Episode 126 Transcript
Podcast: Our Opinions Are Correct
Episode: 126: It’s a Great Time to Read (and Write
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00]So, Annalee, what with like The Mandalorian and now The Last of Us, is Pedro Pascal, basically the world's daddy? Is he everybody's daddy now?
Annalee: [00:00:12] I mean that's just like one of those headlines. That's a question that's really not a question where we always know the answer is, yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:22] Right.
Annalee: [00:00:24] Of course he's everybody's daddy. He’s such a nice guy off screen too. He is a really sweet older brother to his sister who's trans, and he's like—
Charlie Jane: [00:00:34] Oh, yeah, I didn’t know that.
Annalee: [00:00:37] Been supporting her in the media and he’s your older brother, he's your dad. He's just like the guy who rescues weird little green creatures who eat other people's babies. I just love that about him.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:49] Yeah, I feel like we're having this moment where like Pedro Pascal is this really kind of sweet, comforting, vulnerable presence. In The Mandalorian, he's mostly just a voice and his voice has so much gentleness, but also pain and kind of hardness in it.
He kind of does this thing when he's talking to other people, he can be like Mr. Tough guy, but then when he is talking to Baby Yoda, sorry, I'm always gonna call him baby Yoda.
Annalee: [00:01:13] Grogu.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:14] When he is talking to Baby Yoda, he's just like, “Hey little guy.” He's got this kinda like… this sweetness creeps in and his banter with Bella Ramsey and The Last of Us. I just feel like he's the guy that we all need to be our daddy when we're running from like the Empire or from zombies or whatever.
Annalee: [00:01:32] Or from a paramilitary organization that’s allegedly protecting us from zombies.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:38] Yeah, exactly. He's the guy. Pop culture tries to give us father figures on a pretty regular basis, but Pedro Pascal is a cut above. I think he's a much better father figure than what we generally get.
Annalee: [00:01:51] Oh yeah. I like that. I think that's true. I think we're having a renaissance in pop culture of gentle, nice dads. Gravelly, gentle dads, and I think the dead giveaway is in Last of Us where the whole relationship is based on dad jokes. Like it's all about puns.
[00:02:09] And I was like that’s the moment where we hit the wholesomeness sweet spot. So, I am all in favor of that. I think it's also, a dead giveaway that Pedro Pascal's basically a lesbian dad. You know? I just think that's his vibe.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:24] I mean… Yeah, he's just so great and I'm really grateful to the universe for giving this to us.
[00:02:32] So, okay. Today we're actually gonna be talking about short fiction. I recently read like a ton of books of short stories: anthologies and story collections, and I figure I read at least a hundred short stories, like in the last couple weeks. And I’ve come away convinced that right now is a really great time for short fiction.
[00:02:55] Short stories frickin’ rule and so we're gonna talk about, you know, how to read 'em, why you should be reading them, and then also we'll talk about how to write 'em.
Annalee: [00:03:00] Also in our mini episode next week we're gonna talk about our new favorite TV show, Extraordinary, which is a British comedy that takes place in a world where everybody has superpowers except the main character. And it is delightful and weird, and I can't wait for you guys to hear us yelling about it.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:18] Yeah. So, you're listening to Our Opinions are Correct. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, author of Promises Stronger Than Darkness.
Annalee: [00:03:23] And I’m Annalee Newitz, author of The Terraformers.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:29] This podcast that you are currently enjoying, we hope, is entirely independent, and it gets all of its funding from you, our listeners, via Patreon.
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[00:03:54] And if you so join us at the $5 level or above, you get mini episodes like the one we just mentioned, which are like, pretty hefty, substantive discussions about stuff that didn't make it into the actual main show.
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[00:04:04] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:04:50] Okay, Charlie Jane. What did you learn from reading a hundred short stories recently? Which, oh my God.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:59] I know. I mean, it sounds like a lot. Some of them were very short and some of them were actually quite long. It was actually really fun to just immerse myself and I hadn't been reading a lot of short fiction the last couple years, so, this was just, this kind of made me appreciate short fiction again and just how playful it is. Just like how much madcap abandon short fiction has. And you know, some of the short stories I read were experimenting with form and screwing around with different formats. Like a listicle format or a bunch of found documents or a bunch of little vignettes strung together. Others were really straightforward stories where you're plunked down in a situation and the situation plays out over the course of like five or so pages.
