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Are Aussie short story writers an endangered species?
by Geoffrey Dean
© 2208 words
Geoffrey Dean is an Australian writer who has
published over 80 short stories since 1956, including several collections
(Strangers' Country, Cold Dead Monday, Summerbird and
in 2004, The Literary Lunch: Selected Stories). He has appeared
in 22 story anthologies in places as diverse as China,
Norway, the UK and the USA. He has also written film, radio and TV scripts
and published many newspaper and magazine articles.
JUST last month I had begun my latest story. At the time I had no idea
how it would turn out. As usual I just had the characters waiting in the
wings and a wisp of an idea of what they were going to do once I'd brought
them on centre stage.
For a while the four characters I had introduced didn't seem to have
anything to say, they just stood around mumbling inanities to each other,
so I began to think I'd been wrong about the idea in the first place.
Perhaps I would have to discard the work after all.
But then, as so often happens, something clicked into place and the characters
suddenly came to life. And, as it turned out, they had plenty to say and
do. It also turned out they were accident prone and willing to take risks.
Fertile ground for any story. Within a few paragraphs they were on their
hazardous way, heading for some vaguely realized denouement which would,
hopefully, carry with it an unexpected surprise for all of us.
However, having roughly completed several pages, I began to have further
doubts. I began to realise my characters might, in fact, have too much
to say. This story was growing in complexity so quickly I felt there was
a danger of it getting away from me. Not, I hasten to add, the story itself
but the ultimate length the story was going to be.
I had hoped it would be a short story of a nice, comfortable length.
Or, in other words, a story about 3,000 words long which would have the
widest possible market potential. A story which would not only fit comfortably
into a small magazine but one which, along the way, could also be eligible
for some of the many story competitions which proliferate in this fair
land like mushrooms after an autumnal downpour.
Sadly, by the time I'd established the place, the time, and introduced
the states of conflict, I calculated I had already classed myself out
of a third of the 60 or so story competitions that came in around the
2,000-word count.
I'd also run out of most newspaper space and many of the small magazines:
and I'd hardly begun. My characters were still jostling each other, falling
into the holes they had dug for themselves and in no way indicating it
was time to start winding the story up. The only compensating factor was
that, even if the end was still nowhere in sight, at least by then my
story had shape and direction.
Another two-and a half pages of this kind of thing and they'd denied
me the chance of entering the quite rich Alan Marshall Literary Award
and the very rich 1994 National Short Story Competition, which, incidentally,
is touted as the 'biggest of its kind in Oz and one of the biggest in
the world'. Well, money- wise that may well be, but word-wise the NSS
was still in the mini-series class in comparison to the story I had unfolding
before me.
How strange it was, I thought to myself as I made myself my afternoon
cup of tea, that the federal capital Canberra, the seat of government,
the city that turns over more words in a week than the average city would
wear in a year, insists on so few words when it comes to word competitions.
Was this some kind of reaction against poly-verbiage - an attempt, as
it were, to substitute quality for quantity in the word game? Or was it
simply that Canberra's Ivory Tower dwellers were so out of touch with
the real world they no longer knew how long a good short story needed
to be.
When 3,000 words went by on my word counter, I began to realise that
not only had this story written itself out of the majority of story competitions
in the country, it was now in danger of writing itself out of the prospects
of publication in any of the staunch old standbys, the literary magazines.
Having tried unsuccessfully to published many 4,000 to 5,000-word stories
in the past, I was quite familiar with the rejection note that read simply,
'Sorry, too long for our magazine.'
Okay, I thought, I'll keep going and hope I will be able to at least
catch the few story competitions that will accept stories up to 5,000
words. There was still the Warana, the Springvale, and the R. Carson-Gold
Memorial awards to comfort me as my story came up to and passed the 4,000-word
count.
There was also the possibility that the only true story magazine in the
country, 'Australian Short Stories', might go for a longer story if it
was powerful enough. And I did at laest feel that around the 4,500-word
mark the story was beginning to head towards what I can only describe
as a climactic gathering of events. There was still hope I could pin the
thing down below the 5,000-word self-destruction mark.
At that moment I returned to the beginning and began a merciless trimming
down. It took out several doubtful lines, cut sentences back to the bare
bones, but alas, to no avail, my counter hit 5,000 and I still couldn't
write THE END.
It was a story headed, not as I had hoped into the light of day, but
one irrevocably destined for the already crowded floppy disk marked 'Anthologies
Only' that resided far from the light in my very bottom drawer. In Australian
literary terms at least, it seemed it was another washout.
