War and Peace into a car compactor of literature, only nowhere near as rambling.

I can recommend a few short story authors, Ernest Hemingway wrote some, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe made their careers on short stories, Neil Gaiman writes some really good ones, as well as Salman Rushdie.

Joanne Harris also writes awesome short stories.

I remember in first year we had to study a whole selection - I think the anthology was published by Oxford although I'm not totally sure. It or something similar might be good though, because it covered a range of different shorts from Ambrose Bierce through Edgar Allen Poe and D. H. Lawrence to more modern stuff, so it would help you get an idea of what different periods and authors have done, and what you'd like to experiment with.

i'm barely able to make it through very short stories (in regards to writing, i mean) and wish i had the endurance for the novel...i love writing 'em though...well, as much as i love writing...i really love having written them...i'm lazy and unfocused and writing can be hard...

and on the subject of short stories, i usually favor novels, however my absolute favoritest piece of literature is a short story ("The Metamorphosis") that's all...

I love both reading and writing short stories. To me, they were always the perfect format for me and my attention span. I liked studying short stories better than novels in school since I found short stories to be more memorable, not that I didn't like novels, but short stories had more action happening in a shorter time frame.

I'm a journalist by trade, but I've been writing fictional short stories within the last couple of years, and I'm having my first short story collection out early next year. I know I really enjoyed trying to do things differently and pack as much as I could in a short space. I'm not sure the styles I used would have translated as well in a novel format -- it would have gotten old fast. This way, the styles I used made sense but didn't overstay the welcome.

What Ails the Short Story

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By STEPHEN KING
Published: September 30, 2007

The American short story is alive and well.
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Illustration by Wink

Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were actually true. The art form is still alive — that I can testify to. As editor of “The Best American Short Stories 2007,” I read hundreds of them, and a great many were good stories. Some were very good. And some seemed to touch greatness. But “well”? That’s a different story.

I came by my hundreds — which now overflow several cardboard boxes known collectively as The Stash — in a number of different ways. A few were recommended by writers and personal friends. A few more I downloaded from the Internet. Large batches were sent to me on a regular basis by Heidi Pitlor, the series editor. But I’ve never been content to stay on the reservation, and so I also read a great many stories in magazines I bought myself, at bookstores and newsstands in Florida and Maine, the two places where I spend most of the year. I want to begin by telling you about a typical short-story-hunting expedition at my favorite Sarasota mega-bookstore. Bear with me; there’s a point to this.

I go in because it’s just about time for the new issues of Tin House and Zoetrope: All-Story. There will certainly be a new issue of The New Yorker and perhaps Glimmer Train and Harper’s. No need to check out The Atlantic Monthly; its editors now settle for publishing their own selections of fiction once a year in a special issue and criticizing everyone else’s the rest of the time. Jokes about eunuchs in the bordello come to mind, but I will suppress them.

So into the bookstore I go, and what do I see first? A table filled with best-selling hardcover fiction at prices ranging from 20 percent to 40 percent off. James Patterson is represented, as is Danielle Steel, as is your faithful correspondent. Most of this stuff is disposable, but it’s right up front, where it hits you in the eye as soon as you come in, and why? Because these are the moneymakers and rent payers; these are the glamour ponies.

I walk past the best sellers, past trade paperbacks with titles like “Who Stole My Chicken?,” “The Get-Rich Secret” and “Be a Big Cheese Now,” past the mysteries, past the auto-repair manuals, past the remaindered coffee-table books (looking sad and thumbed-through with their red discount stickers). I arrive at the Wall of Magazines, which is next door to the children’s section, where story time is in full swing. I stare at the racks of magazines, and the magazines stare eagerly back. Celebrities in gowns and tuxes, models in low-rise jeans, luxury stereo equipment, talk-show hosts with can’t-miss diet plans — they all scream Buy me, buy me! Take me home and I’ll change your life!+

I can grab The New Yorker and Harper’s while I’m still standing up, without going to my knees like a school janitor trying to scrape a particularly stubborn wad of gum off the gym floor. For the rest, I must assume exactly that position. I hope the young woman browsing Modern Bride won’t think I’m trying to look up her skirt. I hope the young man trying to decide between Starlog and Fangoria won’t step on me. I crawl along the lowest shelf, where neatness alone suggests few ever go. And here I find fresh treasure: not just Zoetrope and Tin House, but also Five Points and The Kenyon Review. No Glimmer Train, but there’s American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, even an Alaska Quarterly Review. I stagger to my feet and limp toward the checkout. The total cost of my six magazines runs to over $80. There are no discounts in the magazine section.

So think of me crawling on the floor of this big chain store and ask yourself, What’s wrong with this picture?

We could argue all day about the reasons for fiction’s out-migration from the eye-level shelves — people have. We could marvel over the fact that Britney Spears is available at every checkout, while an American talent like William Gay or Randy DeVita or Eileen Pollack or Aryn Kyle (all of whom were among my final picks) labors in relative obscurity. We could, but let’s not. It’s almost beside the point, and besides — it hurts.

Instead, let us consider what the bottom shelf does to writers who still care, sometimes passionately, about the short story. What happens when he or she realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily? Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless, because it’s what God or genetics (possibly they are the same) has decreed, or out of sheer stubbornness, or maybe because it’s such a kick to spin tales. Possibly a combination. And all that’s good.

What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.

And yet. I read plenty of great stories this year. There isn’t a single one in this book that didn’t delight me, that didn’t make me want to crow, “Oh, man, you gotta read this!” I think of such disparate stories as Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” John Barth’s “Toga Party” and “Wake,” by Beverly Jensen, now deceased, and I think — marvel, really — they paid me to read these! Are you kiddin’ me???

Talent can’t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. If these stories have anything in common, it’s that sense of emotional involvement, of flipped-out amazement. I look for stories that care about my feelings as well as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally assaultive — like “Sans Farine,” by Jim Shepard — I grab that baby and hold on tight. Do I want something that appeals to my critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never). What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a pear.”

So — American short story alive? Check. American short story well? Sorry, no, can’t say so. Current condition stable, but apt to deteriorate in the years ahead. Measures to be taken? I would suggest you start by reading this year’s “Best American Short Stories.” They show how vital short stories can be when they are done with heart, mind and soul by people who care about them and think they still matter. They do still matter, and here they are, liberated from the bottom shelf.

Stephen King is the author of 60 books, as well as nearly 400 short stories, including “The Man in the Black Suit,” which won the O. Henry Prize in 1996.

> 24 - King is probably correct but it's a classic "chicken-and-egg" scenario. The literary magazines are on the bottom shelve because they don't shift enough units to be placed elsewhere, and because they don't shift mass volume they are expensive (often more so than a paperback) which leads to many readers not buying them. When you take into account that many a significant amount of the book-buying public don't seem to like short stories you end up with a market that has nowhere to go. It is difficult to see how anyone can change this, even in the science fiction field where the short story has traditionally been strong the magazines are shrinking, and the big publishers are increasingly reluctant to issue story collections.

Re Stephen King, IMO he's a better short story writer than a novelist.

Message #25; Yeah, I still like a number of King's novels, but overall he's probably done better with the short story.

Great short story writers; Rick Bass, Thom Jones, Barry Hannah, Alice Munro, Tim Gautreaux, Annie Proulx, William Gay, Robert Olen Butler, Chekov, Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and that'll do for now.

rufustfirefly66 --

I believe copying the article like that is copyright enfringement -- something we, as authors, ought to be very much aware of and avoid. How about redoing it with just a link to the original?

#24 That King essay rocks!

I wonder, though, about Stephen King being selected as editor for "Best American Stories"--I mean, does this guy really have the credentials to be making aesthetic judgments, the man who famously said he's only had one original story idea in his life, the rest were bounces? It makes me wonder if he was chosen just so the publisher could have his name on the cover. I think I would've rather had Michael Chabon, Richard Ford or Tim O'Brien making the choices. While Mr. King's sales are impressive, his critical faculties often desert him--one need only read any of his novels for the past 15 or 20 years to see that.

Richard Ford's "Rock Springs" (by the way) is one of the three or four best short stories by an American author I've ever read. Every word is perfect, the simplicity of the story deceptive, the voice absolutely bang-on.

The Best American Short Stories are published every year with a different guest editor.
2006 Ann Patchett
2005 Michael Chabon
2004 Lorrie Moore
2003 Walter Mosley
2002 Sue Miller
2001 Barbara Kingsolver
2000 E. L. Doctorow
1999 Amy Tan
1998 Garrison Keillor
1997 E. Annie Proulx
1996 John Edgar Wideman
1995 Jane Smiley
1994 Tobias Wolff
1993 Louise Erdrich
1992 Robert Stone
1991 Alice Adams
1990 Richard Ford
1989 Margaret Atwood
1988 Mark Helprin
1987 Ann Beattie
1986 Raymond Carver
1985 Gail Godwin
1984 John Updike
1983 Anne Tyler
1982 John Gardner
1981 Hortense Calisher
1980 Stanley Elkin

The Best American short stories has been published since 1915. The information comes from my copy of Best American short stories 2006.

I see that roster and then take note of names like King and Keillor and remember that old "Sesame Street" song, "One of things things is not like the others..."

Otherwise a pretty impressive list.

I absolutely agree about Rock Springs. It's tops on my list of short story collections.

While I don't particularly care for most of what King writes (I like his non-fiction, though, his works about writing), I still think he knows what makes good fiction. He's convinced me of this through his non-fiction writing. The man totally knows how to live in story. I admire him.

Message edited by its author, Oct 2, 2007, 11:01pm.

But Theresa, have you read his oeuvre over the past fifteen years? I've denounced editors on other threads for being intrusive and lacking aesthetics but King is someone (like Rowling) in desperate need of editing but who, because of his stature, no longer receives meaningful input from his publisher. I truly believe King could be a good writer (not a great one, his commercial sensibilities deny him that) if he would take two years to work on a book, devote himself to that title exclusively and bring his impressive narrative powers to bear on it.

My thoughts, for what they're worth...

Message edited by its author, Oct 3, 2007, 11:44am.

Stephen King (& Garrison Keiller, too IMO) have written enough quality fiction to be considered among the "list of great of American fiction writers" if there would be such a list. Certainly their short stories have earned them a place amont the editors of the annual "Best American short Story" compilation.
Connoisseurs of the "liteerati" have always been slightly suspicious of artists who have achieved popularity with "The masses" or have produced an unusually large body of work. (Joyce Carol Oates was named editor of the Best American Short Stories 1979 edition but not without a bit of murmering). I don't remember controversy over Mr. Keillor's selection in 1998. Mr. King's selection has raised a few eyebrows, both for his popularity & large output & has CliffBurns has pointed out, some of his work could benefit from more editing. However, if you examine Mre. King's total output, he has written a number of outstanding short stories. Some have been published in the New Yorker & other literary works. Also, his works on the craft of writing (in particular his work on the genre of horror fiction & his book "On Writing" have benefited a generation of readers & writers. So I am glad to see Stephen King honored by his peers & will continue to read those works of his works which I enjoy & to put aside those which I don't.

