It's a Short Story

     I've had a life-long love affair with short stories. As a young reader, Jack London, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Brett Harte, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ambrose Bierce rocked my fragile little mind. When I was ten or eleven, it seemed intimidating to pick up a "big person's book," but short stories were different - more accessible.
     Some of those stories I read as a child and young man have stayed with me to this day. O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi haunts me with the perfection of its plot and moving parts. Mark Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Conrad Aiken's Silent Snow, Secret Snow constantly resurface in my brain. I don't know if you've ever heard of that last one, but its portrayal of a young boy sinking into insanity one day at a time is unforgettable.
     As I got older, I naturally turned to longer works, but I never lost my love of the story that could be read over the course of a single lunch hour. Every year, I looked forward to the Science Fiction anthologies that would deliver twenty or more short stories to me all at once. For a time, it felt to like Stephen King was keeping the short fiction form alive all by himself. His collection of four novellas called Different Seasons is simply brilliant, with three stories that were made into excellent movies: The Body (which became the film Stand by Me) Apt Pupil, and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (which became the film The Shawshank Redemption.) In fact, a story that King wrote (Yeah, We've Got a Hell of a Band) was the inspiration for the full-length novel I'm currently writing - Rock 'n Roll Heaven.
     I'm thinking about short stories today because I've just recently written and released two short stories of my own - Second Chance Christmas and Christmas Town. After writing these two very different stories, I am beginning to understand why the masters of the form kept returning to it again and again. There is something freeing about writing a short story. When I get an idea for a book-length project, I had better really love that idea, because I am going to be living with it for a few quite a while. With a short story, my commitment isn't nearly as great, (I can normally write a short story in three days or so) but I am still able to fully explore a single idea.
     For instance, in Christmas Town, I had the concept of an outwardly-successful man who has just made an exceptionally difficult decision - in this case it is to leave his children in Seattle and accept a huge promotion in Boston. I wanted to separate this man from his normal surroundings to give him time to reflect. If I had tried to take this idea and write it as a novel or novella, I would have had to back up from the starting point I chose and written 10,000 or so words that filled in his background and how he got to that point. With a short story, I was able to just throw him right in and explore the dilemma I was interested in. 
     Second Chance Christmas highlighted the opposite side of that coin. When I was done with that story, I realized I had more I wanted to say about Steve and Lizzie, the two lovers who aren't reunited until the last few paragraphs of the story. The beautiful thing is, I can explore more of their story now with more short slices of their life.Their journey will unfold over a series of four more short stories over the next twelve months. 
     There are a million changes happening in the publishing industry right now. Barnes and Noble, the last large chain of bookstores, is tottering precipitously. Traditional publishing houses and literary agents, the gatekeepers of the industry for many decades, are waning in influence. Self publishing has thrown those gates wide open, for better or worse. One of the best changes, though, is that short fiction is popular and viable once again, not just in a few literary magazines, but in the open marketplace. Have you hugged a short story today?