Songwriting is telling short stories. But instead of 15 to 20 pages, it’s three to five minutes.
I was 17 when I wrote a collection of short stories and wanted it published but it didn’t happen. A lot of publishing houses don’t allow young authors to enter into writing segments.
People will think being the daughter of a celebrity is a very different life but surprisingly, we lead a very normal life and that’s what people will realize when they read my short stories.
That’s why Tennessee Williams was a great writer. Poetically, dramatically, it was fantastic stuff. And with the landscape, the losers in life populating it. His short stories have got rhythm, something musical about them.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn’t make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn’t make a phone call. So for six years I didn’t make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don’t write short stories because they turn into novels.
I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do.
History is ultimately storytelling. I think the more stories you write in life – and I’ve written a lot of screenplays, a lot of short stories – you realize it’s your interpretation of events that people read, and they absorb that.
In college, I wrote maybe three short stories.
Eventually, I just want to write wavy little short stories.
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories – these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They’re very different, and I can’t do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I’ll learn something from them.
I’m sure I’ve been influenced by every fine writer I’ve ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
Well, to be honest I think I’m a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought – whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.
I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels – horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor.
Without always meaning to, I write really long short stories, 60-pagers, 90-pagers, pieces of fiction that are too long for all but the bravest magazines to print, and too short for all but the bravest book publishers to publish.
It’s tricky to take a book of short stories and turn it into a feature film.
When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in ‘Bearded Ladies’ are a little bit experimental.
In college, I discovered the Joyce Carol Oates short story ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ which is definitely one of the most incredibly unnerving, frightening short stories ever written.
A few of Ellison’s short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority ‘Invisible Man’ gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.
If you’re an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity.
I’ve read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.
I didn’t really start to write until I was almost 30, and I started with the short stories.