Stephen King (& Garrison Keiller, too IMO) have written enough quality fiction to be considered among the "list of great of American fiction writers" if there would be such a list. Certainly their short stories have earned them a place among the editors of the annual "Best American short Story" compilation.
Connoisseurs of the "liteerati" have always been slightly suspicious of artists who have achieved popularity with "The masses" or have produced an unusually large body of work. (Joyce Carol Oates was named editor of the Best American Short Stories 1979 edition but not without a bit of murmering). I don't remember controversy over Mr. Keillor's selection in 1998. Mr. King's selection has raised a few eyebrows, both for his popularity & large output & as CliffBurns has pointed out, some of his work could benefit from more editing. However, if you examine Mre. King's total output, he has written a number of outstanding short stories. Some have been published in the New Yorker & other literary works. Also, his works on the craft of writing (in particular his work on the history of the genre of horror fiction & his book "On Writing" have benefited a generation of readers & writers. So I am glad to see Stephen King honored by his peers & will continue to read those works of his works which I enjoy & to put aside those which I don't.

King's presence as editor of BEST AMERICAN STORIES is based solely on his drawing power. He's put on the cover to sell books and NOT due to literary status (in my view). There are other writers far more deserving of the honor bestowed upon him. Mr. Keillor writes likable prose but nothing that has broken ground stylistically or thematically. His down home humor and rustic charm may be some folks' cup on tea but I wouldn't put any of his tales up there with the best of the best...

> 34 - I voiced the same sentiment in another group and got blasted. King has deteriorated as a writer over the last few years because he refuses to spend any time working on a single novel and it is obvious that no-one is editing him. There is a good writer in there but it gets harder and harder to find him. That is why he works better at short story/novella, it focuses him.

Here's a link to Richard Ford talking about his last collection of stories Multitude
and to a free story by him Pretty Boy

King sells. People read him b/c he's easy, light, not layered and entertaining. I think the question at hand is: would you rather be an entertaining/popular writer or a good one? There's a huge distance between the best seller list and the cannon.

The question at hand (to me) is: does King have the literary stature to be editing (and selecting) an anthology of the BEST American stories? The answer is a resounding NO. He has his niche (and it's a big one) but let other, more deserving and discerning talents decide what constitutes BEST. He is not qualified for the task and choosing him for this role is like naming a guy who flips burgers at McDonald as headmaster of a cordon bleu cooking school...

Cliff, I'm afraid I agree with Marian on this one. I think King is devoted to writing and lives inside story in a way that few authors do. I don't like his style--it doesn't speak to me--but I don't doubt his power as a storyteller. I've not read Rowling and so can't comment on her work. I don't have any interest in Harry Potter. But I think King absolutely understands how stories work and knows good work when he sees it. I have to give credit where it is due. And I couldn't agree with Marian more about his works on the craft of writing. The man knows his stuff.

Message edited by its author, Oct 3, 2007, 6:37pm.

I believe the definition of a good writer ought to be based on whether he entertains his intended audience. King obviously pleases his readers.

I am not a King fan -- I don't like horror in general, in fact -- but there is no denying that he succeeds. He will not, however, appeal to everyone.

I don't mistake personal preferences for ability.

"There's a huge distance between the best seller list and the cannon."

I thought about this and then remembered that Dickens enjoyed a large audience, so did Hemingway and Faulkner. So did Steinbeck and Fitzgerald. Emily Dickenson's poetry has always sold well. Their work has become part of the literary cannon. Billy Collins sells a lot of books. King is starting to gain more appeal in universities, too. Who knows? Maybe someday what we think of as the cannon will go through a great shift.

We'll have to disagree about this one.

And, zette, I don't mistake personal preference for ability. I judge the man on his facility with words and he will NEVER, in a million years, write anything as fine as Ford's "Rock Springs". He ain't even in the ball park of some of the writers he'll be assessing.

The publisher wanted his name on the cover, that's it. Purely mercenary reasoning, had nothing to do with literary merit.

I believe the definition of a good writer ought to be based on whether he entertains his intended audience.
That would make everyone a good writer, including such talents as Danielle Steel and Jeffery Archer.

> 43 - your analysis is not quite correct, Dickens and Hemingway sold well but Faulkner, Steinbeck & Fitzgerald all ended up in Hollywood because they couldn't make a living through their novels and stories. Admittedly, in Fitzgerald's case, it was after he had spent a small fortune but then again, both The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night sold very poorly when first published.

ps...since this is a library site, shouldn't everyone know better - it is a literary canon, NOT cannon, unless you are talking about shooting people with books!

Another telling King comment (posted on another thread but bearing repeating):

When he made "Maximum Overdrive" he called it a "moron movie".

This is the man judged aesthetically sound enough to select the BEST short stories in the land? I would make him editor of "Best Horror Stories" but best all-around? Sheesh...

Jargoneer--

Does either Danielle Steele or Jeffrey Archer entertain the people who love their books? If they know their intended audiences well enough to become very popular with that particular group, then yes, they are good authors.

Is that going to make them literary giants? No. But it does not make them bad writers. They are doing what authors should do -- entertaining the people who happen to like that particular type of story. Some people don't read stories specifically to be wowed by the prose; they want to fall into the adventure, and sometimes, simple straight-forward storytelling has its place. Could they write better? Probably. But then I think that's true of just about everyone I've read (including me, of course).

I don't like Steel e or Archer on a personal level. They don't tell the type of stories I like to read and I find their writing boring. I adore C.J. Cherryh's work, and I enjoy (among others) Kim Stanley Robinson, Terry Pratchett, Jim Butcher and Charles Dickens. I'm currently reading the Samuel Butler translation of The Iliad and enjoying it, though I think he could have done with a few more commas now and then. (grin)

Was King a good choice to edit a short story collection of this type? I'd have to see the work he did before I would condemn it as bad. I won't judge on a perception of his ability. I do believe he was chosen to help boost sales, but that doesn't mean he couldn't do the work.

Has anyone read the stories that King selected for BASS 2007? I'm still waiting for the library to put it on the shelf.

Cannon/Canon--oops, my bad. It's been a long day.

#48: I haven't read the collection yet. One of the young men I went through the MFA program with, Patrick Ryan, had a story selected by King. Patrick's writing is first rate, and I'm happy to see he has been recognized.

#45 My bad, too, on Faulkner and Fitzgerald. You are right on that score. That still doesn't undo my argument, though. Popular and best selling books can and do become endearing and important literature (part of the "canon").

Personally, and I do mean PERSONALLY, so please don't take offense, anyone. I am just stating my personal point of view here: I don't find the distinction between "good" and "bad" writers to be very useful. We all write. We all have our agenda. We have our styles, our goals. The world is big enough to accomodate everything. I'm just glad to be able to participate. If King has found success, then good for him. He paid his dues. He had his share of living poor and struggling as a writer. He made writing work for him, and he's happy with what he does. We should all be so happy. That is my opinion.

I pay attention to my own work, and what I want to accomplish. I don't compare my work to that of others. I don't compare my "success" with that of others. What does "success" mean, anyway? Everybody has a different and very personal idea on what success is.

I just finished watching a documentary about a man named Henry Darger. He spent a lifetime alone in his room, writing thousands of pages and illustrating his "book" with original artwork. No one found the works until after he had died. He lived entirely in a world of his own making, inside his own imagination. Writing helped him to order his life; it kept him alive. I would call that successful. Henry Darger was a success, although he never published a word of what he wrote.

I enjoy and am thankful to be able to do that: not to the extent that Darger did, but to the extent that I am able.

If I don't care for King's fiction, that is a personal preference. There are plenty of people, including people in academic circles, who do value what he does.

I still think King understands how stories work. He knows about craft. I think he was a fine choice to judge the Best American Short Stories.

If King participates in light entertainment or the creation of "moron movies," then that does not take anything away from what I know he knows: the man understands how stories work. Faulkner wrote his pot-boiler, too.

Message edited by its author, Oct 4, 2007, 12:53am.

"I still think King understands how stories work. He knows about craft. I think he was a fine choice to judge the Best American Short Stories."

But didn't King liken writing to "unearthing" a fossil or something similar to that in On Writing? Meaning he doesn't pre-plan his stories and just literally, makes them up as he goes? I'm not sure if that's beneficial or detrimental to him judging the works of others in terms of structure.

I don't preplan my stories. I don't think in terms of structure at all. If I had to plan ahead, I wouldn't even write. I like the adventure and the surprise. I think everybody has a different way of working.

>47 - i think you are confusing good with successful. I am not going to argue that Danielle Steel or Jeffery Archer are not successful writers but I would argue that they are not good writers. Good infers a (certain) mastery of the medium and they blatantly do not possess that, they are technically poor writers.
You could make the point that their success is not down to their ability as writers but down to the reading criteria of the general public. Most people don't read on any critical level so they don't care about basic concepts such as grammar. (This is at all levels of society, in the UK universities are now complaining about having to teach new students how to read and write to an acceptable standard). This does negate the enjoyment they get from reading Archer or Steel but it does negate their success being a barometer of whether they are good or not.

>49 - re Henry Darger, that is writing as therapy and no-one disputes that art therapy in all it's forms doesn't work. However there is a big difference between that and being a writer. (It is telling that while his posthumous success was based on his art work and not his literary output). To take another example, I may have plumbed in my washing machine last week but it doesn't make me a plumber.

Re - King. As I said before, I think King is actually a good short story writer, his best work is at novella length. As for his novels, if he unearths them like a fossil then he needs to spend more cleaning them up to make them acceptable to display in the museum.

Jargoneer -

While we're on the subject of 'basic concepts such as grammar':

"Good infers a (certain) mastery of the medium and they blatantly do not possess that, they are technically poor writers."

You can't join two main clauses with a comma: you should use a colon, semi-colon, hyphen or conjunction between 'that' and 'they'.

"This is at all levels of society, in the UK universities are now complaining about having to teach new students how to read and write to an acceptable standard."

Same thing.

"This does negate the enjoyment they get from reading Archer or Steel but it does negate their success being a barometer of whether they are good or not."

Not technically a grammatical issue I know, but I assume you mean that it doesn't negate the enjoyment they get from reading Archer.

"...no-one disputes that art therapy in all it's forms doesn't work."

'It's' is a contraction of 'it is'. In this case you should use 'its', which is the genitive form of 'it'.

Call me anal but I just love good grammar!

It was my tribute to Stephen King's unedited style!*

To use grammar to condemn a writer is not completely fair. Jeffery Archer doesn't make many grammatical mistakes - his problems lie in-between the commas and colons.

* I actually didn't re-read what I was posting.

#52: ">49 - re Henry Darger, that is writing as therapy and no-one disputes that art therapy in all it's forms doesn't work. However there is a big difference between that and being a writer. (It is telling that while his posthumous success was based on his art work and not his literary output)."

