Friday open thread: short fiction

[dolorosa_12]

I'm going to start this post with a brief review of some short stories I read this week, and then I will get to the question. I am trying a thing with SFF short fiction this year (namely to read more of it; by 'short fiction' I mean anything shorter than a novella), and am jumping between various online magazines and reading anything that takes my fancy. This week, I read four stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies — the first two were in a very early issue ('Beneath the Mask' by Aliette de Bodard, and 'Winterblood' by Megan Arkenberg), and the second two were in the current issue at time of reading ('Constant Ivan and Clever Natalya' by M.A. Carrick and 'Notes on The Seventh Battle Of The Queen Of The Ruby Mists' by Mari Ness).


Of the four stories, the latter two were probably most to my taste, and the Bodard one was my least favourite. The Carrick story was essentially an invented fairytale, with folkloric quests, characters with fixed personality traits that made them vulnerable to folklore situations, and a marriage at the end. The Ness story is a pastiche of old-school folklore encyclopedia writing, as if written about a genuine fairy otherworld kingdom. 'Winterblood' is about aristocratic families with mythological creatures in their family trees, and bargains with the supernatural, and vampires. Aliette de Bodard these days tends to write space operas inspired by Vietnamese history and culture, gothic fantasy set in post-apocalyptic Paris, and spin-off novellas featuring the Vietnamese dragon prince and his fallen angel husband from her post-apocalyptic series solving supernatural mysteries. But her earliest published fiction was set in a world inspired by Aztec history and religion, and 'Beneath the Mask' is part of this set of stories. As always, it features Bodard's two favourite common threads: lots of descriptions of food, and tensions that hinge on family relationships, particularly those of mothers and children.

As I was reading my way through these stories, I finally figured out something that had been eluding me for years: the key factor that is likely to determine my enjoyment of short fiction (again, a reminder that here I mean anything shorter than a novella). And that factor is that I need short fiction not to make me work too hard to get something out of the story.

This is obviously very subjective, but basically I am not prepared to spend a lot of time (when the story has such a limited word count) figuring out the context, the rules, and the frames of reference that inform the story. For me, this means it either needs to draw on a literary tradition with which I'm very familiar and well-versed (I've read a lot of folklore and fairytales, so fake fairytales told in a folktale style are no work at all), be set in a cultural context with which I'm familiar (either through personal experience or through exposure to nonfiction or longer works of fiction that draw on this cultural context), or it needs to be by an author whose longer work I have read and enjoyed. When at least one of these three factors aren't present, I'm more likely to just let the story wash over me and come out the other side having absorbed nothing, such that I'll need to read Goodreads summaries even an hour later to remember what the story was about.

In longer works of fiction, however, I'm quite happy to be forced to work a lot harder: I'm with the story for tens or hundreds of thousands of words, for at least an hour, and I'm making a commitment to spend time and effort gaining understanding of unfamiliar contexts, storytelling conventions, and literary and cultural allusions. But in short fiction, this is to me an unreasonable amount of effort for such a small thing. I realise this is a me problem and not a sort of objective attitude to quality or taste in writing, and it's potentially cutting me off from a lot of clever, experimental or interesting work that might expand my frame of reference (though I would hope, since I'm more prepared to put in the effort with longer pieces of writing, eventually my frame of reference will expand to encompass more cultural settings or literary traditions, rendering more short fiction 'easy' to me). But I'm not a paid editor or reviewer, reading (other than professional texts) is not a job for me, and I read to learn, and for pleasure. I don't enjoy learning from short works of fiction, and it's as simple as that.

So, all of the above basically forms my answer to today's question:

Do you read short fiction? And do you have different markers of enjoyment for short fiction than you do for longer pieces of writing?

Comments

[yarnofariadne]

I feel like I should read more short fiction than I do - I go through periods of reading tons, and then don't read any for months. Just a matter of not having time to do everything in a day I want to do, but I like when I'm able to prioritise time to spend with short fiction.

I don't really mind a short story making me work hard, but I have trouble with anything too abstract. Personally folklore and fairytales are the world I choose to inhabit in most of my reading and writing, so anything that relies on tropes and tools from that world are going to be much easier to read for me. I sometimes feel like things that make me work hard just don't actually resonate with anything in me. And that's perfectly fine, not everything can be something to everyone. But if I don't feel some sort of chord with what I'm reading, it's hard for me to feel inspired to put in the work to make a connection with it.

[dolorosa_12]

I sometimes feel like things that make me work hard just don't actually resonate with anything in me. And that's perfectly fine, not everything can be something to everyone. But if I don't feel some sort of chord with what I'm reading, it's hard for me to feel inspired to put in the work to make a connection with it.

