>A clever gal in my critique group shared this helpful compilation of statistics about short story sales and writerly success. It’s enlightening in a number of ways and at least one of the overweening questions it seeks to answer is: do I need to write short stories to have a successful career? Conclusion are variable, but I could not help but think: what if I really like short stories.
I really, really like short stories. When I am discovering a new author, I always opt for the short story collections, when available. “Year’s Best”-eses are my holy grails. The authors I love the best are invariably the most proficient in the short form.
I have a (possibly totally wrong-headed) theory that the possibility of written perfection is inversely proportional to the size of the piece. I like a great many novels, I even love a few, but I can’t think of a single one I find as completely wonderful “Speech Sounds” or “Sidon in the Mirror” or “The Electrocution.”
(I suppose the logical extension of this would be those six-word short stories, which I also enjoy. Although Hemingway, despite my general distaste for him, probably did write the definitive one. Too often they’re punchlines and not stories.)
In a short story, every word has weight and purpose. Novels unfold, short stories build. There is no room for extraneous material, no tolerance for digression or purposeless verbiage. Short stories are hard (this is not to say novels are easy, but I do think that novels are more forgiving of mis-steps. The sheer size of the story allows for a failure in one area to be shored up by the relative strengths of the rest.)
But short stories have kind of developed a designation as a necessary evil required to boost name recognition before proceeding to “real” work.
I know you can’t live on short story sales, but, oh, how I wish you could. I could have a very happy life, writing my little stories and paying my little bills. But alas.
Short stories are…frivolous. Why bother? Who reads them? Who wants a bunch of disconnected series of narratives about different characters? Novels feel like a duty or a project. Short stories offend our work ethic. What do we get when we are done? What is our reward, where is our edification?
Maybe I was born in the wrong time. I should have been around when reading was de rigueur, a pastime and not a chore. When there was a large market for magazines full of short fiction. Morsels airy, tangy or sweet. Sometimes bitter, sometimes burnt on the bottom. The only point in common their ability to be digested in a sitting, a bus commute or a doctor’s office wait.
Of course, I might have needed some masculine nom de plume, but these are small sacrifices.
This is the way of the world. I know who reads short stories: people who want to write them and people who love them (the Venn diagram overlaps a little, but not necessarily as much as you might think.) People who have deliberately missed their bus stop and ridden that whole circuit, to finish a story. People who hucked their English textbook home and to school and back again until they’d read all the stories inside.
…what was I saying about brevity, again?
nicolemtaylor 
>I am one of those writers who almost never reads short stories, and that's one reason I'm so lousy at writing them. I have enjoyed a handful of short stories in my life, but for the most part I find reading them to be a hollow experience, like a one-night stand. I'm all about the vast canvas. Hell, I hardly ever even pick up a book unless it's the first in a series. I may have a serious psychological problem, now that I stop to think about it.
>This is a nice and excellet novels which give the entertainment and funniest way for enjoyment.Thanks and Regard:http://www.stories.pk
>I really love short stories too. My to-read stack of anthologies-by-people-I-don't-know is almost as tall as me; adding the anthologies by friends probably would be taller. Worldbuilding is one of the most important parts of a sf/f work to me. Many authors, it seems, can't hold a world together for a whole book. The world starts fraying at the seams and wearing through as the book progresses and I start seeing inconsistancies [sp?] and things to which that my anthropologist side says, "No way!"But nearly every published short story has a world that hangs together until the end. Perfection is possible in a short story, at least in theory. There are many other reasons I love reading short stories, but this is your blog, not mine, so I'll just steal your idea and use it one week when I can't come up with an idea for a blog post.
>Mishell- I really think it's a sensibility thing. I'm not totally averse to writing novels, but all my ideas tend to be story-sized. But I have a fervent belief that every really good narrative has one perfect moment, one thing that is just absolutely true and clean and right. I think my writing and reading life is about boxing that moment up in this small space and pinning it down. Shauna-that's a really good point. I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're right. Oftentimes (especially with high-flown fantasy or crazypants sci-fi) the cracks begin to show. I was reading an article once from an author about why he wrote exclusively short stories and he said the bottom line was, after thirty pages or so, he started to lie. I think often, reading a novel, I start to feel lied-to.