Flash Fiction vs. The Novel: How to Make a Writing Practice in Today’s Market

The path to a successful writing career is not always clearly marked. I think of Samuel Beckett writing Waiting for Godot, and his surprise and despair at its eventual success. Over the years, this unprecedented play would eventually astound and confound audiences worldwide, making the author’s name. Yet Beckett had been writing fiction for years, and his foray into playwriting was initially out of frustration with how his fiction was being received. After Godot, he continued to write plays and fiction, and in his fiction, perhaps in reaction to the success, he went inward, creating even more obscure and consciously inaccessible work. Ultimately, his playwriting defines his body of work as frequently as his fiction does.

The road my writing career has taken is ultimately not the one I had envisioned. If anything the way I imagined it was to be more traditional (read: with more financial rewards). But somehow, without a clear path to having my novels published, I have tried to adapt to the market. I could as easily say I have adapted my writing practice to the limits on my time to write. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Though I’ve not lost any of the ambition I have for the novel, the restrictions on my time have led me to writing quite a bit of shorter fiction. As I have adapted, I’ve begun to feel the trend away from the traditional route is inevitable, but also another potential path.

In terms of the online writing market, there are far more outlets for what could be considered esoteric and experimental short work, which seem to dominate the online journals. This may be because there are more people writing, and there is an accommodating rise in a need of outlets for this work.

Starting out as a writer of fiction, I was hungry to publish. This then became a desire not merely to publish, but to publish more. Naturally, this led me to writing and submitting shorter work. Yet I was already writing this type of material in school--informed by my reading--before I knew there was a market for it. Essentially, this type of writing has fallen under the rubric of traditional flash fiction, though it goes by many other names: short fiction, short experimental fiction, hybrid writing, etcetera. In fact, much of this type of writing is similar to what Beckett was producing in his Texts for Nothing, and fizzles. What I’m not talking about are short stories per se, but the work that predominates online venues such as Decomp, Spork Press, Word Riot, and many others.

               I’m sure there is some correlation between the length of a piece and its likelihood of getting published. There’s probably also a correlation between the intensity and effect of short fiction, versus that of longer work. The intensity can’t be maintained for 70,000 words. In fact, most people wouldn’t want to read it. (It’s called Finnegan’s Wake.) Yet often enough, with short experimental work, I believe I’m writing at my best. I don’t have to adapt to any style or form. There are no expectations, frankly, and fewer rules, for what this short fiction can be. In it, I find I can thrive.  

Much of the time, I try to carve chunks of time to finish a traditional novel, an ever present grail project, because the reward for that can be multiples of what one receives from publishing a piece of short fiction. Still, that kick from getting my work published is always rewarding. And it’s much more expedient to write a 500 word piece than it is a 70,000 word novel.

Where does this place me as a writer among thousands of other writers? I still aspire to a traditional career, but over time I am adjusting my original expectations and goals. I am ten years into my writing career, and I’m accumulating a body of work that has been vetted by many editors I’m grateful to. I consider this short fiction some of my most exciting work. Is it because I don’t rely on writing to support me financially, that I’ve been able to pursue a career in this way? This notion, though in some ways merely convenient (I would have made money on it if I could have figured out how), validates the idea I have for myself of being an outsider. The trade-off with a traditional career is that I can write whatever I want--whatever comes to me in the odd hours and can’t be shaken. This might actually force me to experiment, if not simply to compete, then because I’ve made it a point to subvert my own expectations for my work.

              Yet there is a paradox here. I’ve spent many hours on novels--years, really--and exponentially less time on most of the work that has gotten published. This could imply that I’m better off to keep pursuing the online fiction writing markets. The success I’ve had publishing has me often wondering if I am trying to hard to peg myself, and my writing. (This happens in my reading also, as I spend inordinate amounts of time trying to find books to read, and am often as disappointed as those people who feel duped into reading the next big thing. My gut inclination often, thankfully, gets me to veer from this reading.)

A novel can become an all consuming project; Henry James’s “loose, baggy monster” is a reminder to keep perspective and not overthink the work. Yet a novel is a rationally plotted compendium; though it might be made up of those pieces that could resemble the short fiction, the end must conform to the larger project. A novel is much less open ended than a piece of short fiction. I’m ambivalent about this.

               In my writing practice, I teeter between the unearthing of my subconsciousness, those visions tapped in dreams, and the material where I try hard to attain clarity and project a plausible story. If I have any frustration, it might be the limits of this way of traditional storytelling. With short fiction, I break the rules all the time. Inevitably, this is what grabs an editor.    

