Eight Essential Attributes of the Short Story and One Way It Differs from the Novel

1) There should be a clean clear surface with much disturbance below.

2) An anagogical level.

3) Sentences that can stand strikingly alone.

4) An animal within to give its blessing.

5) Interior voices which are or become wildly erratically exterior.

6) A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.

7) Control is necessary throughout. Constraints allow the short story to thrive.

8) The story’s effect should utterly transcend the naturalness and accessibility of its situation and language.

9) A certain coldness is required in execution. It is not a form that gives itself to consolation but if consolation is offered it should come from an unexpected quarter.

JOY WILLIAMS               

Pay the Writer!

Got a call from a little film company that was doing the packaging for Warner Brothers on Babylon 5, which I’d worked on. I did a very long, very interesting on-camera interview about the making of the show early on, when the creator of the series, Joe Straczynski, hired me. A young woman called and said they wanted to use it on the DVD.

“That can that be arranged,” I said. “All you have to do is pay me.”

“Well,” she said, “everybody else is doing it for nothing.”

“Everybody else may be, but I'm not,” I said. “By what right would you call and ask me to work for nothing? Do you get a paycheck?”

“Well, yes…but it would be good publicity…”

“Does your boss get a paycheck? Do you pay the cameraman? Do you pay the cutters? Do you pay the Teamsters when they shlep your stuff on trucks? Would you go to a gas station and ask for free gas? Would you go to the doctor and have them take out your spleen for nothing? How dare you call and want me to work for the publicity! Tell that to someone who’s just fallen off the turnip truck. There’s no publicity value in my interview being on your DVD. If you sell 2,000, will people say, ‘Oh, I really like the way the guy gave that interview. I wonder if he's ever written a book’? The only value for me is if you cross my palm with silver.”

“Well alright, thank you,” she said, and hung up.

These people want everything for nothing. They wouldn't go five seconds without being paid and they bitch because they want more. These people are so used to getting it for nothing they don't even send you a copy of the DVD. You call to ask where it is and they tell you to go to the store and buy it. And I should do a freebie for Warner Brothers?

The problem is, there are so goddamn many writers who have no idea they're supposed to be paid every time they do something, they do it for nothing. I get so angry because the amateurs make it tough for the professionals. I sell myself, but at the highest rates. I don't take a piss without getting paid.

 HARLAN ELLISON

Writing Allows You to Be Other People

I read a lot of science fiction as a kid. And, of course, that meant reading boys books because that's what kids' science fiction was. I made up my own stories to put myself in them. I wound up writing science fiction from the point of view of girls and women, just because I was a girl and I am a woman. I wound up writing science fiction from the point of view of Black people because I am Black. But I've also explored and I, in a strange sense, I suppose, found out what it might be like to be a white male or whatever. One of the things writing does is, is allow you to be other people without actually being locked up for it.

OCTAVIA BUTLER

A Writer's Only Assets

Beyond imagination and insight, the most important component of talent is perseverance—the will to write and rewrite in pursuit of perfection. Therefore, when inspiration sparks the desire to write, the artist immediately asks: Is this idea so fascinating, so rich in possibility, that I want to spend months, perhaps years, of my life in pursuit of its fulfillment? Is this concept so exciting that I will get up each morning with the hunger to write? Will this inspiration compel me to sacrifice all of life's other pleasures in my quest to perfect its telling? If the answer is no, find another idea. Talent and time are a writer's only assets. Why give your life to an idea that's not worth your life?

ROBERT McKEE

Don't Panic

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St. Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.

SARAH WATERS

Love Your Characters

Love your characters. Ask yourself what underlay their acts and versions of the past. Sometimes I pray to see people I’m angry at or resentful of as God sees them, which heals both page and heart. And one big fat caveat: lead with your own talent, which may cause you to ignore all I’ve recommended.

MARY KARR

Reliable Versus Unreliable Narrator

I’ve always found the concept of the reliable versus the unreliable narrator peculiar, because I think all narrators are unreliable [laughs]. People tell you what they saw or what they think or what they felt, and they may be telling you the truth, but it might not at all be what someone else saw happen. Like, people always call Humbert Humbert an unreliable narrator. He’s very reliable. He’ll tell you exactly what he thought and felt in a lot of detail. And you also get a very clear sense of what Lolita is experiencing through him. But I don’t think of it as unreliable. I think more in terms, and this sounds really corny, I think more in terms of, Do I care what this narrator thinks and feels? Can he engage me? With students, the problem I see most often is that I don’t get a sense of what their narrators care about. What they want. What matters to them. That’s a bigger issue to me than whether or not they’re reliable in some way.

MARY GAITSKILL

Aim for the Stars

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Fine Writing Isn't Enough

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

SARAH WATERS

Flyshit on the Typescript

I suppose this is a trivial matter but I do want to object to the maddening fuss-fidget punctuation which one of your editors is attempting to impose on my story. I said it before but I’ll say it again, that unless necessary for clarity of meaning I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I’ve had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript.

EDWARD ABBEY