In MFA programs, short stories are often given the same weight as novels, screenplays and memoir, but things are different in the marketplace.
Now, I love short stories, and I spent about five years writing a short story collection, but the market for short fiction is extremely limited.
Consider the types of books you buy. Even writers are more likely to buy a novel or nonfiction over a short story collection. And (in what has become an endless refrain) short fiction journals are very fond of pointing out that more people submit to them than subscribe. (I’d like to smugly point out that in the last year I’ve subscribed to Western Humanities Review, The Missouri Review and One Story.)
I realize that the short story is a great format for workshopping. You can read an entire short story in one sitting and (unlike a novel) you can revise it over one school semester, so that’s handy. Still, should MFA programs also take into account the difficulty in getting these things published and (even if you do get published) how little it pays?
Questions:
Do MFA programs owe students any sort of assistance or explanation when it comes to marketing their work? Or are MFA programs here to make us better artists, market be damned?
Publishing for money: What are the odds of getting a screenplay published vs. a short story collection vs. creative nonfiction vs. novel? I have no idea, but I have a sense that the non-fiction market is the easiest to crack. If you want to make money, the most difficult form is poetry. Anyone know for sure?
Are my own thoughts on the short story too negative? Maybe the form will come back. In the 80′s everyone thought animation was dead- now we have the Simpsons and Family Guy and a hundred other animated shows. Maybe the short story will have a new Golden Age?
And maybe the novella will come back too!
Should MFA programs add a course to their programs in which you meet with an editor and agent and get to ask questions about marketing and submitting?
Should MFA programs be redesigned for longer courses (maybe workshops that last two years) so that people, can carry a novel the whole way through?
Should MFA programs clearly explain to fiction writers that they would be better off (from a marketing perspective) writing a novel?
Discuss please.
Thanks!
Armand (who often writes short stories)
Comments 19
I am currently in an MFA but in poetry. I think the issue of whether or not to critique short stories is tricky. Short stories are publishable in lit mags which is where a lot of people get their start. The short story collection, however, doesn’t seem to be an item that sells a lot. I know I don’t buy very many, and usually–like with poetry–it is because the author gave a reading.
My MFA program (Queens low-res) does do panels about publishing etc. I’m not to the end of the program but there is more about that as you go along I believe.
–Jessie
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 7:42 am ¶jacarty.blogspot.com
What’s interesting and simultaneously disappointing is that in the music industry, nothing is more popular now than the Single, the coveted 3:30 mp3 that shoots straight to the top of iTunes and that can be listened to on one’s iPod on the L or at your convenience. It’s not the album anymore that consumers want or that changes the social consciousness, as it seemed to do in the 60s and 70s. It’s the single.
This makes me think that the short story is a perfect form of our contemporary age, an age whose attention span dwindles after roughly ten minutes (by the way, did you see raccoon doing the electric slide on YouTube?). The short story seems to fit our very nature. In our go-here, go-there culture, it is completely accessible. We can read one or more stories during our 34 minute commute to and from the office and still find an emotional investment in the characters and outcome. So my question is not will it survive, but rather, how is it not alive right now.
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 10:36 am ¶I agree with David. It seems crazy that the short story isn’t more consumed these days.
People are trying it with podcasts, though I’ve noticed the problem with those is spotty reading quality.
Yet, the real problem, in my opinion, isn’t that people don’t consume the short story. I think it has more to do with the type of story that is considered good these days.
“Mainstream” literary fiction is more often than not characterized by overloaded introspection and dubious epiphanies. Not to sound too crass, but a lot of it is just boring.
Then, less mainstream lit fiction is often way too writerly — one needs to be a lit wonk to appreciate the craft that goes into the story. There is little characterization, minimal conflict, scant stuff to identify with as a reader.
For some, this all the point: to be Writers, with a capital “W.” But, as long as these two strains dominate what gets published — and what’s considered “serious” fiction — there will be no iTunes for short stories.
