I wrote a short story yesterday and have absolutely nowhere to put it because no one cares. Most writing subs are way too frantic to read other people's work for long, Only fanfiction gets attention on A03. My friends aren't readers. Etc etc
Just anything with that strange hazy summery surrealism. The closest analogues I've found are The Jet Set episode of Mad Men and the films M.A.S.H and 3 Women
High intermediate writer here:
I've been able to complete a draft of a novel with relative ease—a draft I'm relatively happy with—but I don't think I've ever written a short story (I've completed six) that I actually think is good. On a prose level, they're about the same as my novel, but the stories themselves almost always include some important backstory or strange concept that I have to spend time explaining (read: digressing from the character's immediate experience).
In general, I strongly prefer narrating and moving through time rather than writing scenes in real time, and I feel like that makes it almost impossible for me to write a good, structurally sound short story, especially when combined with my worldbuilding tendencies.
I tend to write characters who are defined by a single complex event in their past, which needs to be explained before the present story can move forward. I know that's a little dubious from a character-writing standpoint, but it meshes well with my preference for writing across stretches of time.
Does anyone else here write novels but find that short stories just aren't for them?
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So I can imagine him, the way he did it: the way in which he took the innocent and negative plate of Henry's provincial soul and intellect and exposed it by slow degrees to this esoteric milieu, building gradually toward the picture which he desired it to retain, accept. I can see him corrupting Henry gradually into the purlieus of elegance, with no foreword, no warning, the postulation to come after the fact, exposing Henry slowly to the surface aspect—the architecture a little curious, a little femininely flamboyant and therefore to Henry opulent, sensuous, sinful; the inference of great and easy wealth measured by steamboat loads in place of a tedious inching of sweating human figures across cotton fields; the flash and glitter of a myriad carriage wheels, in which women, enthroned and immobile and passing rapidly across the vision, appeared like painted portraits beside men in linen a little finer and diamonds a little brighter and in broadcloth a little trimmer and with hats raked a little more above faces a little more darkly swaggering than any Henry had ever seen before: and the mentor, the man for whose sake he had repudiated not only blood and kin but food and shelter and clothing too, whose clothing and walk and speech he had tried to ape, along with his attitude toward women and his ideas of honor and pride too, watching him with that cold and catlike inscrutable calculation, watching the picture resolve and become fixed and then telling Henry, 'But that's not it. That's just the base, the foundation. It can belong to anyone': and Henry, 'You mean, this is not it? That it is above this, higher than this, more select than this?': and Bon, 'Yes. This is only the foundation. This belongs to anybody.': a dialogue without words, speech, which would fix and then remove without obliterating one line of the picture, this background, leaving the background, the plate prepared innocent again: the plate docile, with that puritan's humility toward anything which is a matter of sense rather than logic, fact, the man, the struggling and suffocating heart behind it saying I will believe! I will! I will! Whether it is true or not, I will believe! waiting for the next picture which the mentor, the corrupter, intended for it: that next picture, following the fixation and acceptance of which the mentor would say again perhaps with words now, still watching the sober and thoughtful face but still secure in his knowledge and trust in that puritan heritage which must show disapproval instead of surprise or even despair and nothing at all rather than have the disapprobation construed as surprise or despair: 'But even this is not it': and Henry, 'You mean, it is still higher than this, still above this?' Because he (Bon) would be talking now, lazily, almost cryptically, stroking onto the plate himself now the picture which he wanted there; I can imagine how he did it—the calculation, the surgeon's alertness and cold detachment, the exposures brief, so brief as to be cryptic, almost staccato, the plate unaware of what the complete picture would show, scarce-seen yet ineradicable—a trap, a riding horse standing before a closed and curiously monastic doorway in a neighborhood a little decadent, even a little sinister, and Bon mentioning the owner's name casually—this, corruption subtly anew by putting into Henry's mind the notion of one man of the world speaking to another, that Henry knew that Bon believed that Henry would know even from a disjointed word what Bon was talking about, and Henry the puritan who must show nothing at all rather than surprise or incomprehension—a façade shuttered and blank, drowsing in steamy morning sunlight, invested by the bland and cryptic voice with something of secret and curious and unimaginable delights.
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