Before I’m Gone: A Short Story Primer

“I’m not dying, just losing internet connection”

I ended last week’s blog by saying thank you to the people who had helped to form those early works of mine that have influenced me since, but of course I neglected to thank my own family, who were the true original audience.  That being said, I wrote this article at the same time as I wrote the last two, so really I didn’t forget to say thanks.  I just delayed it by about a week so the flow of the articles would be better. 

So thanks, Dad.  Thanks for being one of my first cheerleaders, especially since you don’t read anything other than my posts.  Thanks, Nick, for providing so much inspiration for the weird material that’s going to crop up in future stories.  And thanks, Mom.  Thank you for listening to my stories in the car and encouraging me to write, long before anyone else did.  And thank you for continuing to encourage me to write.  It’s part of why I have this blog today.  Thank you for being my editor on so many papers and so many things.  Thank you for being the first person to proofread Spectral Crown, and a good number of the short stories that I’m about to share on this website.  Thank you. And these thanks, so many words on a page, aren’t really ever enough to convey the depth of my gratitude.  But I try my best, and what else can we do?

Although my deepest thanks will always go to my own flesh and blood family, in a more indirect way I have to thank Randy Hahn and Northern Illinois University for my short story output and part of my confidence as a writer.  See, at about the same time I was working on The Time Keepers, Randy Hahn, a friend of my parents’, gave me information about a science-fiction teen writing contest, hosted by Northern Illinois University.  I entered the contest two years in a row, and won first place both times.  So that really boosted my confidence, to say the least.

The first story that won, “The End of Number Six,” I’ve posted here before.  With the winning of that contest, I was given a scholarship to attend an NIU science-fiction writing camp over the summer, during which I wrote “Gardeners of Eden,” the other story I’ve posted here.  The second winning story I wrote, “Pacemaker,” got me a chance to go to a second writing camp, where I wrote further stories and even some poems.  These two summer camps were an absolute blast, and I had a great time attending them.  They also got me my first paid writing gig.

Following the summer camps and winning the contest twice, I was invited to be a guest judge for the next year’s NIU teen read contest.  I also met up with Gillian King-Cargile, the woman in charge of the program and an author in her own right.  Over a couple years, I was interviewed by NIU for a couple promotional videos in the contest and granted the position of NIU’s Teen Writer in Residence.  And I was paid, for the first time, to write stories.

This was an incredible experience for me, even if I didn’t get a chance to write as many stories as I wanted to or didn’t get a chance to work as closely with NIU as I would have liked to.  But that’s okay.  I got paid a solid stipend to write, and really, that’s living the dream right there.  So I would be remiss if I were to leave out NIU’s impact on my short stories and my development as a writer, especially since it gave me such a boost in confidence.  Even if I don’t go to NIU, they’ve got a little place in my heart anyway.

It also put in contact with John Joseph Adams, a professional editor and anthologist that I briefly interned under.  That was quite an experience, too, and because of it I’m actually in a few acknowledgements sections in real, published books.  I still have them on my shelf at home and I don’t intent to ever get rid of them because that shit’s cool.  So I guess I have a little bit more to offer publishers than just a blog.  I have some real publishing experience.  Buy my book.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  Since I won’t be around this entire summer, I’m creating a scheduled backlog of short stories that should post every Tuesday at 1:30 pm.  One of my friends from school says that Sunday afternoon is the time of week when most people are on the internet, but I’ve been posting on Tuesdays for so long now that I don’t really want to switch it.

These stories that I’ll be posting will cover a wide range of topics and will cover a wide range of quality.  Some of them are very old, and by very old I mean about four or five years old, which feels downright ancient to me as a 20-something undergrad.  I like to think that all of the stories are good, but just as Primus wisely told us, they can’t all be zingers.

The stories that I’ll be posting will be in their raw forms, as I finished them whenever I deemed them to be done.  Or I just got tired of working on them.  Some, like ones that I wrote for class, are significantly more polished than others.  Some, like the ones that I wrote for the hell of it, may have spelling errors or grammar problems, since I didn’t do a thorough proofread before posting.