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 11:31 am ¶@ David & Gordon
I appreciate your thoughts that in our society, short fiction should be thriving. One thing I’ve often thought about is in relation to this, however, is format and price. Price comes first- a lot of web based exposure comes at no cost. A dancing raccoon costs little to film, and it doesn’t cost any money to load it up to Youtube. There, people can download it for free.
Same thing for people who are trying to promote their band: record the song, upload it for free and give away hundreds of copies for free.
True, I can upload my short story and let people read it for free, but that’s where format kicks in. The mp3 player is the right format for a song, and a computer screen is the right display for a low quality You tube video, but a computer screen isn’t quite the right thing to read stories on; neither is (in my opinion) an ipod or mobil phone. I generally prefer to read on paper.
So what we need to expose stories is some medium for giving it away for free but also on paper. The closest solution that I’ve seen is One Story, a tiny little journal that publishes just one story at a time and mails it to your house. The One Story is small and portable but readable and (yes) made out of paper. The only problem, of course, is that it’s not free.
Armand
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 1:12 pm ¶Let’s not forget that if you do post your story for free on your own website, most publications are going to refuse to publish your story.
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 3:00 pm ¶I agree with you, Armand. I prefer to read on paper rather than on a screen. I am dreading the day when I take the L in Chicago and see four or five E-books, and I fear that day is not as far as some may thing.
I wonder if we can get science to somehow bring back Dickens so he can start Household Words 2.0 for us.
Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 3:37 pm ¶I feel your pain as a fellow writer and poet. Believe me, I know I’m not getting into a money-making business by writing poetry. But as a current MFA student, I can’t help but see the improvement in my work, and that is my goal in all of this. I would LOVE to publish, but the reason I began my poetry MFA is because I am compelled to write, and to write better. I think this is the point of MFA programs, rather than to produce slick, best-selling authors. Therefore, I have to say that there is no way MFA programs should avoid discussion of and focus on the short story medium. Commenting on this from the point of a consumer, I LOVE short story collections, and I own a number of them. Robert Coover is a favorite, as is Joyce Carol Oates; one of my favorite books these days is Harlan Ellison’s Angry Candy. However, the majority of my exposure to these writers occurred during my undergrad, in anthologies. The problem is not the medium of the short story, because clearly people are reading them. I don’t think that the vast majority of people have as much exposure to the art form. We can obviously assume that is true because they are not exposed to MOST art forms that can not be easily packaged. But I would truly hate to see the day that MFA programs base their curricula on what sells rather than what is truly art, and truly good writing.
Posted 21 Jul 2007 at 11:58 am ¶I’m with you, Armand, on not being inclined to read short stories … I like to stay with a story’s characters longer, once I get to know them and to fall in love with some of them. Even short stories by my very favourite authors – Chaim Potok for example – irritate me by their very shortness.
I’m writing a novella – I know that’s silly, because nobody will publish it, but it’s primarily for gaining admission to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. (Wish me luck!!!)
Thanks for sharing your post MFA perspective!
Meg
Posted 22 Jul 2007 at 10:38 pm ¶Thanks to everyone for your responses! It’s nice to how many people check in to this blog.
Cyndle, what do you think about creating an MFA track that does focus on getting published? Maybe there could be two tracks- one for the arts and one for commerce???
And good luck to Meg! By the way Meg, have you heard of this:
http://www.hayseednovellas.com/
or this ?
http://home.comcast.net/~wapshot1/
- Armand
Posted 23 Jul 2007 at 3:06 pm ¶While short stories aren’t very marketable, I think people often overlook how much you can learn by fine tuning a 15-30 page story. You can learn the importance of character relation to plot, syntax, structure, dialogue, rhythm, etc, all in the confines of a tiny story. All of those things are important in the crafting of a novel, and all writers (especially myself) can benefit from working on these things. In that regard I think the workshop succeeds.
As for helping the student market themselves, I think MFA in Creative Writing programs should only do as much as an art program would do for their students. Now, since I don’t have an art degree, I’m not sure what that entails. Any thoughts?