I agree with this — but I also feel it's harder to have an emotional connection with a work of short fiction, because there's so little space to establish that connection. Characters tend to be very thinly fleshed out, the story hinges on a single event, etc. I find with short stories I'm looking for a sort of flash of cleverness — an interesting idea or scenario, an unexpected twist on something familiar.

Folklore- and fairytale-based short stories are definitely my preferred subgenre as well.

[darkmarcy]

Heh, I am currently doing the Doorstopper challenge for my library so reading books with over 750 pages... Short story collections (and collected poems or collected trilogies etc.) count in that though!

I just reblogged yesterday a tumblr post that said "Plays and short fiction are about reading the single most fucked up thing you’ve ever encountered in 45 minutes or less and then going back to work like you didn’t just meet both faces of god and satan on your lunch break"

That got me thinking about Nine Billion Names of God, which I read in school and it has haunted me ever since. Or at least that final line.

I could/should read more short fiction, this year I read a Finnish collection of cryptid-themed short stories and just finished a book of nature essays. (Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald) Collections by different authors are a mixed bag, like the aforementioned cryptid collection, there were good stories but also gross stories :'D I feel "safer" reading a collection of short fiction by one author, though I better like that sole author!

[dolorosa_12]

Quite the opposite challenge, that's for sure!

That Tumblr post is so true — obviously it's not the case for every single play or short story, but it does happen in a lot of them! That being said, the single most disturbing work of fiction I've ever read was The Beast of Heaven by Victor Kelleher, and that's a novel, albeit quite a short one.

I agree with you about anthologies — I prefer them to be the work of one author whose writing I know I like, rather than the work of a bunch of authors grouped around a particular theme. The latter tend to be uneven in quality.

[chestnut_pod]

I was going to ask if anthologies and collections felt at all different to you -- I must agree with you about the unevenness of collections, though that can be an anthology problem too. I've had some luck finding editor-compilers I really respect. Navah Wolfe is one of those for me.

Like you, I'm generally a harsher critic of short stories. There's a degree of detachment, often, that I find difficult to surmount. That said, I just read an absolutely phenomenal collection in translation, From the Jewish Provinces by Fradl Shtok, which reminded me that I should never say never about a given format!

[dolorosa_12]

I agree with you about Navah Wolfe — she's a good editor and I've liked a lot of stuff she's been involved with.

There's a degree of detachment, often, that I find difficult to surmount.

This is exactly it! It's as if, faced with the low word count, attempts to forge an emotional connection with the reader is one of the first things to go.

That translated collection sounds wonderful!

[raven]

I try to read it regularly and for the most part I read some, but not as much as I'd like. Right now I'm reading the Hugo long list anthology for last year, which showed me how much I've missed, and a single author collection that I got as an ARC and is excellent. I think with short fiction there is just so much scope for personal taste, more so than novel-length - like you say, there just isn't time to really get into what the author wants you to understand, and then because of that I think a writer who isn't there yet with their craft can be much more visibly struggling in the shorter medium.

(This is the best story I read last year.)

[dolorosa_12]

there just isn't time to really get into what the author wants you to understand, and then because of that I think a writer who isn't there yet with their craft can be much more visibly struggling in the shorter medium.

Yes, exactly so! Authors have far less space to hide in short fiction.

That Vanessa Fogg short story is amazing! I've loved her writing in the past, so I'm unsurprised that I also enjoyed that story — thank you for recommending it!

[corvidology]

I read short fiction very selectively and very little of it that's been written in the last decade. Why? Because I cannot abide 'slice of life' stories which is what so many of them have become. Ack!

If they can't work out how to give their story a beginning, middle and end (at least of sorts on all three counts) then I put it to the author that this form is not for them.

[dolorosa_12]

I like 'slice of life' stories if — and only if — I am very familiar with the setting, and already love the characters a lot. So, fanfic, essentially. And I've enjoyed novellas written by some of my favourite professionally published authors in existing settings with existing characters (who we previously met in novels/longer series) where the authors have already done the work to establish the characters, setting, and stakes, and are using the novellas and short stories to focus on the characters and their relationships in their downtime.

Like you, though, I'm not interested in a 'slice of life' for people whose lives aren't already intimately familiar for me! I don't mind stories where the stakes are low, but there needs to be something.

[raven]

I'm really interested in what counts as "slice of life"! the commenter above says it's a story that doesn't have a beginning, middle and end, but SFF so often steps out of the mould of traditional story forms that I'm not quite sure I get it.

[dolorosa_12]

It's hard to explain (more of an 'I know it when I see it' kind of thing), but I think for me the key element is that it starts in the middle of things with the assumption that we already know who these characters are, and that not very much happens — we just watch them putter around doing domestic stuff (and not doing domestic stuff where there's a problem — even a very low-stakes problem — that needs solving). It might shed light on the characters' relationship, but not develop the relationship further.

I still don't know if I've explained this very well, and my definition might be different to corvidology's.

