Note on Reading Short Stories.

Short stories and short poems are the two things that I don't spend nearly as much time on as I should. They are just as important to my studies as the bigger works, since I study literature and want to know about all literatures. A big aspect of reading that I enjoy is the satisfaction of having read something big, which is probably why I don't read shorter works much.

But because one needs to read what one writes, I need to read short stories more. I often find answers to problems I have with my writing in reading short stories; a good story often contains examples of all the things you need when you have writer's blocks. It is also stimulating to read a brief, self-contained piece of work that is truly brilliant. Great short stories writer can make the characters so interesting you remember them the way you remember characters in novels. I had a discussion in a writing class a while back, in which we discovered that most of the stories we had read for the class focused on the characters than the plots. This, of course, isn't true to all short stories, but I have discovered that this proves to be true in most of the stories that I have read. And I enjoy these stories tremendously.

Reading short stories can help you to discover authors with whom you are not familiar. It is a quick way to get to know their writing styles. There are many authors whose names I recognize but whose works I have never read. Reading their stories help me to decide whether or not I want to read their works.

Last week I went and bought a new short story anthology--it was published in 2008, so not that new, but new to me. It is titled "The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction" selected by Joyce Carol Oates and Christopher R. Beha. So far I have read two great stories, one of which is "The Love of My Life" by T.C. Boyle, which I highly recommend. I might write a more in depth discussion on it later.