              I rarely let this work inform my novel writing. I might do this because I don’t see any writers as models for this approach. In a sense, a writer can be ghettoized by their success; it might be difficult to convince oneself that it’s worthwhile to venture into a different form. If only this was my problem.

New short fiction in Decomp Magazine, "Building the Perfect Wings"

Thanks to editor Jason Jordan at Decomp Magazine, who has accepted for publication my fiction "Building the Perfect Wings" for their February issue. This is another fatherhood related piece, my pet theme lately. Decomp is a terrific old school literary web magazine with a discerning emphasis on experimental and short work. Publishing since 2004, they have an estimable web legacy--and plenty of award nominees and recipients in their ranks. I'm pleased to join them. You can read it here.

"Anger Management" New Experimental Fiction at (ĕm)

My experimental short fiction, "Anger Management", leads off issue #3 of (ĕm): A Review of Text and Image, which can be downloaded as a free PDF from their library. Thanks to my fellow contributors to this terrific magazine, and to editor Jim Miller.

Ben Marcus Responds to My Question on Goodreads

Ben Marcus answered your question

As a writer who writes in a great tradition of the more esoteric and experimental vein of fiction, how do you explain your work to people who probably will not understand it (when they read it), or to those that you can be certain will not understand it?

I don't. That way no one gets killed, no one is harmed, no one grows sad or uncomfortable. I don't think I can assist understanding, or enjoyment, with some magic sentence or two.

Consistency. And the rise of short forms

A foolish consistency, though it may be the hob goblin of little minds, is also the way to go for a writing career. This seems particularly true when it comes to the short story. Perhaps it’s a choice based on economics: you’ll only grab a reader for those few pages, and if you can pull it off then, you might be wise to do it again and again. Some of the greatest writers of short stories are all about this economy of scale: Raymond Carver, John Cheever, John Updike, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Tobias Wolff, Charles Baxter. I might even include Lydia Davis in this incomplete list, though I’d add that her longer short stories never quite seem satisfying enough as short stories. But she’s got her short pieces down to a science, consistently. With these writers, you might see some formal playing around, but generally, not much deviation from the guidelines that have succeeded before. You can essentially take any one of their stories and it will offer a kind of template in tone, style, length, subject matter, among whatever other qualities that could be checked off, to their entire oeuvres. That these are the most beloved and lauded of writers says something about consistency. What it also might say about the marginalization of short stories, and their estimable writers who have made their names generally under the purview of short stories, is something else entirely.

The short story might be the most conservative of forms, in this regard. David Foster Wallace was anything but consistent when it came to the short story. He bridled at consistency, perhaps out of a need to challenge himself, to avoid boredom, or just because he could. But he seems to have cared less for the incremental rewards of the equivalent of little caffeine hits, and, as so many are led to believe in the publishing industry these days are, too, that short stories don’t sell, aren’t read, etcetera. Insert any number of maligning/marginalizing epithets here. I would guess that for a lot of short story writers, or writers in general, the onus is more on finding a habit that fits, though for a writer of DFW’s caliber, consistency in formal qualities was nothing to strive for. Consistency can be a lowest common denominator, but over a career I would suspect it would feel stifling and eventually as rewarding as sending out your dry cleaning.

***

The rewards of reading a short story might be like the incremental hits one gets from any addiction, caffeine, a check of the inbox, etc. In this way, the argument seems to be made for the popularity of shorter forms. They certainly become more facile to write, if only for the time required to produce them. And I’d venture in a very curious suggestion, that this is where populist poetry and the short story are converging, which is bound to make poetry less of a ghetto, eventually more mainstream (and you can imagine how the capital P poets feel about their territory being impugned upon!) Whenever poetry is popularized, you can hear the traditionalists crying foul. 

The form is ready made for the web.

This arrival of short forms has arisen with the internet and the self publishing venues. Before, this niche might have been under the canopy of poetry. In fact, some of these short prose pieces are difficult to define, and might just as easily be thought new forms of poetry. (As I’ve written a kind of poetry for years—I can’t even allow myself to call it straight up poetry, though others have—I’ve taken to submitting these short prose pieces both as prose and as poetry. Who is to say what they can or cannot be called?) The purists or experts might claim there’s too much writing to wade through, and the playing field has been leveled to a ground zero nuclear fallout zone. But who knows? I’m sure it was easier to be a writer, and be recognized for it, fifty or sixty years ago. Maybe this is about adaptation to technology.

