I did playwriting, creative writing, short story, novelization.
I think fiction isn’t so good at being for or against things in general – the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I’ve collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it’s just not what I want to do.
Hemingway’s short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory,’ which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.
In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story – especially if you’ve only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.