Darger's writing is vivid and imaginative. Artwork is easier to display and to grasp than the writing, I suspect, a possible reason why his writing is less well-known. I would like to read his book.

I'm not sure how you define "art therapy." My major interest is in writing as healing. A lot of work has been done on this subject. My two favorite books are POETRY AS SURVIVAL by Gregory Orr and WRITING AS A WAY OF HEALING by Louise DeSalvo. Both write as a way of healing and both are published authors. I write as a way of healing.

I think the term "art therapy" has a negative connotation for most people. Some people see "art therapy" as being below "art" in stature. I don't necessarily agree. Works produced as "art therapy" are often more "artistic" than their more "sane" counterparts (of course, not always, but often).

Darger's works predate contemporary art, using many of the strategies these artists would adopt.

Theodore Roethke wrote to heal himself from the ravages of his mental illness, and so did John Clare, most probably. James Wright definitely did: he talks about it in his letters. Ingmar Bergman made movies to give shape to his life concerns, to experiences that frightened him and/or had negatively shaped his life. The list is long.

As you can see, my boundaries are generally very fluid. As a personal preference, I don't like judgements about what is "good or bad" or "art" or "therapy." There is so much overlapping in life and art.

I've gotten away from King. Coming back to him: I know he understands why horror is important. He understands the psychological basis for it. He also knows what makes stories work. I agree with jargoneer that his shorter, tighter work is better. The novella is probably his best form.

I have only read a selected few of Stephen King's works. I came to him late, because I'm not generally interested in horror fiction. But some of his works, I think, show a literary sensibility blended with an appreciation of how to use suspense to keep readers hooked and eagerly turning the pages. I don't think understanding how to do the latter negates the former.

The first King novel I read was The Dead Zone, and I was surprised by how absorbing and intellectually challenging I found it. Essentially, it deals with the question of whether it can ever be morally right to assassinate someone, knowing that by doing so you will be saving a multitude of lives.

The next one I read, after reading many favorable reviews and resisting for a long time because of the gore factor, was Misery. I would recommend this to all fiction writers, because it tackles the question of literary vs. genre writing head-on. The protagonist is a successful genre writer who devalues himself and his work because it is not literary. As the story opens, he has just published a book in which he kills off the heroine of his series of romance novels, putting his fans on notice that he will no longer write any of these, and he has completed a "literary" manuscript that is completely unsuited to his particular talents, and obviously stinks. After a car crash lands him in the power of a crazed fan of his romance novels, she burns his "literary" novel and forces him to write a new romance novel. For a writer, this novel is a gem because we can follow along with the writer's work process as he conceives of and edits the new novel, which deals with some truly literary ideas in a genre format. The point of Misery is not that literary writing is bad, but rather than a writer should focus on his particular strengths and not try to write something ill-suited to his interests and talents.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a psychological novel about survival. A preteen girl who loves baseball gets lost in the woods and imagines all kinds of scary monsters lurking behind the trees. It qualifies as a horror novel because the monsters seem real enough to her, but it's actually easier to read the novel on a more realistic level, understanding that the monsters are all in her mind as she confronts the terrifying and real possibility of dying because she can't find her way out of the woods. The story is about how she uses her admiration for a particular baseball player to hearten herself, chase away the "monsters" and keep going.

People don't single out genre writers who stick exclusively to genre writing for the kind of belittling Stephen King gets. I think he has this problem because some of his work does cross the line from genre to literary writing without abandoning the suspense techniques that make him so much fun to read.

Message edited by its author, Oct 5, 2007, 4:13pm.

Very well stated, margad. Your last paragraph gets to the heart of the issue.

I like what you say about Misery, margad. I think The Shining is also a gem for writers. I see a certain similarity in The Shining to Ingmar Bergman's film Hour of the Wolf. Both are horror films (The Shing also a book, obviously) and both are about artists. Both are about a disentegration of the personality (sanity) of the artist. I particularly love the idea of the labyrinth in The Shining. I think the labyrinth* structure fits as a way of working for many writers. It is not a linear process at all. The disentegration of the artist's personality or sanity is always a danger because the artist calls on dark forces within the self, and the artist is suseptible to giving in to those dark forces and letting them destroy him or her. Dionysus is necessary, but Apollo, the light of reason, has his place. The artist sometimes has to walk the edge between those two forces.

*Note, as John Sunseri pointed out, the labyrinth does not appear in King and was a product of Kurbric's thinking.

Message edited by its author, Oct 7, 2007, 11:59pm.

>56 - I disagree with your last paragraph. Most genre writers are belittled more than King - they are ignored completely. At least King gets treated as proper writer and one of the consequences of this is that his work is subject to more critical analysis. (In the UK, at least, King is reviewed in the newspaper literary pages and was recently subject of a special one-to-one interview on BBC4).

1987 was a key year for King. As well as Misery he also released The Tommyknockers; his best and worst novels, to date, in the same year. Unfortunately, it was the latter that pointed to King's future - sloppy, unedited, etc.

For the last 20 years King has averaged over 1000 pages a year. Think about that. He is producing 3 published pages a day. How can you produce quality work at that non-stop rate?

Jargoneer: "For the last 20 years King has averaged over 1000 pages a year. Think about that. He is producing 3 published pages a day. How can you produce quality work at that non-stop rate?"

To be blunt, you can't. Your talent is diluted, your creative energies dissipated. And this is a conscious, aesthetic choice King makes. He COULD slow down and write one good book but he prefers to see himself as a fiction factory. I find it interesting in MISERY that Paul, the writer, wishes to break out of the ghetto he's in (tawdry romance) but lacks the skill to be a literary writer. Hmmm... d'you think Steve was trying to tell us something?

Any author who produces books as inept as TOMMYKNOCKERS and IT does not have the credibility to be placed in a position to judge far better writers. Some of his short fiction--the early stuff, from SKELETON CREW (most of which was written in the early-to-mid 70's)--shows promise but I have read little by King in the past 20 years that passes muster. This shows a CONSISTENT disregard for good writing and, again, should absolutely disqualify him for posts like editor of BASS. He was chosen purely to put his name on the cover and should be under no illusions that he earned that much-coveted honour because of literary excellence...

#59 - You have a point. I've often heard genre writers belittled as a class without mentioning names. Of course, some genre writing is truly dreadful - bad grammar, clunky metaphors, and plot lines that cater to the worst in us rather than the best - for example, the many genre romances that focus on women falling in love with captors who brutalize and humiliate them. Hopefully, this is passé even in genre romance these days. But literary writing can be just as dreadful in many of the same ways. I don't think any type of writing should be denigrated as a class. Some writers have no desire to write literary work; they just want to give their readers a few hours of entertainment. It's no easier from a craft standpoint to write thoroughly entertaining genre fiction than to write anything else. If their work succeeds in that way, they are to be congratulated (though I will grant, not necessarily invited to edit a collection of literary short stories - any more than a literary writer should be invited to edit a collection of genre stories like, say, the "Chicken Soup" series).

Stephen King is not the only best-selling writer who has become sloppier as the paychecks grow larger and the editors more deferential. I haven't read any of his "worst" novels, so I'm not qualified to judge. At his best, he can be quite good indeed.

Message edited by its author, Oct 5, 2007, 8:44pm.

The book owned by the largest number of members of the writers-readers group is On Writing by Stephen King.

Folks should be reading Annie Dillard instead of King if they want advice on writing--she's a literary genius and has NEVER prostituted herself like King has. The majority doesn't dictate literary quality, as jargoneer has so well stated. If the majority are to be trusted, THE DA VINCI CODE is a fine work of art instead of the literary toilet paper it really is...

Jargoneer said:

You could make the point that their success is not down to their ability as writers but down to the reading criteria of the general public.

***

It's always easy to belittle the 'reading public' when someone doesn't like what they're reading. Unfortunately, the reading public isn't all of one mind. Lots of people, in different areas and different aspects of life, enjoy Steele and Archer -- and King. These authors write what they're reading public wants to see. That makes them good authors. It does not, as I said, make them literary giants.

zette:

You still refuse to discriminate between "good" authors and "popular" ones. Here's a hint: one denotes "quality", the other "quantity". I know which group I, as a literary writer, wish to belong to...

> 64 - what you seem to be saying is that you judge writers differently dependent upon whether they are bestsellers or literary authors. I don't make that distinction. For me, the criteria of the what makes a good writer or novel is the same across the board. While I may say that some bestselling writers are poor I will also say that there genre writers as good as best literary writers.

Furthermore, if you make sales a basis for being a good author, does that mean that a literary author is bad because (s)he doesn't sell many copies? That's the problem with making sales a criteria for value.

#63 "...she's a literary genius and has NEVER prostituted herself like King has..."

Oh, Cliff, isn't this a bit harsh and judgmental? You sound like Holden Caulfield here, talking about how his brother prostituted himself in Hollywood. Isn't there room in the literary world for all kinds? Should any of us be dictating who is the best writer for people to learn from? I'm a literary author and I've learned more, more, MORE from King than from Annie Dillard. I love Dillard's prose, but King is the one who speaks to me though his essays and books on writing.

Cliff, I'm glad you've decided what kind of writer you want to be. The fact that you've thought about these things says a lot about you and your dedication to writing. My point is that everybody gets to choose what kind of writer he or she wants to be.

I've been a writer a long time. I will say just a few words about my journey. I have been through the sufferings and petty vices that the writing life affords. I began as an optimistic, naive person, sure she would make a mark on the world. I have gone through a stage of defensiveness and pessimism, crying and tearing at my hair, but that gave away--a long time ago--to an acceptance of things. I had to do this in order to be able to continue with the writing life. I am free now. Free to concentrate on my own work, to take from authors who speak to me, to leave the rest for the people who enjoy them. It is all of a piece: I don't feel divided, competitive, bitter, driven, or afriad. I JUST WRITE and I love it.

The reason that I don't write books like Davinci Code is because I don't want to. I thought hard about it and I decided I wanted to go a different way. I was compelled to do something else.

I wouldn't call Davinci Code "literary toilet paper," although it's not the kind of writing I want to read or do. It is obviously meaningful to a lot of people. Who can say the effect it may have on readers? Perhaps they read it to be entertained; perhaps others take something entirely profound from it. Someone who reads Davinci Code might be inspired to be a writer and might turn into one of the best writers the world has ever produced. There's no predicting.

Anyway, this is getting too long. I won't speak on this topic anymore because I've exhausted all I have to say on it. The literary world is what it is. I do what I do. What I can do. Time marches on.

Message edited by its author, Oct 6, 2007, 4:09pm.

zette, I see your populist outlook and I think I get where you're coming from. But I have to agree more with CliffBurns and jargoneer. When I read a book, I judge it. That judgment can encompass a lot of things, and I actually have a lot of trouble saying flat out whether a book is simply "good" or simply "bad."