So, take the stories for what they are, I guess.  Until I get them officially published, either in a collection or in a literary journal or in some sort of contest, they’re all works in progress.  I consider them mostly complete, yes, but they aren’t finished, in the sense that a book you pick up from the book store is finished.  If I were to collect these into a printed volume, which I do hope to do someday, I’ll probably rewrite the old ones and carefully comb through the better ones to make sure that they’re the best story they can be.

Another thing I want to mention; the world of short stories is a weird one.  Much like the duality between “literary” and “genre” long fiction, I feel like you can break most short stories down into similar categories. But if you ask me, the format of a short story lends itself far more easily to “genre” fiction.  I grew up reading the stories of Ray Bradbury, as I explained once before.  But other than Bradbury, I also grew up reading the stories of David Lubar, who I will have to do a post about at some point, too.

David Lubar wrote those children’s books with titles like “Invasion of the Road Weenies” or “Attack of the Campfire Weenies,” and stuff like that.  I loved these stories with a passion.  They were all short, and almost all had some sort of sneaky twist ending.  Some of them were scary, some of them were funny, some of them were both, and quite a few of them have stuck with me all these years later.  I still think about them sometimes, which is definitely something special.

But, since these were the stories that I grew up on, and since Ray Bradbury stories were very much in the same vein of creating fantastic worlds with outlandish premises, I assumed for a long time that short stories had to have a twist ending or some sort of gut-punch at the end.  And in some cases, I was right; some of the best literary short stories end with, or at least contain, some sort of sudden emotional twist from right field, like “Hills like White Elephants” or “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

But in terms of a twist, most literary short stories don’t have that.  I learned very quickly in high school and college that the literary short stories, the ones that get assigned in CW 100 and Intro to Short Fiction classes, do not have twists and do not have something fantastical about them.  This, I noticed, is a trend; the short stories that are considered the “best,” or have the most literary valuable, are often the ones without anything fantastical about them.

Now, that isn’t to say that being about something fantastical and being literary are mutually exclusive.  Octavia Butler does a great job at merging the two, especially in the beautifully horrifying “Bloodchild.”  But I was still met with a stark disconnect between what I had read as short stories in my childhood and what I was now being told were “proper” short stories.

It’s the difference, I guess, between reading “What we Talk about When we Talk About Love” and something you’d get in a pulp magazine.  The difference between Conan the Barbarian and Dubliners.  It’s a divide that I know I’ve mentioned on here somewhere before, and it pisses me off to no end.  But I suspect that it makes me so angry partially because some of my own written stories are what would be considered “genre” fiction.

There’s nothing wrong with that.  I love “genre” fiction.  And most of the world does, too.  I feel like it sells better than most literary fiction, that’s for sure.  But there are so many circles of scholars around the world who snub their noses at Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.  And I resent that, because I enjoy writing stories like that.  I enjoy reading stories like that.  But you know what?  I think the best story I’ve written so far has been one of the “literary” pieces.

Authors tend to get pigeonholed as either “literary” or “genre,” and I can’t really think of any who successfully bridge that gap, besides maybe Ray Bradbury or Tolkien, but only in certain circles.  I don’t want to be that way as an author, I guess.  I want Spectral Crown to get picked up and I want it to be successful, but I don’t want to get stuck writing gothic horror books forever.  I do want to try my hand at the literary scene.  But I feel like I wouldn’t be taken seriously, because I’d already written genre fiction.

Maybe this divide isn’t as big as I seem to be making it out to be.  This could all just be in my head, and I could be working myself up over nothing.  I could talk ad nauseum about the relative pros and cons of both “genre” and “literary” fiction, and I’ll probably write an essay or two about exactly that sometime along my writing career.  I’m not even sure what point I’m trying to make now, anyway.  So I’ll close this up before I start putting my foot in my mouth any more.

I guess what I mean to say is this.  These short stories that I’m sharing may not all be great.  But many of them are born from the thought that short stories have to have a twist, and honestly, I really respect that form of storytelling.  I think that having that kind of framework can make for some profoundly interesting stories, especially when authors find ways to subvert that framework.  And I enjoy reading those stories, and that’s what matters.  We should read what we like to read because we like it, not because it’s “literary” or “genre.”  If you only pick one or the other, you could miss out on something beautiful.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy reading these stories that I wrote.  They’re something, at least.