Note to King: Don’t Sell Short Stories Short

The literary form is today no more or less mainstream that it ever was, and there probably are no more, no fewer, badly written literary short stories than there have ever been. And haven't literary magazines always been on the bottom shelf at chain bookstores—if they were available at all? We may have lost the would-be Clarence Budington Kellands to writers' rooms at "Law and Order," "CSI" and "House, M.D." (a character based on the king of genre fiction, Sherlock Holmes, no less), but I'm unconvinced by King's argument that American short fiction is terminal.

There's no doubt that short fiction has disappeared from the zeitgeist. Today, stories are communicated to wide audiences only if they're made into movies. Any publisher will attest that short story collections don't sell well. In an attempt to sex up the form, the literary magazine McSweeney's has devoted two issues to pulp fiction. Guest editor Michael Chabon wrote in his introduction, "I think we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be." True, genre fiction can be enormously entertaining, but as William Gibson said in a recent New York Times Magazine interview, "in genre, you're sort of buying a guarantee that you are going to have essentially the same experience again and again." That's the idea behind sitcoms. If a reader wants an experience that transcends entertainment, he or she looks to literary fiction, where we hope that, serious or funny, the stories will surprise us—not superficially (the mother was the murderer!) but by presenting the unpredictable human condition, fleas and all.

Even if many contemporary short stories are, according to King, "show-offy rather than entertaining ... self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious," I'm not convinced that they're symptoms of a dying form. They sound more like strained imitations of Nabokov, Roth and Munro. Just as fledgling painters copy the works of the masters, and emerging pianists try to replicate Horowitz's octave technique, young writers will imitate, usually badly, established writers. And if young writers flock to writing programs and end up producing what King refers to as "some fraidy-cat's writing school imitation of Faulkner," have faith that those with the gift, or the curse, will struggle through those pale imitations to find their own voices.

Regardless of what declarations come down from King or anyone else, short-story writers will keep on writing, just as they've always done, no matter the size of the audience, the existence of a market or opinions about the right or wrong-headedness of their work. King, provocateur, knows this. "What happens to a writer when he or she realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily?" he asks. "Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless." He certainly got that part right.

© 2007