[00:05:41] But I was really struck by the high percentage of these stories that just struck me upside the head with how good they are and just how weird a lot of them were willing to get, but also just how entertained I was.
Annalee: [00:05:54] Mm-hmm.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:54] I was like consistently entertained reading a lot of short stories and there were some books that, I actually wrote a roundup for The Washington Post recently, which we’ll link in the show notes of books of short stories to get right now. I picked five of them and I had read a few others in addition, and I was just like, these are high quality. Basically there's not really hardly any clunkers in any of these books. They're all really strong stories.
[00:06:17] And one thing I like about short stories is that you can really build up and turn people's expectations sideways in a really very deft, very kind of aggressive way. And you can have like a strong twist ending. Like I read Tananarive Due’s short story collection, The Wishing Pool and some of her stories in there are basically like little episodes of The Twilight Zone with a really dark, upsetting twist ending at the end. And it's just like, oh my God. Like she just twists the knife super efficiently in a bunch of those stories and it’s—
Annalee: [00:06:49] Yeah, she is a master at doing that.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:51] Oh my God. Yeah, and I hadn't read her short fiction before and now I'm obsessed.
[00:06:56] So Annalee, I wanted to ask you, we've been getting just a huge, like the past decade has belonged to novellas. Like I feel like novellas are where the action is, and it's just been a huge boom in the publishing and celebration of novellas. Do you think short stories could start getting more love as well if we get enough really amazing anthologies and collections?
Annalee: [00:07:15] That's such an interesting question because the short story market has been a topic of conversation in the sci-fi writers world for a while now. Because it used to be, kind of in the golden age of sci-fi, like the fifties and sixties. You could make a living selling short stories, and it was not just that people were reading them at great rates, but like people were paying money for them and so it was worth it to write them.
[00:07:41] And that's just really not true now. Like there are still lots of really wonderful paying markets for short stories, but it's been a while since people could make a living at it. That said, there's so many new markets opening up all the time, like new publications starting, using different formats. I published a piece with the Sunday Morning Transport, which is a new Substack newsletter, which is also just a short story publication machine and every Sunday, if you subscribe, you get a new short story in your mailbox and they're great. They are fantastic. I worked with Fran Wilde when I was there but also Julian Yap is the co-editor and it's high quality shit. And I think that's emblematic of what's going on right now with short fiction.
[00:08:33] The other thing is that short fiction is really easy to adapt for podcasts, so you have podcasts like Escape Pod, which is also an incredible resource, highly recommend, and they just do a short story every week.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:47] And I also want to shout out Starship Sofa. And I've had stories produced for podcasts where they just did some really like beautiful sound design where they added a bunch of stuff and had different voices and like sound effects. And you can do a lot with short stories in the audio format, now.
Annalee: [00:09:05] Yeah, and so I think that that's part of what is fueling this. And you know, I hope that this is the year of sci-fi short stories like making a comeback. That would be amazing.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:18] I would love that too. And like, you know, I mentioned that I haven't been reading a lot of short fiction in the last few years. I'm somebody who always makes resolutions that I then kind of fail to keep. I think that might be a thing that a lot of us have in common, and I'm always… Every year I resolve instead of doom scrolling or reading upsetting articles about all the horrible garbage that's happening in American politics right now. I'm gonna read a short story on my lunch break. I'm gonna read a short story, like while I'm, you know, messing around in the morning or whatever, while I'm booting up.
Annalee: [00:09:50] Nice.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:50] And it just never happens. And like I feel like the thing about short stories is that there's a barrier to get over in reading them, which is kind of what I wanted to talk about in this episode. I feel like there's a thing that like, it's the same barrier that you have getting into a novel, but you have to do it more often with short stories.
[00:10:07] Like it's the thing of like you're dropped in a world, you're dropped in a situation with a bunch of characters and you have to orient yourself and you have to kind of get what's going on around you and where this is going. And with a novel, like I said, you do that once and a lot of novels make it really easy, like by design. They orient you really efficiently and are just like, here you go. This is the plot. We're moving forward now. And that's something I love about a lot of novels.
