“The mighty moral growth of the author, during his literary activity, is written in indelible characters in these exquisite short stories.” – Leo Tolstoy on Guy de Maupassant

I recently heard an admirably fired-up You Tuber say that almost all fiction writers do their best work in the short form.

Then he said he didn’t know why short fiction, i.e. short stories, are not more popular right now, in the modern world, since most fiction writers do their best work in this form.

I instantly knew I agree/d with the first thing he’d said (since I’ve said it myself many times before, in many different formats; there are no “original” ideas: period).

I also know that short stories, while they are making a small resurgence, are not money-makers in the mainstream publishing world today and far from it.

I started wondering more about why that is, because of what the You Tuber had said.

And I came to the conclusion that it’s because short stories are where fiction writers do their best work.

In other words, short stories are very often the deepest work out there and readers today (in the mainstream, that is) are not looking for depth or challenging material; they are looking for cheesy reassurance, easy affirmations, boring normalness (because it’s comforting) dressed up as something exciting.

There was a moment in American fiction when short stories were where the money was at.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kurt Vonnegut both made boatloads of money writing short stories in the early to middle twentieth century. Fitzgerald made far more money from short stories than he ever did from his novels, including Gatsby, which was a financial and critical failure and flop during his lifetime (like Melville’s Moby Dick, or the paintings of Vincent).

But Scott and Kurt both quickly found out that, in order to make that dough, the stories needed to be romantic (unrealistic) tales, easy to digest, and written with contrived (formulaic, used-before, tried-and-true, but not true-to-life) plots. And no ragged, Chekhovian, ambiguous, challenging, thought-provoking, open endings allowed; nor any Dostoevskyean extremity of atmosphere; nor any out-of-this-world Borgesian thought experiments, either.

The best short stories right now are not hugely popular because they are not hugely easy to read.

The first thing they require is pausing from your daily life, concentrating, thinking, feeling, sympathizing, empathizing, decoding, interpreting, imagining, understanding, challenging your own assumptions, stepping away from it all, meditating, reaching out toward characters who might make you uncomfortable, and being comfortable with uncertainty (which ability John Keats called “Negative Capability”). “Beach read” novels and various kinds of thrillers now dominate the fiction best-seller lists, almost literally without exception, and almost all of them (NOT all, but almost) are, by definition, easy, stereotypical, non-challenging, seen-it-before (many times), simplistic, and unrealistic works.

And yet, short stories are, literally, everywhere in our world. School, the internet, and television all overflow with short stories, and almost all movies are far more like short stories than like long novels. Nightly and daily news broadcasts are now presented as dramatic (and, unbelievably, unrealistic, since it’s supposed to be “the news”) short short stories, one piled on top of another in an endless, ridiculous stream.

The relationship between television programs and short stories is a fruitful study for anyone interested in modern fiction writing for any reason and goes back to the very roots of the TV medium.

The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents are all classic television programs with very close connections to short stories in many ways.

The works in the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury Tales, and the Decameron are all early short stories.

Short stories are so closely tied to religion that they ARE religion.

The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son, Dives and Lazarus, Buddha and the Flower Sermon, Lao Tzu disappearing into the mountains after he (for free) penned the 5,000-word Tao Te Ching and handed it to the guard who’d asked him to write it, are all short stories in their (eternal) way.

This short little essay now concludes with a short little list of passed-on (but still here) fiction writers who’ve all done their best work in the short story (plus a few crucial after-thoughts afterward).

Arthur Conan Doyle. Franz Kafka. Clarice Lispector. Ernest Hemingway. James Joyce. Flannery O’Connor. Hans Christian Andersen. William S. Burroughs. James Baldwin. Grace Paley. Raymond Carver. John Cheever. D.H. Lawrence. Thomas Mann. Joseph Conrad. Dorothy Parker. Shirley Jackson. Ambrose Bierce. O. Henry. Harlan Ellison. Ralph Ellison. Frank O’Connor. William Gay. Larry Brown. Barry Hannah. Rick DeMarinis. Washington Irving. Jorge Luis Borges. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Denis Johnson. Thom Jones. H.P. Lovecraft. Nelson Algren. Cyrus Colter. Donald Barthelme. Ivan Turgenev. Nikolai Gogol. Isaac Babel. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Katherine Mansfield. Eudora Welty. William Saroyan. E.T.A. Hoffman. Ray Bradbury. Rudyard Kipling. Guy de Maupassant.

Poe and Chekhov are sort-of left off the official list because their greatest works might be poem/s and play/s; but The Raven is a kind of short story for sure, as is The Cherry Orchard.

Many modern fiction writers who did not do their best work in the short story did their best work in the novella, instead (not the novel), but that is a subject for another (annoyingly opinionated) exploration by THE DRIFTER (sometimes known by local canines and felines, ’coons, squirrels and birds as “Dale the Drifter”).

Almost all of the great nineteenth century novels were published in serial form, that is, as separate magazine or journal installments over an extended period, one chapter at a time.

As just one example, War and Peace, that episodic behemoth, originally appeared as a serial over two years (1865 to 1867) in the journal The Russian Messenger before being, heavily, revised and expanded over the next two years after that, then finally published as a stand-alone volume in 1869.

Frank O’Connor called the short story The Lonely Voice. (Just exactly why he did so is also another subject for a future exploration from: The Drifter.)

The Drifter (Images by The Drifter)