I remembered reading once that in answer to a question from one of his
creative writing students about the optimum length of a story, American
writer Raymond Carver replied that a story was as long as it had to be.
A nice retort, I thought at the time, but I realised now he was talking
from the top of the story writers' ladder. I wondered if it applied to
other story writers at the top.
As some kind of personal justification I decided to take a brief look
into the immediate past history of the short story in America. I chose
an anthology and an author story collection published in the recent past
- 'New American Short Stories' (Plume) and 'The Stories of Tobias Wolff'
(Picador).
Without going into too many mathematical details the average word count
of each story in the anthology was approximately 6,300 and in the authors
collection 6,900. The stories ranging in word counts from 2,200 to 10,000
words. It seemed a pretty flexible arrangement.
Okay, I thought, perhaps the Canadians are more in line with our way
of thinking what is and what isn't an ideal length for a short story.
At random I chose 'The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories'
as an example of an anthology, and Alice Munro's 'Something I Mean to
Tell You' as a fairly typical author collection.
Much to my surprise, the Canadians left the Yanks for dead. The word
count of the author collection averaged out about the same as their southern
cousins but the anthology averaged out at a whacking great 8,500 words.
Only two stories out of the 24 in the anthology came in under 5,000 words
and none of Alice Munro's did. Lucky Alice, I though, to be born in Canada
and not Australia.
I just had to come back here to show the difference, so I took books
of Australian short stories at random from my bookcase. Peter Carey's
'Erotic Pleasures' (Picador), Jessica Anderson's 'Stories from the Warm
Zone' (Penguin), and Angus and Robertson's anthology 'Personal Best'.
As far as anthologies go we do seem to write them shorter here but probably
not as short as many think. The average word count for the anthology -
our best authors choosing their best stories - was approximately 3,600;
which means simply the vast majority would have been too long for the
majority of today's short-story competitions.
The stories of Carey, who is arguably the most successful of Australia's
story writers, was a bit of a surprise however. His stories were more
in line with the North Americans. They averaged out at a very respectable
word count of 6,500. Which means simply none of his stories would have
been accepted for any of the 60 or so story competitions in Australia
today. And I suggest that if his name wasn't Peter Carey he would have
a hard time getting a publication in any of the literary magazines with
stories that length.
The big surprise, however, was Anderson's book. Her story word count
averaged out at an amazing 9,000 words. A higher average than any of the
books from all three countries. Not surprisingly an author's note informs
us that only one of the stories in a different form (shorter?) had been
previously published.
And as far as competitions were concerned, a clue to what they were on
about was dropped into my lap before I'd even finished this article. One
of my entries was returned from a major competition with a pencil-marked
number in one corner. The number was 1,422. A mistake I thought, 142 surely.
But the number was verified by a friend of mine who told me over the
phone that he had also submitted a story and his story came back marked
1,493. My mind boggled at the thought that the competition had been judged
in a four-week period by three judges. I calculate that to do it properly
each judge would have had to read 400 stories each week - a little over
57 a day.
Okay, many of the stories might well have been obviously sub-standard,
but, even if half of them had been thrown away after a quick scan, there
would still have been a mighty lot of stories to read in a week. It seemed
an impossible task to me.
Having never judged a major story competition I've got no idea how much
a judge is paid but I'll bet it's not enough. Even at the hourly rate
of a labourer they should be getting in the vicinity of $1,000 each for
their speed-reading efforts. Which means simply unless judges are still
working for peanuts the real winners of any story competition are the
judges.
Given that a win in any of the major story competitions would pay much
better than any magazine, a story writer in Australia today would have
to be a bit of a fool not to try and cash in on the story competitions
before they submitted their work to a magazine.
And given that most of the really rich competitions require a 2,000 to
3,000 word length it would be foolish not to expect story writers to aim
primarily for as few words as possible if they wanted to maximise their
chances for both money and recognition.
Ray Carver's simplistic maxim may well have applied in his own country,
or to any writer who has already acquired fame like Peter Carey and Jessica
Anderson, but to those who are still struggling to reach the top it's
not so simple. To these writers it's the judge/time ratio, and the editorial/page-
space/cost ratio, that more likely than not will constrict the length
of the stories they write.
The implicit message being, a 'good' story is first and foremost one
that fits nicely into the system. The end result more a matter of strangulation
than stimulation. It is a sad fact, hard to dislodge; and one that does
nothing to encourage the best of our up-and-coming literary talent to
write more complex works.
© Geoffrey Dean
C/- The Write Stuff
Document created 31 March 1995; page updated August 2004.
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