Short Stories in Which Things Actually Happen

I just noticed that Tim Pratt’s superlative story “Cup and Table” recently appeared on PodCastle. The story is sort of Arthurian legend meets X-Men. Go listen to it now. I like stories in which things actually happen, and I submit “Cup and Table” as an example of how this approach can really work. As I understand it, Tim sketched out the storyline as a potential series, then stuffed the whole thing into one short story for the Twenty Epics anthology (epic-sized stories told in short story form). The result is just an incredible frenetic denseness of creativity, and reading the story is like mainlining pure awesome.

Of course, your mileage may vary. I seem to have people constantly telling me that there’s something wrong with my desire for brisk pacing and major plot twists in short fiction. When I turned in my story “Transformations” to one of my grad school creative writing workshops, the instructor’s first comment was, “This doesn’t work as fiction.” Huh? I thought. That’s strange, because I just read this story at the reading series last night, and everyone loved it. In fact, at one point I had had to pause for a full minute because I couldn’t be heard over the enthusiastic gales of laughter. “No,” the instructor went on. “There’s too much happening. We get this boy’s whole life from childhood to adulthood, and there’s this whole interstellar war. It’s too much.” Now, maybe this is a legitimate criticism of the story — the story is online here, so you judge for yourself if you want. But then she said something that really floored me: “A short story isn’t about things happening, it’s about capturing a single moment in time.”

Now, I have no objection to short stories that are about capturing a single moment in time — though it had better be a pretty interesting moment — but how can anyone say that this is the only way that all short stories everywhere should be written? I’m constantly aghast at the way that so many “literary” writers are so narrowly read that they’ve internalized so many formulas they’re not even aware of. (Such as, a short story = “a work of fiction shorter that is a) shorter than a novel and b) in which nothing happens.”) This isn’t true of all literary writers, by the way. T. C. Boyle, of one of my favorite short story writers, writes story after story in which all sorts of crazy stuff happens, and it’s wonderful. But far too many literary writers do seem to succumb to this sort of groupthink. Which is particularly sad, I think, when the edict in question (“nothing happens”) seems likely to lead in most cases to self-indulgence and stultification.