“…the institutions of print supported the flourishing of the short story as never before or since. There were mass-circulation magazines and more-exclusive journals that would pay writers for stories that readers would spend money to read…It is easy, perhaps irresistible, to wax nostalgic for those days. But if the golden age of American magazines is long gone, the short story itself has shown remarkable durability, and may even be poised for a resurgence.”

—A.O. Scott, “Brevity’s Pull“

If the publishing industry were a cocktail party, it might be a room full of authors and editors dressed in black, heads bowed, clutching glasses of scotch, and, as they rarely get to do, smoking inside. The conversation is cynical, but the atmosphere is decidedly one of mourning. The death of print is imminent. Like a dear, wealthy old mentor once rich and carefree, print is plagued with cirrhosis of the liver and broke after years of excess. Everyone hopes for its recovery, miraculously and perhaps without just reason. In our sorrow and confusion, that’s all we’ve been capable of. We haven’t yet attended the funeral, but since this is business, we can be cold an calculating: we need to start healing before the obituary gets published (ironically, probably in the newspaper).

In the same way you might have to gently yet firmly convince your grandparents why referring to Asian peoples as “Orientals” isn’t all right anymore, so must we encourage the industry to change its way of thinking. Storytelling, no matter how it thrives and dies in its various forms, is requisite to culture; it’s only a matter now of how we disseminate those stories. Thus, if attention spans are shrinking and the longer form is suffering for it, we must adapt to the changing reader. Instances of very, very short narratives (and I use the term “narrative” somewhat loosely—restrain your snobbery for just a moment) in the present climate abound: SMITH magazine’s Not Quite What I Was Planning, which featured six-word memoirs from Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Colbert, and Amy Sedaris, amongst many obscure writers, spent six weeks on the bestseller’s list. The idea came from a six word Hemingway story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”. And while it may be decidedly less literary, there’s the absolutely viral sensation of Facebook and Twitter. From Scott in the Times article:

“The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity. The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith.”

Now it may be the case that you don’t give a damn about Oprah’s day as narrated on Twitter, or that you think it’s inappropriate when your boss’s Facebook status update reveals that he was at a bar the night before that everybody knows is a swingers club, but a significant number of people are now participating in this kind of storytelling. Like Scott said, more narrative and a demand for pith. This doesn’t necessarily translate directly in to an increased interest in “literary” narratives; it only suggests potential, and that potential takes the shape of the new media that people are paying attention to.

Granted, there are a number of obstacles to overcome, but one thing working in favor of a short story renaissance is the sheer number of people in the world that are writing, coupled with the proliferation of creative writing MFA programs. It means two things: first, that there are more bad writers out there, and second that there are potentially more good writers out there. Now, there will be those who complain that the discipline of years past—of the days when writers could make a living writing, and therefore wrote like it was their job—don’t really exist anymore, and the quality of writing has suffered for it, and that MFA’s, by and large, produce Masters of Creative Writing who go on to train other Masters of Creative Writing and do nothing besides. And while that all may be true to a certain extent, what’s absolutely certain is that literature isn’t suffering from a lack of talent. When the New Yorker is tens of millions of dollars in debt, it becomes quite clear that the industry isn’t dealing with a problem of quality, so much as a problem of distribution and monetization. If the short story thrived in the first half of the 20th century because a handful of influential, widely distributed publications were printing them, it’s suffering now because those publications publish less fiction, and innumerable smaller publications have taken their place, spreading good stories thin over a wide, feeble network of magazines.

It may seem counterintuitive for me to say what I’m about to, but let’s be honest: there are simply too many literary magazines to keep up with. I’m an issue behind in All-Story, I haven’t logged on to the Narrative website for months, and I haven’t looked into why my last two issues of Tinhouse never arrived. I’m pretty sure I still have a subscription. Not positive, but I’m pretty sure. The fact of the matter is, they’re all producing good material; there’s so much reading to do on top of the reading we’re already trying to do that it’s near impossible to keep up. Having a wide variety to choose from is nothing to complain about, objectively, as a reader. That’s democracy, etc. But from a publisher’s point of view (and by extension a writer’s when choosing where to submit) the question becomes one of standing out: In a hyper-competitive field, how does a reader choose one publication over another, assuming they’re putting out the same caliber material? Or to reduce it even further: how do you get people to read one story over another?

Flatmancrooked has a few notions on the matter. But purists, turn up your noses; things are straying from the page. Coming up: How Alec Baldwin is doing his part to save the short story, why Flatmancrooked is pretty jealous of Opium, and how a single-story paper-and-staple operation is flourishing.

Read Part I here.

By Deena Drewis