types of short stories?

[truepenny]

First, thanks to everyone who has posted congratulations and cries of enthusiasm in response to yesterday's exciting news. Much appreciated!

Second, I had this random thought yesterday. I'm not sure if it's an epiphany or a delusion, so I thought I'd post it and see what y'all think. I was thinking about my short stories and realized they fell into two categories, each of which has, to me, a distinctly different feel. One is the straight narrative group, the ones that are like novels only shorter (the two novellas I sold to Alchemy are this way, as are all the other sales I've made that haven't been to LCRW). The others, the ones that LCRW likes, aren't like novels. They're something else, some different way of story-telling. (I think there are people who can write novels that are more this way--Candas Jane Dorsey's Black Wine is the example I thought of immediately--but I am not one of them.) I don't quite know how to categorize what I'm talking about. Partly it's that the narrative isn't linear, but there's more to it than that. There's a difference in the quality of the stories. It's not necessarily a matter of there being more or less external action, since some of the more traditionally narrative stories have very little that "happens" in them, either. I don't know what it is. But I think one of the reasons I've been having trouble with the current necklace story is that it's a story of the second type that is insisting on being told in the manner of the first (i.e., it wants to look like a traditional narrative when it really isn't).

At this point I shall channel China Miéville and mutter, "Numinous!" and fall silent again.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Numinous!

that is all.

Except he still looks really nice in a suit.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about this, and I think you have something. I've never got the hang of writing short stories that are not either a) actually a bit of a novel or b) actually a poem without linebreaks. But I can see in short stories generally that there is this short story nature, though whether it has to do with linearity or what I'm not sure, more to do with completeness at scale, I think.

But thinking about it, I started thinking about Forster's "The queen died and then the king died of grief" and I wonder if what he meant there was that plot is characterisation, because that's what of grief adds, not just a sequence of events, not, as I'd thought he meant, a justification, but a character, someone who does something because of who they are. (And then I started thinking about Deerskin, where he didn't die of grief.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I like that interpretation of Forster, because it makes sense to me in a way that no other interpretation ever has (even if his distinction between "plot" and "story" seems to me to be entirely backwars).

And I think, now, that there are three kinds of short stories in my impromptu taxonomy:

1. novels-only-shorter
2. poems in disguise
3. this other thing that I'm still failing to articulate

Because a couple of my shortest pieces are poems--or they feel like poems. Really, so is one of the longest ones, although that one's a poem made up out of passages of prose. But there's still these other stories that are neither 1 nor 2, but partake of the nature of both. I think.