On The Origin Of Stories

[coalescent]

A couple of weeks ago there was a debate around these parts about whether a 'mainstream model' of short story publishing (producing enough stories to fill a book and then publishing them together) or a 'genre model' (submitting stories to genre magazines as they're written then collecting them at a later date) encourages better quality short fiction writing. Elsewhere, I suggested this thesis, and the idea that there are differences in publishing strategy was greeted with some surprise; it was pointed out to me that many mainstream writers do submit stories to places like The New Yorker or McSweeny's in an attempt to build their career.

So, a little unscientific research: I would like everyone to look at their shelves, look at their non-genre short story collections--published since, say, 1995--and tell me how many of them have 'previously published in...' credits and how many don't. (Also, if you have any genre collections where all the material was first published in book form, let me know about that as well; the only ones I can think of at the moment are Margo Lanagan's Black Juice and White Time).

I'll start:

Beware of God by Salom Auslander (2005) - no previous publication histories listed.

Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber (1998) - no previous publication histories listed (but note that Faber had already published a novel at this point).

Explaining Death to the Dog by Susan Perabo (1999) - most stories previously published elswhere (in Story, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, New Stories From The South and others).

Close Range by Annie Proulx (1999) - a few stories previously published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and GQ. Proulx has, of course, also published novels.

So far, evenly split. Over to you?

Comments

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

d00d, I can't begin to count how many short story collections I have, much less go thru all their contents, but my feeling is the percentage of non-genre collections with pub credits is way, way more than 50%, altho admittedly I'm looking at collections by people like Atwood and Munro and Carver, not so much the smaller markets. In most of the non-genre short story collections I own only one or two stories weren't previously published. In fact I can't ever really think of a non-genre writer who has produced enough stories "to fill a book" (which is, what? 10? 12?) and then published them without any previous pub credits. I'm probably wrong on this, but if it has happened, I think it's been pretty damned rare.

Also, publishers aren't _required_ to list where stories have been previously published -- and some don't, on purpose -- so looking at the pub credits is actually not going to give you an accurate count in some cases.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Well, that would appear to neatly junk that theory, then. Thanks. :)

Of coure, it doesn't junk the abstract theory that working towards a single collection produces higher-quality work, it just means that not many people do it, so it's probably not a good explanation for relatively higher/lower quality short story writing outside/inside genre.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Ah, I didn't mean to CRUSH THEORY. O well.

it doesn't junk the abstract theory that working towards a single collection produces higher-quality work, it just means that not many people do it

I do think writers tend to divide their short stories, even published ones, into those that could be collected in book form and those they'd prefer not to (unless you're, say, John Updike who is apparently devoted to publishing his laundry lists), butyeah.

OTOH there is the interesting trend nowadays of "linked short stories" forming a "novel" -- Melissa Banks had a big success with it, and before her, Louise Erdrich with Love Medicine. Altho IIRC most of the stories in those publications were previously published as well. But I do think it might be easier to get a linked cycle of short stories published than a straight-up collection.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

OTOH there is the interesting trend nowadays of "linked short stories" forming a "novel"

Yes. This interests me a lot. There was an article about it in some newspaper or other a while back; I could have sworn I posted it to shortform but if I did I can't find the entry now. Other examples are David Mitchell and the latest Michael Cunningham.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Ursula K. Le Guin has done it a number of times -- there was Orsinian Tales way back when, and I think she talks abt the phenom (which she says Brits call "a fix-up") in the intro to The Birthday of the World, IIRC, there was Changing Planes, and Tales from Earthsea was at least thematically linked -- in fact you had to read one story to bridge from Tehanu to The Other Wind. Mainstream-wise, she did it with Searoad. She also did some more thematic collections like Buffalo Gals and The Compass Rose.

One of the grandaddies in genre is, I guess, Ellison's Deathbird Stories, altho that included a lot of previously published work and what you got at the end wasn't a novel. But it was v thematically organized. Then of course there's The Martian Chronicles and some of Bradbury's other themed collections, Dandelion Wine and so on....

What's interesting to me is that even if it's clearly a bunch of short stories the book is often marketed as a "novel" -- cf the Erdrich and Banks books. A lot of Erdrich's books have that sort of fix-up quality, actually, altho it doesn't seem to hurt her sales any. John Updike collected a series of his stories with The Maples, altho I think that's out of print by now. He has another themed collection with the Olinger Stories. John Cheever wrote a number of stories abt the same people and places in his "Shady Lane" (if I have the name right), but it wasn't v systematic. (Cheever's also complicated because he sold chapters of his novels to the NYorker as short stories so his family could eat, so he was criticized a lot for publishing novels that read like short story collections.)

