When Stories Beg to be Continued
There are a lot of similarities between short stories and TV shows, the less than one-hour kind, with commercial breaks.
A short story is to be consumed in one sitting and the reader’s time commitment is minimal, starting at a few minutes for a flash piece up to whatever … but definitely less than an hour unless you’re straying into novella territory (think Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption).
To continue the analogy, short story writers usually go for the episodic format, where each story stands on its own, a la Twilight Zone, new settings, new characters, different vibes. Writing like butterflies sample a variety of blooms. Maybe short fiction writers are prone to distraction. Or easily bored, fickle types that can’t stick to one thing and can’t bring themselves to work a tale till all the juices have been extracted. Lackluster woolgatherers … There is some truth in all of that.
I like to think that short story writers have too many ideas that won’t fit in a single coherent narrative, i.e. a single book. And these stories need to come out in some way.
Occasionally, the writers stumble upon characters that are too compelling to say goodbye to after one walk in the park. Edgar Allan Poe wrote three Dupin stories. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories (and only 4 full-length books, something people tend to forget). The man’s tales were ready-made for the television age.
So far, I’ve written 7 stories featuring my 1950 San Francisco detectives, Tom Keegan and Al Matteotti. There’s comfort in stepping into their world and worn shoes from time to time, a familiarity without a commitment to a full-fledged relationship—friends with benefits? I suspect that when I hit a dozen stories, I’ll have to seriously consider popping the question: uh, guys, what about a book? They might stare at me through the smoke of their cigarettes and tell me to go take a hike.
Serials, like Better Call Saul or Lost, are rare in short fiction. They’re ubiquitous in books and fertile ground for television or movie adaptations (Game of Thrones, True Blood, Outlander, Harry Potter …). Studios love them as much as publishers do. Hey, what’s not to like? Every installment is advertising for the next one, you just have to get the ball rolling. I don’t know many examples of pure serials in short fiction. It’s hard to do. The stories must each work independently and contribute to a larger narrative at the same time. Hugh Howey’s Wool was built this way, from four connected stories, after the first story was so successful readers screamed for more. Howey went on to write a slew of books in the Silo series and the Sand chronicles. Russell Thayer is experimenting with the serial concept in his Vivian-Gunselle stories where he builds a story arc for the character starting during Hollywood’s Golden Age. You can read his latest installment Cine con Carne on Bristol Noir.
Characters or themes that make it from the limited frame of short fiction into a larger book canvas are more common. The most famous might be Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway that started as a short story. Or Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. And two of my favorite science fiction books: Nightfall (Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, 1990) was first a 1941 Asimov short story, and a brilliant one at that. It will give you shivers. Similarly, the basic concept for Connie Willis’s wonderful 1993 Doomsday Book was the short story Fire Watch published in 1982. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll look for it.
Mae Rollins, the narrator in the title story of my collection Family and Other Ailments(published by Wordwooze Publishing and available here) will soon appear in a Halloween-themed piece and is one of the main characters in a work-in-progress PI novel. Like Mrs. Dalloway she needs more room to show what she’s made of. More on that later… I’ll get back to Mae soon.