A Voice Entirely Your Own: The Art of Short Fiction
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Over the eight years since I started writing, only two of the countless short stories I’ve written have been published.
The first was in a small, online journal that was kind enough to send me a congratulatory letter and a physical copy on their custom letterhead in a three-hole-punched plastic sleeve. Not long after I received my copy did the website cease to exist, erasing any credibility that I had, in fact, been a published writer of short fiction.
The second was in another small, online journal—the recommended venue for writer’s who are dipping their feet into the vast ocean of writing. While they didn’t send me a letter or a copy to hold, they did keep the website functioning so that when I say I’m a published short fiction writer, I can provide this brief credential to anyone who may suggest otherwise.
This second publication was my first piece of fiction that I diligently worked on. All others that came before it were typed up and sent off without a second thought. They were created with the idea of creation rather than revision. The writer I am today looks forward to toiling with a story, moving scenes and events around, changing which character says what to ramp up tension, or cutting the dull words and empty sentences altogether. Nowadays, I write to edit.
I could go on about the importance of editing. It’s a crucial component that is often overlooked by young and eager writers, one that can turn a mediocre story into a good story, even a great one. All it requires is time and to ask the story what exactly it is trying to say or do.
The Art of Fiction
In his essay, “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James asserts that: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.” James wrote this in response to the idea that readers enjoy novels that make light of life and jest about it. Novels weren’t meant to be these objects so heavy of emotion and critical thought. This was the late 1884, mind you. And the novel has come a very long way since then.
Short fiction, too, has developed since its inception.
Take the 1920s, for example, a time that followed the first major world war and soldiers—human beings—returned to their lives after being pulled away from them having witnessed atrocities. Many were directly involved in them. If we take James’ assertion that the novel exists to compete with life to be true to heart, then we can say the same for short fiction. Ernest Heminway made his stake by writing fiction—both novels and short stories—that are about human fragility and strength, to put it one way.
But how does fiction reach across that threshold and imprint itself onto the reader? How, as writers, are we able to create a piece of art that affects the reader in profound ways?
Four Russians in One Book of Craft
The short answer is, we can’t. Well, not every time we write a story. My first published story is a far cry from the type of story that Anton Chekov produced, time and again, throughout his lifetime. The same can be said of Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, and Ivan Turgenev, the writers whose work comprises George Saunders’ book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
“A story is a series of incremental pulses,” Saunders writes regarding what makes up the heart of a story, “each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were.”
In short fiction, those pulses must be carefully calibrated to keep the reader alive and attentive. The writer must consider the passenger and be mindful of their journey—where they go and end up is entirely up to you, they just need to be willfully distracted until they arrive and can look back on the journey to understand how they got where they end up.
According to George, “It’s a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.” A good short story will allow the reader to understand that it’s art and give them time and space to respond. A great short story will convince them that it’s life and compete with it, confront them in some way, but then let them go on their way, all the better for having done so.
These issues with writing good short fiction are at the core of what Saunders aims to address. He has taken his twenty years of teaching at Syracuse University and condensed it down into a readable, engaging master class. And he uses those four Russian writers, whose lives were hard, grim, bleak, yet wrote transformative short fiction that, someone, convinces you that there is still hope in the world and goodness.
It’s not that suffering makes a good writer. It’s a writer’s desire to be attentive, to be a wonderful host and great curator; most important of all, it’s the voice of the writer that matters. While we look to those writers who came before us for the secret to success in writing, the reason they had such success is because they were unabashedly themselves, for better or worse, within their work—and, in some cases, outside of it.
“While writing this book, I turned sixty-one,” Saunders writes in the closing pages, “and I found myself asking again and again, during the writing, why writing stories is important—if it’s important enough to justify the time it takes, as I become keenly aware that time is precious and life is passing, and that, for sure, everything I want to do in this life is not going to get done, not at all, not ever, and that the end is going to come rushing up faster than I expect (even if it rushes up, per my plan, two hundred years from now, when I’m 261).
“Writing this book turned out to be a chance to ask myself again, at length: ‘Do you still want to devote your life to fiction?’
“And it turns out, I do.
“I really do.”
So, if you find yourself struggling, as many of us writers will often do, take a moment to ask yourself: Do I want to devote my life to fiction?
I know I do.
About Coty Poynter
Coty Poynter is the author of two poetry books. His most recent, Delirium: Collected Poems, was published by Bowen Press. His work has appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Equinox, Grub Street, and Underwood Press. He lives in Baltimore with his partner, their cat Pudge, and a hodgepodge of plants.