I think Nabokov's Pnin is also linked short stories, but I haven't read it in long enough to be sure. Woolf wrote a number of short stories to "get into" Mrs Dalloway and those were published as Mrs Dalloway's Party, I think, altho she didn't conceive of them as a linked collection herself. I think Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is basically a collection of short stories -- every chapter from a different viewpoint -- altho it might not be that book, altho I know she wrote at least one book with that effect.

[kalorlo.livejournal.com]

I have no non-genre short-story collections...

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

To be fair, three of the four above belong to greengolux. :)

(I do own more non-genre collections, but they're older. e.g. Dubliners.)

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Frex, Googling on just one of your examples in the "no" column, Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber, reveals "His short story 'Fish' won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition in 1996 and is included in his first collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall and Other Stories (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award." A prizewinning short story makes it a lot easier to sell the collection that story's in. According to that same website, his first novel, Under the Skin, shortlisted for the Whitbread, wasn't published til 2000. I'd bet my hat some other short stories in SRMF were previously published, they're just not credited in the book, which, as I pointed out in the earlier post, is not that uncommon wrt publisher.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I did wonder whether that might be the case. In the Auslander collection, there's a note that one of the stories won an award in 2004, but it didn't list prior publication so I went with the assumption that it was submitted to the judges but not actually published.

If genre publishers are more likely than mainstream publishers to list prior history, that skews things completely. Personally I like to know history, and think it should be compulsory to include it. :)

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I used to go through pub credits to see what markets might be open to whatever short stories/poems, and was crushed to find out it wasn't always that informative. Also, while a lot of writers do include pub credits in collections, a lot of the time they're also edited to reflect the most prestigious ones (NYorker, frex) or you get a "Work in this book appeared in X Y and Z" without detailing which one went where. I do know a lot of publishers include pub creds, but enough don't that it would skew the sample too much, I think.

[chance88088.livejournal.com]

Not sure of the point of this, but I'll give you what's in my bedroom:

Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones - Estensive prepulication list including Ploughshares, Esquire, others

The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr most previously published elswhere in the Atlantic,Pris Review, etc.

Things Fall From the Sky by Kevin Brockmeier - Extensive prepublication list including Harper's, McSweeney's

Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem - New Yorker, Conjunctions

The Collected Patricia Highsmith - ok I am too lazy to upset the pile to check this one, but she's been published everywhere, so there isn't really a point.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Not sure of the point of this

Well, it makes me kinda happy. I wasn't really comfortable with Geneva and Martin's argument that losing the magazines would produce higher-quality fiction, and if mainstream authors are publishing in their magazines just as much, it suggests that the argument doesn't really hold water.

They will now come along and tell me I have misinterpreted their argument.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

losing the magazines would produce higher-quality fiction

eeeeeek. By what, having first-time writers try to publish collections of unpublished work? yeah, that would go over v well at publishing houses....also a lot of the time writers get agents by sending credits of their published stories or work up books from a couple of short stories or a sequence. Granted you can't make a living writing short stories anymore, but not everyone can take the time off to write a novel and market it....

One thing I think I have seen in the genre field is that there are a lot of high-quality "webzines" publishing stories by pros, and paying -- SCIFI.com is at the top of the heap I wld guess in terms of exposure and pay, but there's lots more -- and more people are flocking to those, partly cause a lot of the time you can read the story without having to buy a whole issue of a magazine. I haven't really seen that in the mainstream field at all -- you have places like the NYorker making a v limited quantity of their recent short stories online, but it's not like that's a v easy market to crack, and a lot of online fic places are adjuncts to hard copy journals/magazines.

In a perhaps not unrelated note, I just bought the Atlantic Extra Special Fic Issue, and it had about six stories in it (you remember, this was supposed to equal all the stories that would otherwise have been published in the Atlantic over a year or so), by people like Joyce Carol Oates and so on, and was clearly indicated to move sales at magazine racks (bizarrely enough, subscribers to the mag don't get a copy, but can access an online edition, which just ups my suspicion this is intended to test the market re special issues a la the NYorker and impulse buys). So the withering away of short story hard copy magazines continues on all fronts....

