I’m going to use advice from people who, in addition to writing novels, have also spent plenty of time “interning” with short stories. While most of them are speculative fiction writers, I’ll also be looking at plain, old, effective short story writers. The advice will be in the form of one or several quotes off of which I’ll jump and connect it with my own writing experience. While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do most of the professional writers...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see as I work to increase my writing output and sales! As always, your comments are welcome!
Without further ado, short story observations by Ursula K. LeGuin – with a few from myself…
“My fiction, especially for kids and young adults, is often reviewed as if it existed in order to deliver a useful little sermon (“Growing up is tough but you can make it,” that sort of thing). Does it ever occur to such reviewers that the meaning of the story might lie in the language itself, in the movement of the story as read, in an inexpressible sense of discovery, rather than a tidy bit of advice?
“Readers — kids and adults — ask me about the message of one story or another. I want to say to them, “Your question isn’t in the right language.”
“As a fiction writer, I don’t speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling.”
I’m going to have to disagree with the Great UKL here – with deep respect…and wondering if she would have agreed with my disagreement…She writes, “Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling.” I would say that the question to ask is “What does the story mean to you?”
Every writer has an intent to their story – I often ask, “What am I trying to SAY in this story?” The thing then, is that I’ve come to realize that even when I mean something intentional, the reader is going to bring to bear on the story ALL of their life experiences; all of their knowledge; all of their mood-of-the-moment.
I just finished reading the most recent issue of my favorite magazine, ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact. For some reason, this issue prompted me to underline a whole lot of sentences…occasionally out of interest, but most often because I found the author’s intended message rude and obnoxious…
On further analysis, I think what I was feeling was that the author had not only an intended purpose, but seemed bent on TRYING to convince me that THEIR message for the story was all that mattered. What I brought to the story was, in their view IRRELEVANT. They intentionally dismissed me and what I brought to their piece and sought to subsume me – maybe even occasionally overwhelm me with the “importance of their message” or even WORSE, that I SHOULD listen to them because they were smarter than me and of COURSE their message was right because they were somehow inherently smarter than me and my point of view was stupid and that I should shut and read what they had to say, because THAT interpretation was the CORRECT way to read the story.
I just realized now that not only did Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing never make me field pummeled by her intention, she presented her message subtly and made allowance for me to interpret her work through my own lens…
In fact, reflecting on this as I write it, I think I might have discovered why my most recent submissions have been rejected…actually two reasons present themselves. First, I allowed my own point of view to change the story from STORY to a jeremiad (I like the word as it has roots in the Bible book of Jeremiah)…the modern usage which is based on the book of Jeremiah. He was was a Jewish prophet who spent his days reprimanding the Hebrews for false worship, social injustice and the king for his selfishness, materialism, and inequities. When not calling on his people to quit their wicked ways, he apparently spent lots of time complaining about his life. Nowadays, we use the word for the way a difficult person carries on.”
Or, secondly, I wasn’t adhering closely enough to the jeremiad that the magazine EDITOR wanted me to present maybe better words are “push”, “shove”, “jam down the reader’s throat”, or worse yet, “pander to not ONLY the reader’s point of view, but pander to what the EDITOR thinks their readers should believe…”
Hmm…this is food for thought and I think I’ll come back to this essay by Le Guin again soon!
References: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/message-about-messages
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