It seems that we can no longer talk about the state of a cultural form without talking about its death. I can't think of a single cultural form in perfect health: rap is dead, rock is dead but doesn't know it, jazz has died a thousand deaths, classical musical will die as soon as its last band of listeners finally totters into the grave, the novel dies once a generation, movies can't last much longer, television should have been aborted at birth, and architecture is alive and well, which can only mean it will die soon.
The short story, Stephen King tells us, is alive, but not so well. Fresh from a stint as the guest editor for The Best American Short Stories 2007, King testifies that he read too many stories that were
airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.
King claims that the readership for these stories are
other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines . . . not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.
King, who doesn't seem to have an off switch, makes a valid point, then pushes it too far. Suspense has been out of fashion in high brow American fiction since at least the 1920's, when suspense in absence of any other literary value ceased to strike readers as artful. Sensitive readers will find suspense in the smallest clues, and those are the readers for whom the best writers create fiction.
That most of these readers are themselves writers is neither yucky nor surprising. Reading and writing are not separable acts. The reader who doesn't write is a leaky vessel best suited for the unsubtle novels of King's "glamour pony" writers James Patterson and Danielle Steel.
Yes, workshopped fiction is weak tea, but most American literary magazines are sustained by it. Writing workshops provide the bulk of material and the majority of readers for independent fiction publishing. Stephen King can publish high-impact short stories only after years of releasing the monsters of his id, and he's only now cultivating the favor of a literary establishment made up mostly of--uh oh--other writers trying to figure out what sells.
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