Just write: 2013 Short Story Challenge

I’ll just go ahead and say it: the message that short stories are AH – mazing was not properly delivered in my fiction class.

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Not pointing fingers, BrockClarke, just saying.  

Last spring, while promoting his new novel, this Pulitzer Prize winner read a short story to a room full of literary fans at the Clemson Literary Festival. 

I went home and wrote the first one I’d written in years. It wasn’t any good, but it was written.

He’s a master. But don’t tell him I said that. We’re still in a fight. 

 

Sort it out

For many new writers, there appear to be two fiction camps: the novel writers and the short story writers. Typically short story writers marvel that the novel writers have that much to say. Then the novel writers can’t believe the short story writers even consider themselves writers.

FYI: Long doesn’t make it good. Long doesn’t even make it a novel.

Not Anybody Like Me

“Would you think he was anybody like you?”

That’s the last line of the story Rock Springs by Richard Ford, in a collection of stories bearing the same name.  I read the story and responded, “nope.”

It was probably 1996 or 97, and I had escaped the suburbs of Northern Virginia to the idyllic college town of Clemson.  And now, sixteen years later, I’m headed back to Clemson to hear Mr. Ford read. I had to remind myself of the name of the story.

Rock Springs was published in 1988; it’s certainly not the work we’ll hear tonight. I think I might be embarrassed or surprised that I haven’t read anything else by Ford. But I’m not. The world of literature is so vast. And he’s not anybody. Like me.