For example, I've read a lot of Louisa May Alcott. She frequently has ridiculous characters say ludicrously Pollyanna things; her attempts to overcome the racism of her times by introducing non-white or non-upper-class characters almost entirely result in characters that today read as racist and classist; she fills her books with overt sermonizing that promotes values with which I don't entirely agree. And yet, I adore her. I read books like Rose in Bloom and Little Women over and over again, when I want something that'll just make me happy. So does she write bad books with good stuff in them, or good books with some stupid stuff in them? It's a conundrum, and I appreciate the difficulty of the question.

However. When you yourself write something, don't you use your evaluative powers on it? Don't you decide on what parts are worth keeping, and which need to be thrown out because they suck? You said earlier, "Is that going to make them" (popular authors) "literary giants? No. But it does not make them bad writers." Which says to me that you do indeed make a differentiation. While the rest of us are using terms like "good" and "bad," you're making the same evaluations and calling your categories "literary giants" and "not literary giants." But it's the same act of judgment. Obviously, though literary giants can write badly. (Just read The Wayward Bus by Steinbeck if you'd like a shudderingly acute example.)

I do believe that worthwhile experiences can be gleaned even from "bad" books. When I read The Picture of Dorian Gray, I thought it failed as a novel. That it was--yes--BAD. The pacing's off. It can't decide whether it wants to be really funny or really deep. But it gave me enormous insight into the mind of Oscar Wilde and the battle between his cynicism and his idealism, and it has several beautifully juicy parts. I also found it fascinating to deconstruct the novel, because really well-put-together novels are opaque. It's hard to see what makes them work, but the bones of Dorian Gray are much more visible. While I know that there are a lot of people who'll disagree with me that it's a bad novel, that's still my judgment. TheresaWilliams pointed out that the distinction between good and bad isn't useful, and there *is* something to that, to the extent that something being bad doesn't, by itself, mean that a work isn't worth reading.

But make no mistake--King is making those exact judgments when he edits a book of the best American short stories. David Foster Wallace talks a bit about this and what it means to be "the Decider" in his introduction to Best American Essays 2007. (Read for yourself at http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/cata... .) One point he makes is, "Unless you are both a shut-in and independently wealthy, there is no way you can sit there and read all the contents of all the 2006 issues of all the hundreds of U.S. periodicals that publish literary nonfiction." So there isn't really practical way zette, to "see the work (King) did before I would condemn it as bad" (#47). For better or worse, the celebrity editor is a "Decider," and you'd better hope his judgments about good and bad overlap enough with yours if you're hoping to enjoy the book he "edited."

CliffBurns, I've gotta disagree with your assertion in #60 that having had bad books published, King isn't qualified to make any judgments of his own. For what it's worth, I've only read The Eyes of the Dragon and it sure wasn't good, but publishers are in the business of selling books. The publishers of a collection of short stories are in an even stickier situation than normal, given the relative lack of interest in that medium. So if they want to slap a big celebrity name on the cover of their book, and, for ONE YEAR, invest that person with a certain amount of deciding power, I'm okay with that. Just because King doesn't have enough people who'll tell him that his most recent novel sucks (before it goes to publication), doesn't prove that he's incapable of making decent aesthetic evaluations of others' work. The fact is, King's name being on the cover could bring quite a few people to great stories like "St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" that they're not very likely to come to otherwise. As readers, each one of us is still entirely capable of going through the collection story by story and deciding whether the piece is good or bad. Names like King's mean that the book is more likely to go on a display, which means that it's more likely to get picked up by someone who would never otherwise look at it, let alone buy it. Big names and the money they generate are what allow bookstores and publishers to carry "literary writers."

OMG, I do go on. But P.S., anyway -- Something being labeled "good" can't INFER a darn thing. It can only IMPLY other qualities.

Great discussion today with a nice range of views.

Theresa, I see where you're coming from and you're much more inclusive than I...and more accepting. Who am I to take you to task for that?

But have you really learned more about writing from King's ON WRITING than Annie Dillard's LIVING BY FICTION and THE WRITING LIFE? I can't fathom that. I checked my book journal to refresh my memory of ON WRITING (which, obviously, made little impression on me) and find that I wrote on July 12, 2002: "Nothing new here--the first part is a rehash of biographical material that King has covered before and the final portion of the book is (another) ad nauseum account of the road accident that nearly killed him...in between there's generic advice for writers, most of it commonplace, oft-cited...". On the other hand, the Dillard books are paeans to the printed word, rhapsodies about how literature can contribute so much to our daily lives. Annie's books have a spiritual core that invests each sentence with a kind of magic. Maybe you should give Ms. Dillard another look...

I'm not sure how you can completely sever popularity from good in this case. If a writer is popular, he must be reaching his intended audience. If he is not, he can't be a good writer. This doesn't make the author a literary giant. However, that doesn't make them bad writers, either. Not every reader is looking for a literary masterpiece. Many are looking for a good adventure, and if the writing is good, it will entertain them. Not every book is meant to scale the heights of the best 100 books ever written. Not everyone is going to be Dickens or Shakespeare (and didn't they both write more than the average number of works? I know Shakespeare sometimes wrote as much as three plays in a year.)

I'm always amazed to see writers judge others by how much they write, or how fast they write, and not by the manuscripts instead. One of my favorite writers is considered prolific -- Rex Stout. And there was Dumas, of course, who was very prolific. Georges Simenon, with the popular Inspector Maigret novels, is also considered a prolific writer. I suppose the fact that the books of all three of these writers are popular automatically means none of the authors could be good writers. (Yes, I'm being facetious here.)

(Oh, and one of my favorite quotes about prolific writers is about Simenon. This was from the Front Row BBC Radio 4 programme where someone told the story about Noel Coward who had called up Simenon:

"May I speak to M. Simenon?"

"I'm sorry; he's working on a Maigret novel."

"I can hold until he's finished.")

Spending years on a novel will not automatically guarantee it will be good. On the other hand, there are some incredibly gifted writers (I am not one), who can create fantastic stories and prose in a short time. If you are going to judge everything bad based only on how quickly it is written, then you also have to automatically say everything written slowly is good. I think you can see the fallacy in this premise.

You cannot judge everything with one brush because not all fast writing is bad and not all slow writing is good. The quantity versus quality argument would only work if every writer were exactly the same. Besides, there are writers like me who write very fast first drafts and often spend months (for short stories) and years (for novels) joyfully reworking, editing, and creating a finished product.

Or maybe I'm wrong -- in which case I would suggest some of you hire yourselves out to publishers and agents, who would no doubt pay a lot of money to have someone who can make judgments on all manuscripts without ever seeing a single word of the finished material. It's a pretty amazing ability, when you think about it.

Message edited by its author, Oct 6, 2007, 4:38pm.

...oops, forgot you, Xiguli:

Your points are well made. And if the publisher of BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES chose King as editor because having his name on the cover will help sales, okay. But be straightforward about it--don't even PRETEND that he (King) has the chops of a David Foster Wallace (a genius) and most of his other predecessors. How about this for a press release (wholly the product of my imagination):

"Mr. King's unprecedented sales record, the millions of copies of books he has sold worldwide, will ensure this collection more exposure to readers who might have imagined the short story format to be dead. We are pleased that Mr. King has agreed to lend his name to this enterprise and hope that his presence on the cover will do much to raise the profile of the masters of short fiction in this country..."

I would have no quibbles with this--it means King has no illusion of his stature in the literary community but also acknowledges his profound (in my view undeserved) popularity among the general readership.

Thoughts?

Zette: I'm baffled how you can, on the one hand, claim that you take "years" to work on a novel and yet also assert you have 80 novels under your belt and, to quote from your Profile page, "usually produce at least half a dozen new novels and twice as many short stories a year". Can you elaborate on this apparent discrepancy as to the care you say you take in writing and editing and the volume of material you produce? Just a slow-moving colleague expressing his curiosity...

Cliff: How to explain why King's book on writing appeals to me more than Dillard's? I think it is that King is a different animal from me, but Dillard and I are too much alike in philosophy. I love her prose, but we are cut from the same cloth and there is nothing new for me there. King is coarse, brutal, a clown, a devil. He's profound and ridiculous. He's a lot of fun. In a lot of ways, he's my opposite, so he shows me what may be missing in my own work. I want to write beautiful, sound, meaningful, sensitive, spritual prose, but I also want to knock my reader between the eyes with an axe. Dillard doesn't show me how to do that; King does.

Maybe it is the opposite for you: perhaps the necessary brutality of the writing process is something you are close to and Dillard brings the necessary light and rhapsody to your thinking.

It's just all so damned mysterious, beautiful and mysterious, and so, so hard to explain.

But it's fun talking about it.

Perhaps King brings a new sensibility to the selection process for BASS.

There are many ways to measure a judge's credentials and to think about what he or she may bring to the process.

Each judge has a lens through which to view the selections. King's lens may be different from Wallace's, but who is to say Wallace's would be in any way better? I can't imagine that it could be better, just different.

Did I already say that my workshop buddy, Patrick Ryan had a piece selected by King for BASS? Yeaaa, Patrick!

At its core, this type of judging would involve determining whether or not a short story has succeeded in what it set out to do. It would involve a determination as to how well it succeeded in what it set out to do. I think King is qualified to make such a judgment.

Message edited by its author, Oct 6, 2007, 6:45pm.

I'd have no objections, Cliffburns (#71), to a press release like that. But no one involved in press releases--whether writing them, distributing them, or receiving them--is naive enough to think they're anything but bullshit. (Cf. Your Call Is Important to Us.) (Cory Doctorow keeps talking about ways to filter the nuisances out of his email -- http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/01/how... .)

Since the whole press release system is based on everyone pretending they care about sharing information out of the goodness of their corporate little hearts, the only thing that matters is that the author of the release thinks that their content is topical enough to have a chance of being printed somewhere by someone, or they hope that it's a slow enough news day to warrant inclusion. You styled that fake release beautifully, by the way. And if someone in Marketing had ever thought that such an utterance would catch anyone's attention, they'd have used that approach without missing a beat.

I know I'm cynical. But I think it's healthy to remember that nothing you can get in a store ends up there on accident. There are a lot of other industries I'd call to task to be more open and honest in their communication with the public before I'd worry about the movers and shakers of the book industry making breathless assertions about the caliber of their offerings.