I’ve gone through something of an evolution in my own work. I never used to write these short pieces, other than to be convinced I was writing poetry, and I’m not sure when I thought of it as a good idea. In some way it’s easier when you have time constraints, but it’s also more difficult to pull off successfully, because you have to accomplish that kind of frisson moment, perhaps even to call it a catharsis, within the space of a paragraph. In the same way you might question whether your 3500 word short story is working, you have to accomplish something--more often than not--enigmatic, in 2 or 300 words. 

Schadenfreude Unlimited! A review of Lorrie Moore's Bark and Apotheke

Schadenfreude Unlimited!--my review of Lorrie Moore's Bark: Stories, is live today at the wonderfully eclectic Trop Magazine. Props to all the folks behind this terrific journal. Here's a teaser: Lorrie Moore will "expand whatever postage stamp-sized garden of humanity you will needlessly, excessively toil over with yard implements and fertilizer for a season, just to grow one ****ing cherry tomato."

As well, I've begun a blog experiment with some short, enigmatic pieces (short shorts, these are usually called, a term I don't like) that I've either not placed anywhere, or not bothered to try to place, having become convinced that I might as well put them into the web-verse, rather than let them sit and stagnate. I have files full of these, and I'm going to post one a day for the near future. These can be found here, at Apotheke.

Three Firsts: Ten Pubs for Year, Four Pieces in One Week, and Two UK Journals

Trying to place work can frequently feel like head butting a stuffed rabbit. Still, this year (so far) has produced ten publications for me--a first. Also, this week, four pieces are appearing in four journals (second first), two of which are UK based journals (third first).

My recent semifinalist acknowledgement for the Hudson Prize and Black Lawrence Press for my story collection, The Survivor's Guide, has convinced me to hang in there--not that I was ever going to quit. But sometimes, I can forget that, to paraphrase Karl Ove Knausgaard in the ridiculously readable My Struggle: Book Two: “Writing is the only thing that matters.” You can read my related review here, at Trop Mag, from this past summer. 

"Our Satellite Problem" is up at the incomparable Eyeshot. Thanks to editor Lee Klein, who accepted my piece after I pulled a fast one on him. I also can't seem to forget this detail: I first sent this piece to The New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs (hint: "O.S.P." is humor), and their editors were encouraging. Although they rejected the story, they admitted they did so, "despite its evident merit." An experimental piece "Cogitations on Self" appears in a journal across the pond, Sein und Werden, for their auto de fe issue.

Since I decided early on that I wanted to be a working writer, as opposed to one who daydreams about shiny fake gold engraved plaques and hollow encomiums--which I do daydream about anyway--I suspected reviewing was one way to get readily published. Current reviews are: MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood in Review 31 (UK), and Sunland by Don Waters in the venerable Rain Taxi print issue.

Shadow is Substance

Many thanks to Burningword Literary Journal for selecting “Object/Multiple Singularities/Be Here Now” for publication in their quarterly, upcoming on April 1st. This piece was inspired at my alma mater Goddard and the Pratt Center Library's bunker-like lower level on a snowed in January day several years ago.

Re-upping Indie Credibility

The estimable Spork Press will be going live in March or April with three experimental thematic pieces I wrote: “Ejection Seat”, “Shine”, and “Ski Patrol”, proving to me that it’s never too late to re-up my indie credibility. Gravity has a lot to answer for.

Experimental Versus Realist

The work of fiction doesn’t really exist until it is read.* And thus the effort of keeping a reader’s eyes and mind (and maybe heart) glued to the page is attending to the entertainment value of the work. This brings up the question of, is what we do as writers meant to entertain? This idea can seem sacrilegious, because we’d like to believe our work is about artistry. Yet why should artistry exclude being entertaining?  Though I’ve often felt people will try to argue me into this position, particularly those people who imagine they will become the next Steig Larson—claiming that “Fiction isn’t art, it’s only meant to entertain.” The problem with this is the absolutism. A lot of the party lines established in these arguments exclude this one notion by which a work succeeds or fails: did the writing keep you reading?

Sometimes in reading you can become bored and can be assured that the writer must have been bored when writing.

This is a truth I hold to be self-evident: At the very least, a piece of fiction has to keep you reading.

This, for some reason, has become the determinant of the experimental versus realist divide.

There is an assumption that if you like avant garde work, or experimental fiction, that you can’t have much interest in making your work desired to be read, and this follows around any writer who professes an interest in experimental work.

While researching the review for Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, (available to read here via Rain Taxi), I read his long Harper’s essay “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destory Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction.” Written in 2005, the piece, which isn’t dated at all, is an intriguing insight into just how much of a struggle there is in this divide for a would-be commercial fiction writer who aspires to practice in a strain of the experimental.