Anyhow, I will shut up now and quit cluttering up yr comments.

[chance88088.livejournal.com]

They will now come along and tell me I have misinterpreted their argument.

Well, that's because you have. :P

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Well, there were a bunch of different things, but as I understood them:

- The genre magazines encourage an 'apprenticeship model'.
- Writers put out collections too early, including their earliest works.
- This leads to poor collections.
- In the mainstream market this is less common.
- It is less common at least in part because there is less emphasis on publication of new short stories in magazines.

Separate to this was the idea that working on a set of short stories produces higher-quality work. This may well be true. However, if it doesn't happen very often in any market, I'm not sure how useful it is.

[chance88088.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, for me implicit in the whole discussion was that the mainstream model is basically the MFA model, which at the very least encourages a writer to create a cohesive work, whether it is a collection or a novel. But it also encourages the idea that a writer has to learn how to write before one becomes published. (I don't really believe there is less emphasis on getting published, but more of an idea that you probably aren't ready to be published right away.)

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

It is less common at least in part because there is less emphasis on publication of new short stories in magazines

Well, one big flaw in that is something like the NYorker Young Writers issue, which led directly to a book deal for at least one person and is a marvelous career-starting spotlight for many -- and that's "for" specifically unpublished authors, altho usually people who have completed MFA programs (or that girl who worked in the NYorker office itself). Places like Story and Glimmertrain also highlight up-and-coming authors, and having short stories published in some upscale markets is one way to get an agent to take you on or at least look at your work. I think there are fewer non-genre markets that pay well nowadays that more "regular" people can crack, and you can't make a living selling non-genre short stories anymore, but that's more a case of the market withering rather than anything else I think.

[snowking.livejournal.com]

They will now come along and tell me I have misinterpreted their argument.

No-one ever needs to tell you this anymore. It's just taken as read.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

If you bring a marker pen to Worldcon and try to write 'Captain Wronghead' on my name badge, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet that I will end you.

[greengolux.livejournal.com]

They will now come along and tell me I have misinterpreted their argument.

You have. I was arguing that the magazines are a bit disappointing while single author collections are usually a lot more interesting and looking for reasons why this might be the case. I wasn't arguing for making any sort of changes to the current system.

I think the current magazine market doesn't do enough to encourage high quality fiction, and I think there are other publishing phenomena that do a better job of encouraging good quality short fiction at the moment, but mostly I would like to argue for a better, more critical magazine market, not no magazine market.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Which single-author collections did you have in mind when you made this comment?

[ajr.livejournal.com]

Well, it makes me kinda happy. I wasn't really comfortable with Geneva and Martin's argument that losing the magazines would produce higher-quality fiction

It occured to me some time after the original discussion had long died that we already have evidence that losing the magazine market kills the short story form in a genre. Crime fiction. There seem only to be crime novels these days, never short stories; let alone high-quality collections of short stories. I have little doubt that without a magazine market for SF short stories, they will similarly die a death.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

that losing the magazines would produce higher-quality fiction,

That really wasn't the argument at all. However this is something more like it.

It is perfectly true that there are mainstream magazine venues. When I describe the mainstream model as being "original anthologies and single author collections" that's a contraction to the point of being flat out wrong.* Equally when I said "obviously the mainstream model isn't completely different" I perhaps didn't emphasise the similarities enough. However I still think there are fundamental differences between the two, one of which is a much smaller mainstream magazine market.

Everything the_red_shoes says is right though. The "mainstream model" that popped into my head in the last thread was because at the agency where I work (until tomorrow!) we are currently trying to break a young short story writer. We are doing this through original anthologies, sponsored competions and getting her portfolio know by publishers. Obviously Granta would be nice but that is about the only magazine market and incredibly hard to get into.

As for your survey, I have precisely two collections on my local bookshelf that meet your criteria. They are:

The Blood Of Strangers by Frank Huyer (1999) - All original

Heavy Water by Martin Amis (1997)- three original, three New Yorker, one each for Encounter, Esquire and Granta

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Good gravy. I have been trying to nab a copy of Explaining Death to the Dog for _ages._ The title story is one of my favorites in the world.

This comment just to express general envy. Envy!

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

It strikes me that Looking For Jake And Others is an example of genre collection done in a more "mainstream" way (and coming out, with a big push, from a mainstream publisher.) To which you might say, "well, that's China Meiville", but that's kind of my point.