I obviously feel that I can, to a greater or lesser degree, be a Decider for myself, when it comes to books. (I think you're with me on that.) I also think that my experience gives me a decent chance of seeing through the marketing and hype, though it doesn't necessarily give me a better chance of not being influenced by it. (I can't miss the books on the major new release table when I walk in the bookstore door any more than anyone else can.) But alas, my self-perceived authority in the world of books doesn't extend to say, consumer electronics. So I ask around and I read blogs and consumer sites when I'm doing research, and I might even fall under the spell of a celebrity endorser. Just about everyone uses Deciders of some sort to navigate areas in which they *don't* feel they have expertise. Either I can feel like an idiot for not knowing everything about everything, or I can cheerfully acknowledge that a lot of people out there need some help deciding what to read and that there's nothing wrong with that.

zette, I'm not sure if you were tarring me with that brush in #70, but for the record, I don't think that the speed at which someone writes, or the genre to which they've been consigned, absolutely dictates the quality of their work. I agree that someone can be prolific and terrific (which would make a nice t-shirt slogan). I'd still argue, though, that those can be *signs* that a book is *more likely* to be bad. Just like a self-published book with a bad cover and typos on the copyright page and horrible "illustrations" courtesy of the author's husband makes a poor case for me to read the book. There are doubtless gems amongst those types of books, but believe me, the cruel people in the backroom of the bookstore spend a lot of time reading select hysterically bad passages aloud to each other from that particular category. (Burgeoning authors should take note, if they're savvy, and take pains not to be included in said category.) As a consumer, it's virtually impossible not to make judgments without considering useful categorizations.

It is a faulty system, though, I'll admit. I really thought that the Harry Potter books had to be awful--I couldn't believe that I could like anything that so many people liked so much. But in reading one, I realized I was wrong. I really like 'em. Rowling isn't perfect, or my favorite author, but I'd say she's a Good writer. (The discussion about her needing editing is too much of a tangent even for *me* to take up.)

And, er, don't worry, I'll soon exhaust myself into shorter responses.

Cliff: I really appreciate your question about why I prefer King over Dillard because I've had to think about it. My first response to your question is true but it is not the whole truth.

For years, I taught an essay by Dillard (an excerpt from her writing book) called "Handed My Own Life." It described her family as well-off, educated, and concerned for their daughter. She describes the day she gained independence as a result of her parents' refusal to gush over her accomplishments.

I never connected with that essay. And although I love Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek on a very important level I don't connect with it because Dillard comes from a world of privilege that I didn't. To be able to take a year and live in the wilderness is a great gift, but people in the twentieth century who are fighting for survival can rarely make such a commitment.

I do, however, identify with King's weird upbringing. My family was weird, too. Not in exactly the same ways as King's but on the same level of weirdness. King did not come from a world of privilege: he had to forge a life for himself out of little more than his imagination.

I don't question Dillard's dedication to writing, but somehow I trust King's dedication more.

This is not logical or even right, and it isn't fair to Dillard, but it is where I am.

On another level Dillard and I are alike; our curiosity, our love of nature, our belief that writing approaches a spiritual act. Our sensibilities are similar.

But King is my bud, my pard. I trust King because he didn't have the family support that Dillard did; I trust him because his *experience* is more like my own.

I enjoy King's no-nonsense approach in On Writing. I teach writing at the university level and I see too many students struggling to be erudite and literary and to fill their writing with tragic themes and pregnant symbolism. King, on the other hand, asks a writer to spend time thinking about the most basic things, like why is writing important to you? Why do you do it in the first place? You would be surprised how many people can't answer this question at first.

King has taught me to relax. He's shown me what's possible. That I can be myself and still write a decent story. He's shown me how to find my own way.

Even people with weird families who then go on to struggle and live in trailers and dream about writing a cogent work of art can do something. They can make something that lives for people.

I trust him.

I trust Dillard, too. But I trust King more.

Message edited by its author, Oct 6, 2007, 9:44pm.

> 70 - I'm not judging King on the speed of his writing, I'm judging him on the finished product. What I am implying is that the flaws in King's recent work are down to the volume of the output which is reducing the time spent polishing and editing.

Re - the three writers you mention.
Stout - produced one or perhaps two novels a year at an average length of 250 pages. That is still only half the volume of King.
Simenon - he is acknowledged as one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century (and seducer according based on his boast of having slept with 10000 women). What critical standing does Simenon have? I'm not sure. I have read a couple of the Maigret books and while enjoyable they are a bizarre mess. I do know that even most of the Maigrets are out of print though.
Dumas - I like Dumas. I recommend everyone should read The Count of Monte Cristo despite it's length. Interestingly though, Dumas could not keep up with the public demand so had a studio that wrote much of the general material for a novel, while he would give it the Dumas touch.

I do agree with your statement that not everyone can Dickens or Shakespeare but everyone can strive to be better, to push their talent to achieve more.

> 68 - I do agree to some extent about your statement about good and bad not always applying, that sometimes "there is a something" is a more accurate term. But how do you define that something. I personally think Lilith is one of the great fantasy novels; there is nothing else like it. At the same time I have to acknowledge that some of the writing is laboured, twee, preachy, etc. This is offset by some wonderful passages and an incredible vision. Overall the strengths of the novel outweigh the weaknesses and that is what raises it above other works.

Re - Dorian Gray. My feeling is that Wilde wasn't actually that good a fiction writer. He is a great writer of sentences and paragraphs but at times they don't all join together.

It says something that we are still debating what good fiction is in a thread that started about the BEST American short stories of 2007. If it is so hard to define good, how do you choose the best?

edited to add last paragraph

Message edited by its author, Oct 6, 2007, 7:37pm.

Theresa: You're right, it is fun talking about and debating this. Especially when I'm discoursing with smart, articulate people who are able to disagree without invective. I appreciate the tone of today's messages and give and take.

Xiguli: Another great post and I see what you mean. I just want to see honesty from the publisher--choose King if you want, but make sure the rationale behind this is manifestly clear: Steve is editor because he sells books. Period. No question, a book with King's name on the cover as editor would sell more copies than if you named Colson Whitehead editor. The authors included in such an anthology will undoubtedly appreciate the expanded readership. Fine and dandy. But the choice was made for reasons of sales, NOT literary merit.

But, after all, isn't this is a collection of the BEST American stories? Shouldn't it have the BEST editor/writer available to make the hard choices? King's tastes are decidedly commercial and, based on his body of work, I just don't trust him to be discriminating enough. I, as an author, would rather be judged by Whitehead or Ford or Wallace than King. Being selected by them would be an honour...if Steve-O picked a tale of mine, it just wouldn't have the same cachet...

Theresa: You're right, it is fun talking about and debating this. Especially when I'm discoursing with smart, articulate people who are able to disagree without invective. I appreciate the tone of today's messages and give and take.

Xiguli: Another great post and I see what you mean. I just want to see honesty from the publisher--choose King if you want, but make sure the rationale behind this is manifestly clear: Steve is editor because he sells books. Period. No question, a book with King's name on the cover as editor would sell more copies than if you named Colson Whitehead editor. The authors included in such an anthology will undoubtedly appreciate the expanded readership. Fine and dandy. But the choice was made for reasons of sales, NOT literary merit.

But, after all, isn't this is a collection of the BEST American stories? Shouldn't it have the BEST editor/writer available to make the hard choices? King's tastes are decidedly commercial and, based on his body of work, I just don't trust him to be discriminating enough. If I was an eligible literary author (I'm Canadian so I don't make the cut), I would much rather be assessed by Whitehead or Ford or Wallace than King. Being selected by them would be an HONOUR...if Steve-O picked a tale of mine, it just wouldn't have the same cachet...

Message edited by its author, Oct 6, 2007, 7:42pm.

Cliff -- first drafts are fast for me and I write many of them. I love the joy of flying with a story and getting the material written. I finish quite a few of first draft manuscripts each year, usually writing the story in very short time.

Afterwards, I often take months or years to edit the work -- sometimes editing or even rewriting multiple times, in order to get what I want.

The number of novels (or short stories) I edit each year is less than the number of new novels or short stories I write. Nonetheless, the number of books and stories builds up.

I've also been writing original material since I was 13, which also helps explain the high number of manuscripts. Are all of them good? No. But I enjoyed writing every one of them, as well as rewriting and editing the ones I feel drawn to work on. I don't regret having written any of them.

TheresaWilliams, what you're saying about a particular work resonating with you is so true. That's the part, I guess, where "good" and "bad" become irrelevant. Your response to Dillard also goes to show that you can also acknowledge something to be good, but still not particularly like it. (Your reasoning reminds me of an opinionated customer I once had, when I worked in a video store. For some reason, we were having a conversation about Walden and he was irate--IRATE!!--that Thoreau had acquired this reputation for self-reliance when he was subsisting on pies baked by someone else.) When you get down to it, all these connections we make and passions we have are ultimately and truly "beautiful and mysterious." Even if people like me get a perverse pleasure out of analyzing them to death.

jargoneer, you've brought up another great issue (#76). And then CliffBurns, in your last message. This concept of BESTness. I'm trying to wrap my mind around what seems so false about it to me, in light of everything else I've said about the usefulness of evaluation. I think it comes down to the whole marketing aspect once again. There may have been a time when the editor of BASS was indeed an erudite personage in the literary community, a respected arbiter of taste, and that that was the chief criteron by which he was selected. (And in all likelihood, it probably was a "he".) But the world is not the same place it was in 1915.

Who the hell is the respected arbiter of taste nowadays? That concept doesn't even have currency in any real way anymore. You could create an endless list and qualify it with countless sub-lists. The world we live in, particularly with these tubes we call the internets, teaches us not to look to a centralized authority about what is good and what is not, but instead to find communities of the like-minded. Everything that celebrates bestness in mainstream/pop culture, like the Emmys, the Grammys, the Academy Awards, the VMAs, the Pulitzer Prize, has its vocal and profligate counterpoint in reviewers, camera-ready experts, bloggers, and fan newsletters.

Take a look in the bookstore and you'll find lots and lots (and rots and rots!) of books with the word "best" in the title. (You especially see it a lot in the children's department, where nervous customers are desperate to be reassured that they're buying something of quality and Excellent Moral Character for young pliant minds.) The power of that word is diluted because its use is inevitably a marketing decision. While there are always people who take things at face value, consumers overall are savvier than that. "These stories MUST be the best because why else would they put 'best' in the title?" is not an argument that can be taken seriously today. Not only is it circular in reasoning, but our overall sense of irony is simply too finely honed.

These are thoughts which naturally lead me to distrust even the concept of a "canon."

Oh, oh, but I forgot -- jargoneer --

Wilde really was a great writer, to me, if not a consistent one. You're right about a lot of the problems he had with successfully joining the bits together. But The Importance of Being Ernest is as tight as they come, and several of his fairy tales are luminously transcendant. And that towering wit, that irrepressible smirk, the sublimely wicked ability to say funny / mean / pithy things, even in the midst of a work that's otherwise less worthy. Douglas Coupland is another writer in his category, to my mind. Mediocre-overall novels, for the most part, and sort of structurally repetetive, but taken to another level by his periodic ability to pick just the perfect, particular turn of phrase, or the absolutely most apt metaphor, to convey an emotional state. Not the best novelist, but able to convince me that he's got something worth saying about the human race.

I'd really like to read Lilith one of these days. I adore The Light Princess, though it appears to be in a considerably different line.

#76 - I didn't know that about Dumas! Plus ça change...

