Does Publishing Short Stories Matter?
The economics of short fiction, how commercialism is changing what writers write, & a bit of advice from Shirley Jackson
I have a friend who is currently exhausting himself in order to write a novel. Let’s call said friend Axel. (Axel would hate that I named him Axel.) Anywho, Axel spends months devoting all of his writing time to The Novel. He writes a draft. He rewrites it. He hates the draft, he decides to give up. He comes back to the novel after a month and revises it again. This brutal cycle has been going on for a long time.
I love Axel, but I can’t help but wonder if something is off here. I asked him why he was so intensely focused on The Novel, when he seemed unhappy even talking about the thing. Here’s what he said:
I feel like if I don’t write a novel, I’ll never be a successful writer.
Oh, Axel. This is a thing that I hear a lot from writers, even successful ones. You see, Axel has a prolific career in SFF short fiction. His short stories and flash fiction are cutting, perfect examples of the genre. He has published in several, maybe dozens of pro markets. Repeatedly. Axel is a bad-ass short story writer, so why doesn’t he see short stories as the precursor to a…
