The Craft of Short Stories

Chance writes:

What I Believe About SF But Can't Prove

That the ongoing collapse of the short story markets has little to do with distribution problems or any of that crap that is often cited. Rather, it is because most SF writers have no love for the short forms of fiction, and mostly view it as a stepping stone to novels, a diversion, the means to an end, not the end itself. And because of this most writers churn out mediocre story after mediocre story, not willing or unable to invest the time and skill to make something wonderful.

Some not particularly ordered thoughts:

This doesn't sound completely implausible. There's also a chunky group of writers who seem to view short stories as, essentially, adverts for novels. Mr Baxter has certainly been guilty of this in the past, though he's by no means the worst offender.

But is it the whole story? Certainly the Big Three are, as far as I know, still shedding readers, but how many people are the 'zines/small press/online venues reaching, and are they reaching people who wouldn't read the Big Three?

In addition, why are writers like, say, Kelly Link--who certainly takes the time to make her stories work--not being published in the major (genre) magazines? If the answer is 'because they're not submitting to the major magazines', again, why is that?

Further, is it anything new? I was reading the first section of Hell's Cartographers last night. This is a collection of autobiographical essays by sf writers, published in 1975. The first section is by Robert Silverberg, and one of the things that really struck me was that in the first part of his career, in the late fifties and early sixties, he made a decent chunk of his living from short fiction. He was doing other kinds of writing as well, but the the short fiction seems to have provided the bulk of his income for a few years at least, and it did so not because he was crafting a few highly-paid jewels but because he was simply churning out an insane amount of words on a daily basis.

It's also a truism these days that you can't make your living from short fiction (though maybe if you had Silverberg's output you could?), and I suspect that may be a big reason why writers focus on novels.

And lastly, and I suppose most importantly: if this is a reason for collapsing short fiction markets, can anything be done about it, and if so what?

EDIT: On a similar theme, this (not entirely serious) post by Alan DeNiro:

Short Stories, 2015

In light of what science fiction writers are “supposed” to do–be predictive, prophetic, whatever–and with a lot of paradigms floating around lately in terms of perscriptive notions of how to fix genre writing, let’s take some potshots at the future. Short story readership is in decline…I think we can all agree on this? So where does it go? What’s the event horizon? And secondly, how does this change–if at all–the creative processes at work?

Make sure to read the comments.

SON OF EDIT: via sartorias, who points at Gregory Feeley's blog, who quotes from the introduction to a collection by Robert Sheckley:

"Despite the efforts of NESFA Press and others, almost everybody is looking at novels as the measure of a writer's true quality. If this goes on without challenge, everone from Damon Knight to Harlan Ellison, from Lucius Shepard to Ted Chiang will end up as second rank, and not worthy of Grand Master awards no matter how fine their stories. And to put it bluntly, there are a disproportionate number of excellent short story writers in the SF tradition, but not a lot of first class novelists."

-- David Hartwell