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13/5/16 16:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyI have been very dissatisfied with writing lately. That Ira Glass thing, about how you start out with good taste but bad skills, and so at first it seems like everything you do is awful? In my experience it gets better but it doesn't ever stop. You keep on finding higher things to aim at. And with short stories -- well, all my favorite novels are ragged, shaggy things; you can't keep up a high-gloss polish for a hundred thousand words, and if you could, the novel that resulted would be chilly, like a marble statue that is very lovely but doesn't make much of a friend. So I don't mind writing an imperfect novel. My standard for short stories is that I want them to be flawless, and I see that as an achievable goal (maybe not achievable by me, but achievable by Zadie Smith, let's say.)
Of course "it has to be perfect" is not a great approach to writing a story, emotionally speaking, and "it has to be perfect because I have to have a ton of publications on my CV when I graduate because the job market is brutal" is even worse.
But really, short stories should be where you get to take the risks you wouldn't necessarily take in novels because 80,000 words is such a big investment of time...
Of course "it has to be perfect" is not a great approach to writing a story, emotionally speaking, and "it has to be perfect because I have to have a ton of publications on my CV when I graduate because the job market is brutal" is even worse.
But really, short stories should be where you get to take the risks you wouldn't necessarily take in novels because 80,000 words is such a big investment of time...