Lorrie Moore: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Once more: What is the inspiration for a short story versus the inspiration for anything else, say, a novel?

A short story is about love. Yet it is not a love story.

She barely makes her connection in Houston. Dehydration. Where is her Gatorade? In some airport or other she falls down the escalator, the wheels of her suitcase having got stuck and pulled her backward. When someone some evening in some city somewhere asks her whether being “an author” is what she had expected it would be, she starts laughing and cannot stop. She places her head down on the lectern, attempting to collect herself but keeping her eyes open to look for a glass of water.

How does one know when one’s idea is suited for a story rather than a novel?

She has no plastic pelvis to show or tell. She is thinking up titles to her next story: “Dicey in the Dark!” “I Don’t Remember You Already.” “Two Meats for Dinner.” “Intelligence on the Ground.” And “The Fish Rule Does Not Apply to You.”

Is the story form harder to write than a novel?

The lectern at a West Coast library — what city is she in today? She has crisscrossed North America in a demented way — has a sign facing the speaker that says PLEASE REPEAT QUESTION. Probably it’s acoustically good advice, but it makes the Q and A sound as if the writer is in a bad romantic relationship, acting preemptively evasive and on the defensive, as when one person asks, “Where were you last night?” and gets the answer “Where was I last night?” How appropriate for a short story writer on tour! She is doing the dialogue of a love affair on the rocks, where one person asks, “What is going on?” and the other replies, “What is going on? That is your question?”

“Do you ever Google yourself?” someone asks.

“Do I ever Google myself?”

“Yes, that is the question.”

“That is the question?”

“Would you like another?”

“Would I like another question?”

Why is she changing the subject? Why is she sounding defensive? Why can’t she answer a simple question? Why does she keep repeating the question?

“When you write, do you ever have particular people in mind?”

“Actual people?”

“Or hypothetical people.”

“Am I thinking of someone else?”

“Yes, is there someone else that you are thinking of?”

“Is there someone else?” There is always someone else. “Do you mean generally or specifically?”

“So there is someone else? I mean, where were you last night?”

“Do you mean generally or specifically?”

A short story is about love. But it is not a love story.

In Philly the short story writer on tour wakes up not knowing where she is— she has no idea where she was last night —and, unable to interpret the room, she literally gets out on the wrong side of the bed and bashes her foot against a chest of drawers (oh, a metaphor for a story collection), permanently loosening then losing her large toenail. Later, in another city, she will put the toenail under her pillow, hoping for a new pair of shoes from the Cobbler Fairy. Perhaps she has gone mad.

When you’re writing, how do you know when you’ve come to the end?

How does one know when one’s come to the end? One loses a scarf, sunglasses, two umbrellas, three cotton nightgowns across a large geographical area; perhaps one will be thrown into the federal slammer for interstate littering.

What would you say is the role of the short story in today’s world?

What would I say? Or what should I say?

The short story is the human mind at its most adventurous. It must be shared.

Everyone remains so nice. How can she not help but speak in facile, dimwitted remarks inflected with the faux-faded memory of continental philosophy: if the individual is a fiction, then what better place for him to reside than in fiction? Et cetera. But she believes in the human mind part.

What practitioner ever had a good working theory of the short story? Only the great Irish writer Frank O’Connor and his admirable and intriguing positing of the story as the life and voice of one individual within a societally submerged population. “The lonely voice” is as original and astute and as good as it gets yet still doesn’t cover everything (not Hawthorne, Coover, nor T. C. Boyle), though it gets very close. And if one were to take it as a prescription and write only stories that are the quasi-exiled voice of that marginalized individual, a writer would do very well.

The short story, of course, is a genre, not a form — it comes in so many different forms — even though its distinctiveness from the novel, say, is primarily one of length, and so a formal one. Shape and structure are naturally essential. When one looks out at the problems of life, and of the world, the problems, as well as the solutions, tend to be structural. When one looks at the success of a sentence, a joke, or an anecdote, it hinges upon structural decisions. Changing the structure changes the story. A short story writer is building a smaller house so fewer troublesome people can get inside. Perhaps the short story allows for fewer things to go wrong in this manner, because of its structural constraints but also because of its demands. Perhaps this is why some have remarked that the story has to be “perfect,” and novels are necessarily not, because that is not the novel’s aim. “Conciseness is the sister of talent,” said Chekhov himself. And perhaps it is also genius’s kissing cousin — in strappy shoes so elegantly thin it’s as if they were drawn on by a pen.

Yet there are so many different sorts of stories: look at the tremendous variety in subject, shape, and tone. When one assembles a hundred years of them, one is looking thrillingly not just at literary history but at actual history — the cries and chatterings, silences and descriptions of a nation in flux, since short story writers have from the beginning been interested in the world they live in, its cultural changes, societal energies, the spiritual injuries to its citizenry and what those injuries may or may not mean. And North America — a collection of provinces, states, and conditions — has done a first-rate job of claiming and owning and sponsoring the short story, with all due respect to Ireland and nineteenth-century Russia. It may be the apprentice narrative form of choice, but that is only sensible. Student writers are encouraged to practice it, take a stab at it, rather than accumulate drawersful (yearsful) of novels. But the short narrative also remains a true master’s art. It is a string quartet, which is often preferred to a composer’s longer works. A short story is not minimalist, suggested Angela Carter. It is rococo, with trills and grace notes and esprit.

A novel puts many things in the air at once, a complicated machine that its author then tries to land safely — though more than one novel has had an author parachute out of it, leaving it to circle in the sky on its own: space junk that may or may not have some immortality to it. There are many places with such ghostly items flying around in the atmosphere. Most countries, it should be said, are nations of novelists. At one literary festival I attended recently in England, a couple were consulting their program. “Who is reading next?” asked the husband.

“I believe it’s a new American short story writer,” said the wife.

“Really,” the husband said, then, after perusing the program further, closed it abruptly. “I need a new American short story writer like I need a hole in the head.”

Well, we all know what he means.

And yet why not a hole in the head? A new little garden space for planting, a well-ventilated, freshly lit room in the mind? Do we not want to feel the tops of our heads come off, as Emily Dickinson said a poem did for her? A story does not intoxicate or narcotize or descend and smother. It opens up a little window or a door. And the world gets in it in an intimate way. Art is when one becomes “aware of an unfolding,” said Matisse. And stories unfold. That is pretty much one thing they can be counted on to do, if they are any good.