[forestofglory]

I do read short fiction! Very erratically at the moment, but there's so much being published right now. I generally don't give a short story too much time to grab me, but that's true of most media right now. I generally give up pretty quickly if thing are looking grim or the prose isn't working for me.

[dolorosa_12]

I've always appreciated your appreciation of short fiction (and your determination to share it)! Your point about not giving the story too long to grab you, and ditching stories that aren't to your taste is a good one — there's so much out there that it's not worth persevering with something that isn't giving you any enjoyment.

[sophia_sol]

I read a fair amount of short fiction! I follow a bunch of different sff semiprozines online, and give at least a try to all the stories they publish. I think the biggest difference for me in how I approach short fiction vs longer fiction is that the longer stuff generally you get some sort of summary/enticement to go with it so that you have at least something of a sense of what you're in for, whereas with short stories it seems you're always going in cold. Which means, honestly, that I have a lot less patience with short stories, because I know that plenty of them are ones I'd have given a pass to if I'd had access to a blurb because I'd have known it wasn't for me, so I know I'm in for a much worse ratio of stories-tried to stories-liked. I finish reading the vast majority of the novels and novellas I start, but I probably finish less than half of the short stories I start. So a short story has to catch my attention in some way within the first few paragraphs, or first few pages at worst, or I'm going to half-heartedly skim for a while and then x out of it. You gotta indicate from the beginning what sort of story it is and why a person should care about it, is my short story opinion!

[dolorosa_12]

You're absolutely right — we go blind into short fiction in a way that we don't with longer pieces of work. I guess that's why I tend to prefer to read short stories written by authors I already know and like, or stories recced by people whose tastes tend to a align with my own.

So far I haven't clicked out of short stories without finishing them (it feels like such a little investment in terms of time that I might as well persist, even if the story isn't to my taste), but I probably should start to be a bit more selective. I suspect once I start doing that that my habits will match your own — completing every novel/novella I start, finishing far fewer of the short stories I start.

Some magazines do have brief descriptions of the short stories (e.g. Tor.com) but it's often not enough to give a clear picture of the story.

[sophia_sol]

Yeah, any individual short story is not much of a time commitment, but they definitely add up when you start reading more of them! I think when I initially started I also tried to finish every short story I started, but I realized that was just leading to me not reading short stories, because it was getting overwhelming for me.

And yeah, I love that Tor dot com does brief descriptions, and it really helps me sometimes! I wish more places would do that!

[dolorosa_12]

I think when I initially started I also tried to finish every short story I started, but I realized that was just leading to me not reading short stories, because it was getting overwhelming for me.


This is a good reminder for me — I think that's what caused my short fiction reading to tail off in the past. And I agree with you about the descriptions of short stories, and wish more places would do it.

[torachan]

I like short stories but mostly only read them in collections (and prefer such collections to be by a single author, rather than a theme by multiple authors), and don't go looking for them elsewhere. I was never in the habit of reading short story magazines in print and have not gotten in the habit of it now that most of that sort of thing is online. I do also sometimes read short stories published as part of a series where they take place before/during/after events in a series of novel-length books.

[dolorosa_12]

I agree with you about anthologies — I prefer single-author collections rather than themed collections as the latter tend to be very uneven in quality.

I'm mostly reading short story magazines online because it's an easy way to access lots of stories quickly, and it's free, which means I don't need to make a financial commitment to something I'm not sure I'm going to like.

[merit]

If you have 10+ named characters who also have a speaking role in a short story... that's going to test me as I try to imagine every single character. It can some times work at the novelette range, but true under 10K stories... no.

[dolorosa_12]

This is so true! Everything in short fiction needs to be cut down to the bone — and if it isn't, the story is going to feel very chaotic.

[superborb]

I read a fair amount of short fiction, both in anthologies and one offs online. For something short to work for me, it needs to have a very clear idea about what it's trying to say and for that idea to be interesting/unique/thought-provoking. Everything else just passes through without much impact.

[dolorosa_12]

What you're saying makes a lot of sense, and is a good approach to short fiction in general. There aren't enough words to sustain more than one single good, clear concept — and that concept should hold attention.

[thawrecka]

I grew up reading hard SF and horror shorts, so I feel like I often do want short fiction to rearrange my brain a little. I haven't read as much recently as I used to, though I did read an anthology of Chinese SF this month. But for me the main thing is that they have a strong point they build to, whatever that is.

I do get annoyed that so many short fiction magazines don't give a summary or the slightest hint of sub-genre or subject matter, just a title and a brief excerpt. It's not a lot to go on. In that way, I guess fanfic does spoil me.

[dolorosa_12]

You're the second person to mention here that a blurb/description would be helpful for short stories, and the fact that it often isn't included. I would also find this very helpful, because otherwise all I really have to go on is my knowledge of the author — which is no use at all if it's a debut or unfamiliar author!