We're nibbling around the edges of the question: What is the difference between literary and genre fiction? Just about everyone has an instinctive ability to place most fiction in one or the other category - but it's not so easy pinpointing precisely where the dividing line is and what it consists of. Also, people generally think genre fiction is sloppily written, exploitive work (which it sometimes is) and literary fiction is or at least aspires to excellence. But that just begs the question, how do we define excellence?

I can appreciate a beautiful sentence, and I try to write them - but too often, current literary work puts me to sleep with dry, overlong sentences that are full of hypnotically beautiful chains of words but not much life. Some literary writers, it seems to me, are scared of going too deep into the well of emotion. The writers I most want to emulate are those who write with clarity, honesty and precision about important human issues: grief, guilt, violence, ambition, shame. Their prose is a vehicle for meaning, a tool honed to best convey their insights and experience of life.

Here's a sentence from the most recent issue of The New Yorker that struck me as exceptionally well crafted. In her review of a current biography of Nureyev, Joan Acocella says: "Nureyev was born in 1938, and, like most Soviet citizens who didn't starve to death in the years that followed, he almost did." The sentence has a rhythm, but you don't notice it unless you're looking for it. It uses basic words of few syllables that any reader can understand at once. Instead of pausing to give us background about the WWII period in the Soviet Union, Acocella stays tightly focused on Nureyev, even while giving us the information that a lot of people there starved to death. We've all read about enough dreadful conditions in history to be rather jaded, but the end of her sentence packs a wallop that brings them home to us. We're expecting her to say something uplifting at the end, to move away from her glancing reference to the citizens who starved to contrast the citizens who didn't. Instead, she surprises us by telling us how close he came to being just one of the others. She tells us something real and makes us feel its reality by the way she constructs this sentence. And she does it by using the kind of emotion-grabbing "trick" a skilled genre writer might use.

Message edited by its author, Oct 6, 2007, 10:35pm.

#80: Thank you for understanding. It was a little hard for me to admit to the origin of my resistance to Dillard. It is very odd; I feel Dillard and I are probably much alike in how we see life. But King trumps her in my mind because of the connection I feel to him regarding my life of hard knocks. I think it's good for us to acknowlege these things, even though they are hard and not always pretty. I think "good" and "bad" does become irrelevant to me: it's what makes me feel alive.

margad: this is what they say over at author's den (excerpt)

http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle....

There are two main types of fiction: literary and commercial (more commonly called genre or popular).

Genre fiction is plot driven and attracts a broad audience. It may fall into any category, such as mystery, romance, science fiction, etc. Bestselling genre authors would be John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Connelly, Janet Evanovich, Danielle Steel, among others.

Literary fiction is character driven and appeals to a smaller, more intellectual audience. A work of literary fiction may fall into any of the genres. However, what sets it apart are such things as excellent writing and originality of thought and style that raise it above ordinary writing. Examples of literary fiction: Cold Mountain, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath. Popular authors of literary fiction would be John LeCarre, Barbara Kingsolver, and Toni Morrison, among others.

Mainstream fiction is a term publishers and booksellers use to describe both commercial and literary works containing a universal theme that attracts a broad audience. Usually set in the 20th or present-day 21st century, these books deal with family issues, coming of age initiations, courtroom dramas, physical and mental disabilities, social pressures, political intrigue, etc. Regardless of genre or category, most of the novels on the bestseller list are considered mainstream, including authors such as Sue Grafton, Michael Crichton, or David Guterson.

I'm not sure when people decided that genre fiction wasn't character-driven. It seems very odd to me. A mystery is almost always more about the detective than about the crime, from Holmes to Miss Marple and from Nero Wolfe to Spenser -- it is the detective that draws the reader back. Every romance is about a woman looking for love and she drives the story. And while there are some forms of science fiction that are considered less character-driven, they're not as common as most people who don't read the books would assume. Fantasy is probably the most character-driven genre of all of them. At the same time, literary fiction isn't just about characters. There is a great deal of plot there, too. (grin)

Of course I'm a heretic here because I consider literary fiction to be a genre, just like all the others. The use of genre is a marketing tool -- a set of agreed upon conventions that allow readers to easily find the type of book they like. That includes literary fiction, which has sections in book stores no different than the rest of the genres.

Mainstream is just a catch term for publishers who don't want their author's books put on the shelves of the genre areas because their readers would be aghast to think they might read one of those lower forms. However, this is funny. A friend sent this quote to me:

URSULA K. LE GUIN reviews Jeanette Winterson's _The Stone Gods_: 'It's odd to find characters in a science-fiction novel repeatedly announcing that they hate science fiction. I can only suppose that Jeanette Winterson is trying to keep her credits as a "literary" writer even as she openly commits genre. Surely she's noticed that everybody is writing science fiction now?

Formerly deep-dyed realists are producing novels so full of the tropes and fixtures and plotlines of science fiction that only the snarling tricephalic dogs who guard the Canon of Literature can tell the difference. I certainly can't. Why bother? I am bothered, though, by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow-authors who created it and left it open to all who want to use it. A little return generosity would hardly come amiss.'

(_Guardian_, 22 September)

I've seen mainstream books hailed as huge, never-before-done breakthroughs -- on some of the oldest tropes in science fiction, with everything from cloning to time travel stories.

The distinction between character-driven fiction (literary)and plot-driven fiction (genre) is not always easy to make. There is significant overlapping. I think many university writing programs are more generous these days in what they consider to be literary fiction.

Most stories use a variety of techniques: characterization, plotting, setting, theme, symbolism, imagery, etc. The question arises as to which technique is given the most attention.

Sherlock Holmes, to me, is plot driven because it does not convey a complex psychological makeup for its characters. The plot is logical and rational; one might make a clear outline as to how the story was put together. However, in a literary work, such as The Sound and the Fury, such an outline would be difficult, if not impossible, to create and would not be beneficial at any rate. The action is organically constructed and the meanings are not spelled out, as they might be in a Holmes story. In fact, the "action" is usually built around the complicated psychological state of one of the characters.

In genre fiction, characterization is generally more shallow.

Character-driven stories tend to be more complex, sometimes experimental, and less prone to expectations regarding conventions (mysteries are more similar to each other than literary stories are similar to each other; Holmes and Marple have similar conventions; whereas there is a vast difference, for instance, between a Salinger story, an Updike story, an Erdrich story, a Dubus story, a Carver story, a Ford story, and so on).

An able and perceptive writer might write a story about Holmes or Marple and have reasonable success. Writers for the Marple series might come and go, but Marple will always be Marple.

However, if one consciously sets out to write like Salinger, Updike, Carver or Ford, the result tends to be ridiculous at best or useless at worst because the literary writer strives to find a unique voice, to create her own world, to delve into the psychological complexities and motivations of her characters. Marple will act in predictable ways, but a character in a Ford story will not, and the dilemma in a Ford story is not so easily resolved as it is in a Marple tale.

Although literary fiction can draw from various genres, it isn't a prisoner to the conventions in that genre. Romance is perhaps the most notorious genre for having strict expectations about language, plot, setting, pace, and so forth.

That said, there is significant overlapping, enough that we could argue a long time about whether this or that story is literary or genre.

Message edited by its author, Oct 7, 2007, 2:10pm.

#86: That said, I believe any kind of story can be worthwhile, literary, genre, mainstream, whatever. I like what King said when he accepted his literary award in 2003 or so (I provide the link so you can read the whole speech, if you want to):

Now, there are lots of people who will tell you that anyone who writes genre fiction or any kind of fiction that tells a story is in it for the money and nothing else. It's a lie. The idea that all storytellers are in it for the money is untrue but it is still hurtful, it's infuriating and it's demeaning. I never in my life wrote a single word for money. As badly as we needed money, I never wrote for money. From those early days to this gala black tie night, I never once sat down at my desk thinking today I'm going to make a hundred grand. Or this story will make a great movie. If I had tried to write with those things in mind, I believe I would have sold my birthright for a plot of message, as the old pun has it. Either way, Tabby and I would still be living in a trailer or an equivalent, a boat. My wife knows the importance of this award isn't the recognition of being a great writer or even a good writer but the recognition of being an honest writer.

Frank Norris, the author of McTeague, said something like this: "What should I care if they, i.e., the critics, single me out for sneers and laughter? I never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth." And that's always been the bottom line for me. The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I've told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation.
http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspe...

***
TheresaWillaims wrote: Character-driven stories tend to be more complex, sometimes experimental, and less prone to expectations regarding conventions (mysteries are more similar to each other than literary stories are similar to each other; Holmes and Marple have similar conventions; whereas there is a vast difference, for instance, between a Salinger story, an Updike story, an Erdrich story, a Dubus story, a Carver story, a Ford story, and so on).
***

I think you really mean that literary fiction stories tend to be... etc.

Holmes and Marple have similar conventions? What do you mean? Or are you saying that mysteries have certain things they must achieve in order to be a mystery, which makes them have some things in common?

Holmes, who is seen through the eyes of a Watson, is not at all like Marple. The characters are both complex and except for an ability to figure out puzzles, completely different. The joy of these books reading is seeing how the character figures out the plot, not that the plot itself is so complex (though the more complex the puzzle, the better).

Message edited by its author, Oct 7, 2007, 5:30am.

There is another thread on why mainstream write science fiction but deny they are writing sf. Some of it is snobbery but that works both ways; many genre fans get very defensive about non-genre writers crossing over and instantly dismiss the work on the basis of the idea(s) rather than the quality of the writing or the insight into characters, etc.

It's easy to forget that up to the rise of the pulp magazines sf and crime novels were treated the same as mainstream novels - H. G. Wells literary reputation relies on his sf novels, not his mainstream ones. With the advent of pulp magazines few sf novels were published in book form, and the ones that were tended to be by mainstream, i.e., Huxley, Orwell, etc. The pulp magazines effectively created the sf genre but at the same time removed it from the mainstream - with their garish covers, 1 cent a word and appeal to adolescents it is not difficult to see why sf was not taken seriously.

This has resulted in the situation where it is easy for a literary author to use sf tropes and remain credible while it is very difficult for genre writers to break out to literary acceptance. The latter does happen though, writers like Ballard, Moorcock, and Le Guen herself have received accolades from mainstream critics. It would be nice if it happened more often - writers like John Crowley and Gene Wolfe should be seen as major American writers. However, sf, and fandom in particular, is it's own worst enemy - the standards within the field remain relatively low but the cliches and bad writing are defended tooth and nail by fans. For example, it is difficult to be critical about any sf writer on LT without being accused of being a snob, not understanding the genre, and so on.

Re Holmes and Marple - recurring characters are a genre trope. It is quite rare for literary novelists to return to the same characters time and again but very common in certain genres. For me, this is a weakness in genre writing - often the recurring character is a comfort zone for both writer and reader. It has been argued that this allows greater time to develop the characters but this is rarely the case; these characters become fixed quite early on in a series and new novels are merely built around them. There can be no doubt that weaker later novels harm even the standing of strong initial novels - its the equivalent of a crappy tv spin-off series of a good film.

