From a new fan of short fiction
Although I’ve dabbled in short-story writing on and off since elementary school, I’d never read much short fiction for some reason. Until now. I’ve been reading a bunch of it online (mainly contest winners and stories posted on writers’ Web sites and blogs). And, I received three books of short fiction for Mother’s Day (along with a great scarf).
I’ve really been enjoying the short stories, for a few reasons.
They’re short.
Many of them are very short, so I can start and finish an entire story online while I scarf down my lunch. Others are a bit longer, but I keep them by the bath and squeeze in one story in a night or two. They’re low commitment and I don’t have to re-read several paragraphs, or pages, to figure out where I left off, as I often am forced to do with novels.
I’m getting a lot of good ideas for my own stories.
People turn the most basic things into stories and it’s made me realize that I have more plausible stories in my head than I thought. The very short stories (flash fiction, sudden fiction) seem to me to be more like personal essays in many cases. In stories under 1000 words, or even under 750 or 500 words, there isn’t much room for character development or setting development, so I imagine that many of these stories are really based on one small, real-life event. I have plenty of small, real-life events to draw upon.
Some of the stories are really, really good.
Three that I’ve read recently were so powerful that they are still gnawing at me and when I was done reading them, I was left with that same void you often feel after finishing a really good novel. These stories were longer, so there were strong characters. And at the end of the stories, I was sobbing, empathizing with the characters, and wishing I could write stories like that. These three stories are in an anthology of short stories by top Canadian writers (selected and introduced by Jane Urquhart), so high quality was expected, but I was surprised by how I felt after reading the stories.
Check out The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories for some great reads.
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