Posted 26 Jul 2007 at 10:26 am ¶Great topic. And thanks for the link to Hayseed Novellas!
Since one question that seems to be arising here concerns marketing, I have to say I think part of the answer is literally staring us in the face: blogs. Musicians and photographers are using online tools to showcase their art. Why aren’t more “serious writers” (read: published) putting quality stuff online? Not just in the form of an “ebook,” or a manufactured article which has been approved by a publisher. But as a blog post?
Part of the reason, I think, is that the “blog” has received a bad connotation in the “literary” world as being trivial and somehow not writing and only useful in terms of marketing. I think once today’s twenty-somethings become tenured professors, the community will begin to change their opinion on this and see the blog as less of a “marketing tool” and more of a creative medium unto itself. Writers, by their very skillset have the opportunity to maintain really good blogs. There are certainly blogs out there I would consider “literary” in their own right, but most of those come from Web professionals who also happen to be good writers. MFA’s might do well to teach students how to use the medium not just as a way to “establish an online presence” but as a viable way to practice their art, build an audience, and yes even make money as an ‘indie writer,’ if that’s a goal.
Posted 30 Jul 2007 at 1:55 pm ¶Hi Armand, I graduated a year after you from USF.
First, I agree that the short form is easier to critique and workshop, so it gets a lot of emphasis. I happen to like writing creative nonfiction, and I particularly like essays. Like short fiction, this is not an easy sell. But I learned a lot from writing an essay collection, and so far have placed three essays, which keeps me going.
However, the part I’d like to comment on is your conclusion about teaching online writing. I absolutely agree that how to write for the Web should be part of the curriculum. (That said, I had a wonderful education… no complaints there!)
Anyway, keep blogging and keep writing. I enjoy your blog.
Posted 09 Aug 2007 at 10:57 pm ¶Hey K.G. — I’m actually the one who graduated from USF.
Armand — a welcome and avid guest contributor — got his MFA from Emerson, I believe.
Thanks for your comments. Please keep reading and commenting.
-gordon
Posted 21 Aug 2007 at 10:00 pm ¶Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh ok. Thanks!
Posted 22 Aug 2007 at 12:35 pm ¶THIS ISN’T INTENDED TO BE A POSTED COMMENT – I couldn’t find an e-mail on the site, so this is how I’m trying to reach Gordon/Armand.
I tried to post a comment to this post several times yesterday, but I was having trouble with the interface. Hope I didn’t bombard you with duplicates, but I see a comment I made to one of Gordon’s posts got through okay (and faster), while this comment never showed up at all, so I’m wondering if I should try reposting. Would you mind dropping me an e-mail to let me know? Thanks.
-BC
Posted 07 Sep 2007 at 9:19 pm ¶Hi Benjamin !
Gordon has complete admin. control over the site, so he would be able to help you out with that.
I sometimes have weird troubles posting to blogs too, so it’s not just you.
If you need to, you can email me at armand_i@yahoo.com
Armand
Posted 07 Sep 2007 at 11:22 pm ¶Hi Benjamin — sorry about your issues. I put comments through approval the first time anyone posts a comment, to keep spam to a minimum… But I think there are problems with the comment system lately.
I apologize for the problems.
Let me know if you’d like me to delete your comment above — g AT afterthemfa.com
Posted 08 Sep 2007 at 12:56 am ¶** Hi- Benjamin Chambers had tried to post this comment previously but was unable to-
I added it for him- Armand
**
from Benjamin Chambers:
I realize you’re being provocative, but I’ll take the bait.
It’s unrealistic to expect MFA programs to stop using short stories as a basis for teaching, for all the reasons that have been stated. But I think you’re right that MFA programs do very little to prepare their students for succeeding commercially.
This is because MFA programs aren’t run by commercial writers, in general, so they tend not to be focused on the market; instead, they seek to help writers develop their art, regardless of the market. That’s okay for many of those who attend – it’s why they go in the first place.