One conclusion? Jonathan Franzen suffers from having bought into the idea of the ascendancy of experimental literature in the late 80s and early 90s, only to have failed to have actually written any novels with spine or teeth--or known skeletal structure at all--and then feeling betrayed by the failure to achieve the requisite fame from his religion, only going on to find success when he sold out his po-mo leanings to write straightforward realism. Selling out his “radical” past is what he’s been doing ever since. Eventually atoning to the gods of realism because he feels betrayed by the evil Gaddis, Coover, Hawkes, et al. This occurred, according to Marcus, in the years between 1996 and 2005.

The turnaround for Franzen? He had been writing books that no one wanted to read. Which is not to say they resembled anything experimental. Rather, Franzen’s early work is only partially successful in terms of reader engagement, and bears no semblance to anything experimental. Mostly, I think, they are just unsuccessful as novels. If we’re talking about quality, it’s easy to criticize a writer who seems not to want to be left out of the flavor of the month game.

After The Corrections he figured it out. He wanted to keep a reader reading. Freedom is the full flowering of his mission and is successful on this eminent readability count, though the unexpected praise that he received from N+1 for this novel was strange and unwarranted adulation from a group that acts like it wants to be the rear-guard action of the avant garde.

With a lot of these arguments, I find myself questioning the either / or nature of whether one is an experimental writer or a realist. In my ideal world, I would like to think that one could write a number of different ways that suit their purposes for whatever piece they are writing. Yet so often, one seems required to pledge their allegiance to this camp, or that one. There is almost a defensiveness that creeps in to arguments as to the definition of the fictional journey for oneself.   

To quote Marcus, there is a strand of realism; “[a]t its worst, it’s uninspired, dull and oppressively devoted to its modern forebears Cheever and Updike, and it wears such a heavy tire mark on the exhausted assumptions of psychology that reading it is akin to constantly crawling from a trench of received ideas.” (Harpers essay, pg 43)

I’m guessing one could attribute to the opposite camp, for all intents and purposes, experimentalism, a similar kind of diagnosis—and any dull or uninspired fiction would fall into the category. In fact, I think it could be argued that this is more likely with experimental work, for how varied the parameters by which it might be judged successful. I feel a little sting at Marcus taking a gut shot at Cheever and Updike, yet I’m also skeptical. There is room for many approaches, even one that might find inspiration in Cheever, of whom frequent Marcus champion and, himself, equally criticized practitioner of his own realism (of a kind), Michael Chabon, has been known to idolize.

Though I have an open heartedness toward, usually, anything innovative and challenging which can border on an excited eagerness to read—maintaining my own not so secret pedestal for Beckett—I often imagine my leaning is toward the experimental (so many of my advisors were clearly in ghettoized experimental camps), though I’m quite sure I haven’t pushed the boundaries and am rather more working in the realism tradition. I assume that what Marcus is saying is, we should challenge ourselves, ultimately. And if you are engaged with your fiction, it’s hard to see how this won’t produce something novel, compelling and hopefully, inspired. And that will keep readers reading.

*I would have timidly denied this before I ever had anything published, I’m sure; now I tend to understand this idea as putting my will into my writing so that someone will want to read it. And it has to be at that level for me to put it out there—like I’m signaling a sinking ship, throwing up flares for some distant horizon.

Third Anniversary Toast

The most interesting writing projects, for me, have come about through experiment. It may spring from the thought: should I try this? But often that is enough to get the notes down on paper that will spark to life. The Literary, the blog you are reading which I started three years ago--begun before the first groans of the greatest recession of our era--was just such an occasion. I’d wanted a place to post reviews, news and thoughts about the one subject that never ceases to excite my enthusiasm and obsessions. Incidentally, for someone who used to start things he couldn’t finish, a blog is the ultimate tool for procrastination.

When I assess the writing on this blog, it isn’t necessarily a lot of work for a three year period, though it has accumulated to a decent book length draft. I may not post as frequently as I should, if I am thinking about numbers and getting hits. But since I haven’t been thinking only about numbers and hits, I’ve tried to be diligent, consistent and tactful in my writing. This process takes more time than I can usually anticipate, considering my ambition. Having a web presence is better than none, perhaps, and this blog has helped me land more work and place pieces that I might not have otherwise attempted. The Literary has kept me on my toes when I’ve detoured from fiction. In retrospect I’m pleased with the material in this blog, and can say that I set out to do exactly what I have done with it. Thanks to everyone who has commented or sent me a note over the years.

Since art is long, money expendable, and the economy is like an unfortunate roller coaster ride, for now I’m going to keep looking forward and offer a third anniversary toast.