There was a recent question raised at the MetaxuCafe forum about story length, and the usual answer would be "when the story has been told and finished." Or, if must be done, according to the publisher’s specs. Of course, I (as all of us, I’m sure) feel insulted by the word limit placed on creativity. It’s like telling a painter that his skies must be bluer, or the canvases limited to 24" x 36" because that’s what sells.
However, looking at the next story in Best American Short Stories 2005, there was one that ran forty pages long called Stone Animals written by Kelly Link. While it was good, it just seemed that an excess of dialogue and slow buildup of changes within a family who buys a house that seems haunted (unfortunatelly, I immediately pictured Jack Nicholson in Stephen King’s The Shining) did indeed need a bit of tightening up to pick up the pace. As a matter of fact, the main plot is outlined right within the text. The wife is pregnant and obsessed with painting the rooms while her husband spends more time away at his job than they’d planned:
He helped Catherine down from the ladder. "I wish you would stop painting."
"I can’t," she said. "It has to be perfect. If I can just get it right then everything will go back to normal and stop being haunted and the rabbits won’t tunnel under the house and make it fall down, and you’ll come home and stay home, and our neighbors will finally get to meet you and they’ll like you and you’ll like them and Carleton will stop being afraid of everything, and Tilly will fall asleep in her own bed, and stay there, and–"
"Hey," Henry said. "It’s all going to work out. It’s all good. I really like this color." (p. 96)
There are a few subplots; the wife lies to her husband about an affair, and the children get a little dippy along with their mother as their possessions "feel" haunted, and there are a bunch of rabbits that run around outside this country home, so it is interesting. But naming off the paint sample colors and much of Henry’s work back in the City just seem to build to nowhere. There is an odd twist to the end, but I think the impact of the story might have either been built to novel form, or shortened considerably to short story format.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Actually, limits in form allow the artist to display their mastery of technique. I agree that word counts seem arbitrary (very much of the paper publishing world), but it doesn’t stand in the way of creativity. Word limits only constrain what sort of stories are printed.
Very good points. As a matter of fact, when I needed to cut a 900-word story into a 3-minute presentation at a seminar open-mike, I learned how relatively easy it was to note what was important and what wasn’t. A short story in BASS 2005 relates a tale of a writer of a 1000-page story that comes eventually down to a haiku.
Story Lengths
The blogger at Spinning has writtenThere was a recent question raised at the MetaxuCafe forum about story length, and the usual answer would be when the story has been told and finished. Or, if must be done, according to the publisher’s specs. Of cours…