What is intriguing about iconic fictional characters is whether we read into them is on the page or exists elsewhere. Dracula is a good example of this - talking to people who have read the novel you often find that the work in their head is a combination of the actual novel and the existing cultural ideas on the character. In the novel Dracula is more bestial looking; he is not tall, dark and handsome with a strong sexual allure - that is the invention of the stage and screen. It is the same with Holmes and Marples - our perception of them is altered by the cultural bubble that now exists around them.
This leads to the question - are these characters so popular due to the strength of the initial writing and characterisation, or is it because these characters are vague enough in the original works that they allow multiple different readings?

What I find interesting about this discussion is the amount of authors I have never heard of.

I read 70+ books each year, ranging from obscure literary to mainstream horror. 50 more books I chuck out after a few pages because I see them as wasting my time.

The point? For every person who says this writer/book/style is the best there are a thousand other people who think it's bat guano.

Writer success? Are their books in print? If they can stay in print, they prove their worth (in the sense of Society) whether we individually like it or not.

Wanna make your favourite (obscure?) writer worth their pages? Go out and buy 50,000 copies. That's the only way to make them last in the mind of Society (at least for today). Money talks. Oprah talks.

(BTW: if she endorses it, I generally steer clear, but I am a nonconformist. Just because someone praises it doesn't mean a hill of beans to me. That's just the potential for a lot of gas . . .)

> 90 - I'm interested in just who you think is obscure; most of the writers in this thread are well known if you read literary fiction, or detective fiction or science fiction/fantasy.

Your argument about writer success is facile. Look at any bestseller list from the first 70-80 years of the 20th century and it will be packed with novels and writers you have never heard of. Why? Because they may have sold well in their day but have no lasting value except as cultural curios.

ps...how much of non-conformist can you be when your favourite authors are James Herbert, Dean Koontz, J. K. Rowling, et al? If that's not conforming to the popular view what is?

#88 and #89: It's always excellent when somebody says something so much better than I ever could: thanks, jargoneer, who explained the similarity between Holmes and Marple:

"Re Holmes and Marple - recurring characters are a genre trope. It is quite rare for literary novelists to return to the same characters time and again but very common in certain genres. For me, this is a weakness in genre writing - often the recurring character is a comfort zone for both writer and reader. It has been argued that this allows greater time to develop the characters but this is rarely the case; these characters become fixed quite early on in a series and new novels are merely built around them. There can be no doubt that weaker later novels harm even the standing of strong initial novels - its the equivalent of a crappy tv spin-off series of a good film."

#88: You wrote: "...joy of these books reading is seeing how the character figures out the plot, not that the plot itself is so complex"

I never said the plot was complex; I said that the emphasis is on plot rather than character, which you suggest yourself by saying that the joy is in seeing how the character "figures out the plot." In literary fiction, there may be hardly any plot at all, or a shadowy plot. Generally, one doesn't read literary fiction to see "what happens" but to immerse oneself in the inner lives of the characters. Does Marple have a rich inner life? Does Holmes? Not really, because their inner lives are subjugated in service to the plot.

#88: I think we are using the term "character driven" differently. Of course all stories have characters and couldn't function without them. But a literary story is character driven in the sense that the story is about the inner lives of the characters, not just in how they figure things out. Literary stories tend to deal with moral ambiguities, philosophical dilemmas, and so forth.

Re: Literary fiction--Notice that I say "generally." There are exceptions, of course. There are always going to be exceptions. I am making broad assertions here, just for the sake of teasing out the differences. And I am saying "differences" and not that one kind of writing is "better" than any other. Readers can make up their own minds about what is pleasurable for them to read. Writers will decide what is pleasurable for them to write.

#90 and #91: A lot of literary writing goes on under the radar and does not gain the attention of most of the public. This is one of the things I had to come to terms with as a writer. Getting a novel published does not make you a household name. A lot of wonderful novels die quiet little deaths.

But, if you're willing to dig a bit, you'll find a lot of true gems out there that are worth reading. The best-seller lists, the shelves in bookstores: these don't tell the whole story of what's going on in publishing.

Message edited by its author, Oct 7, 2007, 2:26pm.

Oh, true about mystery novels often having returning characters, which is why the books are so heavily character-driven. (grin)

As for the literary books stepping outside the tropes of (say) science fiction -- that's not always true. Too often, the science fiction idea is no different than what would be written in a science fiction book, it's just that the genre tag has been changed to accomodate a belief that if it was sf, it would be horrible. It's good that the audience for those books doesn't generally read sf, though, because they'd realize that a lot of their 'fresh, new, startling' ideas are very old. (laughs)

Maybe... maybe it's more that literary fiction often uses plot and character in a different way than other genres, and not that the other genres are often plot-driven rather than character-driven.

#93 - I'm not quite as up on the correct terminologies as I oughta be, but I hope I'm accurate in saying that a piece having recurring characters does NOT make it character-driven, for this reason: that in a plot-driven novel, the main character will undergo no substantial, no fundamental, no earth-shattering change. That's certainly the case for Sherlock Holmes--he is essentially the same guy at the beginning and end of each story. We can picture him, suspended in time, iconic, precisely because he *doesn't* develop. We're given alluring glimpses of his backstory and his relationship with Dr. Watson, so we do learn a bit more about him over time, but you can pick up any Sherlock Holmes story and the detective will be the same guy in all of them. That's not a weakness, by any means. It's just how those stories were constructed.

To break it away from strictly genre fiction, I'm thinking that another example of plot-driven novels might therefore be the Alice books by Lewis Carroll. I know many people who are charmed by the character of Alice, but though she is older in Through the Looking Glass, she is really no different than she was in Alice's Adv in Wonderland.

What you've been saying about there being a prejudice against genre fiction is absolutely true. I think it was just last night that I ran across a thread here on LT where people were talking about what kinds of books they *wouldn't* read, and it generally boiled down to this or that variety of genre fiction. Attitudes can reflect this idea that a particular genre is essentially "beneath" that person. I know I'm always having trouble getting people to take me seriously when I say that good children's literature ranks right up there with any good literature (e.g., The Mouse and His Child or most of the picture books of Anthony Browne).

But acknowledging those things doesn't change the fact that it's far more common, in terms of numbers alone, to find genre fiction with plot-driven stories, and literary fiction with character-driven stories. Though such an attitude may exist elsewhere, I haven't heard anyone here claim that this fact makes one thing superior to another. There are scads of poorly-written literary novels. There are plenty of brilliant, groundbreaking works that get shelved in genre. There are countless books that blend literary with genre conventions successfully, and probably an infinitely greater number that don't manage to pull it off. And as acknowledged in #92, there are plenty of exceptions when any of us speak in generalities about how genre and literary fiction differ.

Cynthia Ozick writes in her essay "The Din in the Head", "Where, after all, are the sovereign forms of yesteryear--the epic, the saga, the Byronic narrative poem, the autobiographical Wordsworthian ode?" For the artistic form we call the novel to remain alive and well, it needs *all* of the forms it takes, genre and literary, experimental and pulp, to pump new lifeblood into our conception of it.

A character need not change for the story to be character driven -- in fact, the point of some stories is that the character does NOT change, and it would still be character driven. This is sometimes a major part of the story, and happens in all genres.

The fact that literary fiction tends towards stories where the characters make major changes is a facet of the genre, not of character or plot-driven stories.

Message edited by its author, Oct 7, 2007, 9:47pm.

zette - #96 "A character need not change for the story to be character driven"
Then I'm still not understanding what you in particular mean when you describe something as character driven. I'm taking "driven by the character" to mean that the fundamental thing that "happens" in the novel is something to do with the state of the character. Please clarify?

"in fact, the point of some stories is that the character does NOT change,"
Unless handled with some sort of experimental postmodern finesse that I can't really picture, a book whose whole point is that the protagonist starts and ends as exactly the same person sounds pretty snoresville. A book's point *could* be that, say, a protagonist realizes he's just fine the way he is, but that's still a shift in his understanding.

" and it would still be character driven. This is sometimes a major part of the story, and happens in all genres."
Can you give me some examples?

Try to ask me again in a couple weeks and I'll see if I can think of them -- but maybe you're right on experimental. I know I read some in school -- specifically pointed out as being that type of work. I've buried them from my brain because I found them boring, too -- but I remember the teacher being very big on the fact that they were literary fiction.

I just don't have time to look stuff up right now. A publisher has asked me to do a chapter for them and it needs to be done by November. It's nice that people know I can write quickly and fill in a spot, but a little more warning would be nice!

Oh, yes, well... my publisher asked for a chapter, too, but I told them I was too busy posting nitpicky essays on LibraryThing. I guess it just comes down to priorities.

Zette #85 - LOL at the LeGuin quote!

This is a wonderful thread, which I know I am going to return to and re-read. My fiction seems to land in that mushy zone between categories, so it is always hard for me to tease out the distinctions between literary and genre, mainstream and not, etc.

The terms "character-driven" and "plot-driven" have been in common use for a long time to define the distinction between literary and genre fiction, but I am not sure how useful they are. In particular, the term "driven" seems to imply works in which character drives plot, or plot drives the actions of the characters - but any type of fiction has to have both character and plot to get off the ground at all.

Sometimes people talk as if literary novels did not need plots. I disagree - I think any reasonably good literary novel does have a plot, but the plot development tends to take place inside the progagonist. Thus, where the rising action in a genre novel might involve an external development like a spy being given a mission to complete, the rising action in a literary novel is more likely to consist of a character's need to address inner pain or turmoil. The crisis in a genre novel is likely to be a dramatic external development, like a shoot-out between the hero and the antagonist; whereas in a literary novel it will more likely involve the protagonist facing an internal crisis, say, whether to lie or tell the truth. But in all fiction, genre or literary, outer and inner developments tend to coincide, so the external drama in genre fiction will often result in at least some amount of character development, and the character development in literary fiction may be the result of a dramatic external event, as well. As a general rule, genre fiction is more likely to use exaggerated personality traits (like Sherlock Holmes's powers of deduction) while literary fiction tends to use more complex and realistic characters. But there are many exceptions.

Nowadays, even a lot of series mysteries have protagonists whose character develops at least slightly from one novel to the next. For example, one of Tony Hillerman's Navajo detectives faces the fatal illness and death of his wife as well as his own aging, and the other makes a series of decisions that ultimately determine whether he will stay on the reservation and continue studying to become a shamanic healer or whether he will move away and give up his traditional studies. Over the course of the series, there is quite a bit of internal character development.

Message edited by its author, Oct 8, 2007, 1:09am.

> 95 - I like your analysis of the character driven and what we are really talking about is character development.