I got my MFA from Washington University in 1989, and never in two years did anyone actually teach me basic issues of craft or plot (eventually, I found the right how-to books for this). First, it was assumed that all of us who’d gotten into the program already knew all this stuff (and only one of us had actually studied or been explicitly taught the craft of fiction as an undergraduate). Second, it was assumed that we were writing literature (i.e., not with a market in mind), and that to pay attention to plot necessarily meant producing formula fiction. The faculty there still had an amazing amount to teach me, but looking back, I wish they’d spent more time drilling us on plot and craft. They didn’t, I suspect, because they were going largely on instinct themselves. Furthermore, they’d never had to pay attention to the market to get where they had: teaching graduate students to make ends meet while they did their own writing.
If you’re writing literature and hope to survive, the obvious way to do it is to teach, which is the path that most writing teachers offer their students, explicitly or implicitly. I certainly left my MFA program expecting to get a job teaching somewhere eventually. However, I remember seeing a summary in the Associated Writing Programs journal last year or the year before that totaled the number of writing programs, the number of graduates … and the pitifully small number of teaching posts available. I’d bet that this is something that no writing program ever discusses with its students.
Now, I’m a literature wonk, so I’m okay with literature that won’t ever appeal to a huge audience — in fact, in 2003 I founded an online literary journal to focus specifically on the hard-to-publish novella and long essay (and even so, I have trouble getting enough quality submissions to fill the issues) — but I agree that writing programs should be more market-focused. Your point about bringing in editors and agents to talk to students is dead-on; so was the point about teaching writing for the web (though I would argue that the future is in multi-media writing). Short stories, too, could be used to teach genre fiction — there’s a ton of mystery and science fiction short stories, and there’s probably as many romance and horror stories as well. If nothing else, the writers who don’t care for genre fiction would still benefit from a thorough education in how to plot.
Nonetheless, the basic truth that writing programs need to convey to new writers isn’t that novels will be more marketable than short fiction — it’s that creative writing of any sort almost never pays. For anyone. It’s like wanting to be a pro basketball player: if you’re supernaturally talented or supernaturally lucky, you might get to the pros. Most aspirants never will. As writers, we can improve the odds by writing novels instead of short stories, nonfiction instead of fiction, or *anything* but poetry, but the fact is that precious little of what gets written ever gets published (or should be), and an even smaller percentage of what is published ever actually makes any money for the author.
Writing programs that truly want to prepare their students to make a living writing should also teach them how to write grants, ad copy, technical manuals, etc. It’s not a s g ratifying, but you can make a great living doing it while you learn how to tell ever better stories — and maybe more marketable ones, to boot.
Posted 28 Sep 2007 at 1:11 pm ¶Like Armand, I also earned an MFA at Emerson College, about eight years ago. I think the reality: that the odds of being able to support oneself by writing what you want to write, comes through. You really don’t need professors constantly telling you it’s hopeless. You’d have to be pretty deluded or dense not to realize the odds of success are miniscule without them discouraging you.
But MFA candidates aren’t taking out vast student loans to be told to quit. We hear that enough from all the practical, worried people around us. You enroll in an MFA program to learn all you can about how to create the poems, stories or novels you want to create. And that ought to happen in a supportive, optimistic environment because learning to write well is a struggle.
Last year I won a one-hour meeting with an author who has published at least five commercial novels. She started writing romances and now writes mainstream fiction which sells alright locally. Personally, I find her stuff hard to get through – it just has nothing fresh to offer.
Her advice to me was to write chick-lit or something genre, just to get my name on a published book. Her experience was that once she was published, getting published again was easier, and that now she has more control over what she wants to write. Her goal was to earn a living writing, but I’m not interested in writing schlock. There are easier ways to make the rent. And I think most MFA students, at least those I met, who tended not to be fresh out of college, know the score.
Posted 14 Nov 2007 at 3:12 pm ¶Post a Comment