SHORT STORIES VERSUS NOVELS

Down the years, I have frequently heard writers of short stories (and I am sometimes such a writer) bemoaning the situation re publishing short fiction. The idea is that publishing does not really appreciate the appetite for short stories that is out there and that publishers are just not brave enough, or not far-sighted enough, and publishing is simply unable to see that there is a market for good short fiction. What publishers want are novels, you see, and that is a blindness they have. At least that's what short story writers would say. After all, WE'RE writing them and WE like them so publishers MUST have it wrong. And it is sometimes said that this is a realtively modern phenomenon, given that DH Lawrence published short stories, as did Kafka, and Katherine Mansfield and Silitoe and so on and on and on.

I confess that I have not always been won over by this argument. At the stage that I am, being older now and less patient about books and with so much still to read and so little time in the busy day (I tell myself the days are busier, but it may be I am slower), well, I do tend to pick up the slimmer volumes from the shelves of bookshops… but I confess that I prefer, hands down, the shorter novel to the short story collection. And just don't get me started on reading flash fiction collections… love writing them, too, but really find reading collections of them almost tedious, with only flashes (pun unintentional) of worth.

Anyway, I read this today and I thought it was worth sharing:

'It must also be taken into consideration that the public for a connected, comprehensive prose work is naturally much greater than that for a collection of short prose pieces.'

I draw attention to that word 'naturally' and to the fact that this was a comment from a publisher called Kurt Wolff - a comment he made in 1921!