> 100 - I agree that in some series recurring characters do develop but I have a major problem with a number of these series' - what is best described as "the superhero syndrome". When a new series starts the hero tends to be and believable; they overcome their personal issues to solve the crime. In second book they do the same and then in the third book and the fourth book.... By the time we get to book 10 the hero seens to have overcome all personal problems (alcoholism, innumerable partner problems, leprosy, etc) and solved every major murder in the area for the last 10 years. Their personal live has become a soap opera but in their professional life they are so brilliant (not that it ever gets recognised) you wonder why they even bother to employ (other) police. They have become invincible, unstoppable; in other words, a superhero. (The "jumping the shark" moment in a crime series is often the one when the hero and his family and friends become the targets of a crazed killer; the point when reality exits stage left).

As one wag stated, it was incredible that Marlowe could remember his name never mind solve the crime as he hit on the head so often.

margad (#100) - While I'll happily quibble terms and genres and everything else, it's true that those concepts are a lot more useful if you're a critic or a professor, and not so much if you're a writer. When I'm reading, I give zilcho thought to whether something's driven by plot or character or chauffer--though I might do it a little bit more, since we've been having this conversation. A lot of my favorite literature is experimental in nature (Calvino, Borges, Cortazar, Donald Barthelme, Jonathan Lethem) or ironic / postmodern (Better Brown Stories, A Barrel of Laughs..., A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), so, really, my investment in categories extends only as far as it takes to smash them.

Categories also have a really hard time dealing with change over time. Building upon what other thriller writers have done before him, Tony Hillerman and others owe a debt to the somewhat simpler characterizations of Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown, for example, but are skilled enough to blend lessons learned from other places. Over time, it seems like all the distinct lines of genre or technique get muddied; so-called invention can really just mean pulling from disparate sources.

Which is why I certainly can't fault literary writers being attracted to sci fi material, or vice versa.

Message edited by its author, Oct 8, 2007, 8:21pm.

Re: Message 78 Well, BASS includes Canadian authors, so good luck. There always seems to be a story by the great Alice Munro included. If King selected your story, would you tell them no thanks and go back to your garret and toil away in obscurity? Just wondering. I'm waiting to read the stories King selected, then I'll know how well he did.

Rufus:

I'm a HUGE Marx Bros. fan so I appreciate your handle.

I think I said, without taking the time to check, that having King choose a story of mine for BASS wouldn't mean nearly as much as having Colson Whitehead (or a write I admire) decide I merited inclusion. I simply don't respect King as a writer (although, as a person, we'd likely share a beer, enjoy a Red Sox game and have a grand old time).

Sorry, folks, I've been away from my desk for Canadian Thanksgiving--but I've enjoyed catching up. Good discussion...and no pissy cracks. I like that...

CliffBurns: Oh yeah, Firefly, Wagstaff, Spaulding, I love the Marx Brothers. Yep, that's what you wrote. But would it mean so little you wouldn't accept inclusion? King as a writer. He's not McCarthy or Ian McEwan or whoever. Probably couldn't be if he tried. I don't think that necessarily means he can't appreciate those writers, or others. I know he appreciates those two. On the other hand, he loves the Harry Potter books. Go figure.

I write almost exclusively on historical topics, but as a reader I range a lot more widely and have relished a lot of good contemporary literature, from genre to literary. Working with critique groups, I've been in the position of critiquing thrillers, which is absolutely not the type of work I would ever write (though I read thrillers my husband brings home). The people I critique have referred me to other thriller writers, so I must have some ability to judge what works and what doesn't even in a category I don't write. It's possible King actually reads and relishes some of the writers you admire, Cliff.

Margad:

I judge a writer from his/her published canon. Danielle Steele may be a world authority on the novels of Smollett (she isn't) but it's her WORK that determines her aesthetic sensibilities to me. I think King has equated his writing with MacDonald's/fast food at various points in his career; someone with a fast food mentality is not the guy I want judging fine cuisine.

C'mon, let's be honest--we've all been around long enough to know how publishers think, especially in a time when the biz is SO corporate. The publisher wanted him for his name, not because he's always whispered about as being a possible Nobel Laureate. And, as I said, that's FINE. But if you're looking for a great writer who deserved the honour, King is not your man/woman. He is qualified, eminently qualified, to sell books. It's a different kind of talent and God bless him.

Rufus: would I turn down inclusion in BASS if King offered me a slot? Nope. Would I scream and pump my first in the air and feel like I had flown to the moon and back if Colson Whitehead made the same offer? You betcha...

Message edited by its author, Oct 9, 2007, 10:37am.

CliffBurns; Will you read BASS 2007 and let me/us know what you think of the stories? I just don't think the stories will necessarily suck just because King chose them. While King isn't a literary writer, I just can't put him the same category as Steele. Regardless of who chooses you for BASS, good luck.

#91

Sorry, I don't check in too often.

To reiterate: I read 70 or so books a year, putting down another 50 or so in boredom. I just don't see many of the authors mentioned in this thread. Maybe they ended up in the 50 tossed, I don't know. I generally don't remember the ones that bore me or that I haven't heard of (to paraphrase Yogi Berra).

As to writer success being facile, I reiterate: Writer success? Are their books in print? If they can stay in print, they prove their worth (in the sense of Society) whether we individually like it or not.

Example of success: I don't care for Wuthering Heights, but it lives on, making someone rich.

If we can't read them (being out of print and out of used book stores) how can we judge their success? I have many "forgotten" novels in my library -- most of them are forgettable -- some even from the Victorian era.

My nonconformity has nothing to do with authors. My nonconformity is a lifestyle, pure and simple. Favourite authors has to do with frequency, at least mine do. I like To Kill a Mockingbird but I don't list Harper Lee because I have no second book of hers to set a benchmark with.

Besides, this is just a silly website, not some oath of allegiance . . .

Rufus:

I'll watch for BASS at my library but actually buying a copy...er, no. As a consumer, I vote with my wallet and I show my disapproval of King stealing that post from a more worthy writer by not buying it. I congratulate those writers whose work was chosen and, undoubtedly, having King on the cover will help sales but...well, I'll leave it there.

No need to buy it, Cliff, but do please read at least the first couple of stories in BASS when it shows up at your library. You might not like them (probably won't!) but we'll be quite interested to hear your reactions.

I really enjoyed the one a few years ago that Amy Tan edited - it was full of stories I found atmospheric, rivetingly interesting, mysterious and profound. So I bought BASS last year out of impulse when I saw it on the front table at Powell's, and I was so disappointed. None of the stories interested me - though you might have thought they were all fantastic, Cliff. I think the editor that year was a high literary type. But, in a way, that's the beauty of the policy of revolving editors: it means they select stories that appeal to a variety of readers rather than always focusing on the same kind of story.

Scaryguy - I don't like Wuthering Heights, either. I've read it at least twice, because I keep running across references to it that make it sound like just my kind of novel. But it leaves me cold - despite the fact that I love Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. I just didn't like Heathcliff and couldn't relate to Cathy's feelings about him (though he's got a great name!).

Message edited by its author, Oct 12, 2007, 9:40pm.

I've read BASS every year since 1989. There have been times I've liked them all to some degree and others when there have been just a few that I liked. I do come across writers I wouldn't normally read. That's usually a good thing.

Something nice about BASS, regardless, is its franchise. There are Best American Mystery Stories, as well as for comics, sci-fi, essays, nonfiction, too... And it sure wasn't dumb to invent Best American Non Required Reading. (Which refuses to touchstonify.)

That many more chances for writers to be anthologized in high profile anthologies.

# 90 - If this is true: "(BTW: if she endorses it, I generally steer clear, but I am a nonconformist...)" then you are not a nonconformist. You're a reactionary. To avoid something specifically because Oprah recommends it is to still give her enormous power over what you read.

I do, however, own a button that demands, "Who CARES what Oprah reads?"

"Generally steer clear", in my lexicon, means missing Australia because you're cruising by Iceland. Maybe I should have said, "I hear about it (Oprah in this case) because it's thrust at me everytime I turn on the television, read my excite mail (from the 'news' page), or wait in line at the grocery store. Unlike the apparent masses, I am not tempted by it (Oprah in this case)."

Generally steer clear is just easier to write. Definitions are funny. Everyone has a take. Got to go, the boys are yelling about two skunks walking across the front yard . . .

Oprah's got a lot of people who care about her literary taste, but still a very large portion of people who do not. So neither camp really makes you a nonconformist. Now, if you bought or ignored books based on visits with your spirit animal, *that* would make you a nonconformist.

Hey--I think I just realized something--in my own mind, at least, "nonconformist" is one of those "honorifics" Cliff's always talking about! So I guess I'm hassling you for not having earned your nonconformist stripes or something. Which I now see is silly, so never mind. Carry on. Enjoy Iceland.

Statistically, Oprah's bound to pick a decent book now and then. Maybe I'd be embarassed to read something with the actual O logo on it, since I have my ironic image to keep up, but it's not the books' fault. Oprah is much more disturbing to me in ways other than her book club... when you're a woman, inevitably getting older, you have to fight tooth and nail to avoid absorption by the Cult of Self Help and all the positive thinking seminars and dream diaries the Cult entails, and Oprah is the Grand Poobah of charismatic self-absorption.

Now I've gone and derailed the topic train. (Yep, failing to conform to thread topics, that's what I'm known for. Ask anyone...)

i don't get the opportunity to watch daytime tv, what with having grown tired of editors rejection slips years back and deciding to stick with day jobs, but i've admired Oprah for bringing books into the forefront of her half hour of whatever it is she does. are they mostly bad books? Does it really matter? if a few couch potatos turn off their tv for a few minutes and burn a lightbulb instead, we save that much energy.
donchya think?

what makes me laugh at this posting is the inordinate attention my friend stevie gets from everyone. No, I never met Stephen King, but he is one of my most intimate friends. He has become so through his craft. I know when I flip to page one on any of his books I'm going to enter a world that I probably won't be able or want to leave for a day or two. His point of view is that of a friend telling me a story. Even in his most terrible (It or The Shining) he mixes gentle humanity in with the horror. The one thing I KNOW (which isn't much) is that anyone in their craft who embodies the controversy SK does must be damned good! Of the top five authors on LT, who posts such controversy on Rowling or Prachett? Heck, I'd never heard of Prachett or some of other top authors when I arrived here. I do well with predictions and here is one:

Before the end of this decade (2009 specifically), King will be number one as Rowling has played her hand. The rest will not catch him, either. He continues.

I think short stories are terriffic! I read one by Neil Gaiman that reminded me of Good Omens. It is called,When We Went To See The End Of The World. It was It was a first person narration by Dawnie Morningside, age 11 1/4. He can truely capture the voice of a child.

Here's an article that talks about the demise of short stories when the format should be PERFECT for a rush-rush, 21st century world. Some good points, methinks:

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/pub...

I can die happy now. Folks are heaping praise on "Rock Springs" by Richard Ford. The entire collection is stunning. The standouts for me are "Optimists" and the title story "Rock Springs". After hundreds of readings of the lead story "Rock Springs" over the years, it's clear vision, it's razor sharp humanity can still bring me to tears. It is one for the ages!