[00:10:35] But short stories. You know, A, sometimes if they're more experimental, it might be harder to orient yourself at the start of a story. But either way, it's like, there's work that you have to do at the start of a piece of fiction and with a short story, you have to do that work every single time. And it can be kind of a barrier to entry. And if there's a story where it's like you read the first paragraph and you're like, wow, I don't actually know where this is going, and I'm kind of confused. There's a part of you that's just like, I don't know. I mean, I get lazy, I guess, which is like weird.
Annalee: [00:11:03] Yeah. This is actually, I'm glad that you brought this up because this is one of my biggest problems with short stories and one of the reasons why I am not as much of a short story reader as I should be because I get really thrown by having to connect and disconnect from a story so quickly because there's the barrier to entry, like you said, the kind of like, I'm naked and on fire in a strange world, what the hell is going on? But then there's also like, now I'm deeply engaged in this world and it's over!
Charlie Jane: [00:11:36] Right.
Annalee: [00:11:36] It leaves me feeling like bereft and it's just, it's not something that I'm used to because I am such a novel reader and such a TV watcher that I think of narratives as being long, and I think maybe this means that we need to get more comfortable with closure. Maybe we just aren’t…
Charlie Jane: [00:11:57] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:11:57] Like our brains are just, we've been so fed on like the idea of watching 20 million episodes of a show that our brains are just like, no, I can't handle closure.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:11] Yeah. Well, and this is what I found when I was like reading a hundred short stories and I had a deadline.
Annalee: [00:12:14] I just want you to keep saying that, like, I read a hundred short stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:18] I mean, it sounds more impressive than it is, but I had a deadline. I had this article I was gonna write where I told my editor it was gonna be about books of short stories. But I found that at a certain point it got easier. It got much easier because I was kind of just, you know, I was in the habit of like, okay, onto the next one and, oh, what's going on here?
[00:12:36] And I got curious and excited to discover and reading a whole bunch of short stories in a row kind of helped with that in a weird way. I think part of my problem before was that I was like, I'm gonna read one short story on my lunch break. And for some reason that was harder for me to do, but when I read a bunch of short stories in a row, they just like, I felt like it was a thing that I just kind of got used to doing.
[00:12:56] Like I said, I got kind of excited to just find the next thing and to kind of… And it just was a different frame of mind, and I think it is kind of about your habits and about your willingness to kind of just be naked on fire in another strange new world after the last world where you were naked on fire, I don't know.
Annalee: [00:13:16] But also to have closure on the previous one, right. To just accept like, okay, that's over now.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:22] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:13:22] So what are some of the really great short stories that are out now and why is this such a good time for short stories?
Charlie Jane: [00:13:30] Yeah, I mean, obviously you mentioned there's a bunch of publications putting out amazing short stories right now, and you know, there's Tor.com, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed. So many. Strange Horizons.
Annalee: [00:13:41] Nightmare.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:41] Yeah. There's just so many great magazines out there right now, publishing short stories on the web. There's the traditional big three digests: Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's and Analog. But you know, the thing that I found was we’re just getting some really incredible books of short stories right now.
Annalee: [00:13:59] Mm-hmm.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:59] Both anthologies where it's like a bunch of different authors together and collections. And I think it's the same reason why novels and novellas have been really good lately, which is that it's opening up to people who were previously were kept out. And so there's a wider field of people writing stuff and there's, there's more good stuff to choose from.
[00:14:20] I don't know. I feel like there's just a lot of energy right now in short stories like, you have a couple of anthologies that came out recently that… There’s Africa Rising, which is specifically African diaspora short fiction.
[00:14:32] There's also a book that just came out called New Suns 2, which is the sequel to New Suns edited by Nisi Shawl, and that's speculative fiction by people of color. So it's all types of POC authors and those books, I mean, New Suns 2, which I literally just read. I was like there's not a weak story in this book.
[00:14:55] It's like everything in there is just mind-blowingly good. There's a book that just came out called Not Too Old to Save the World, which is just basically stories about older protagonists who save the world, which I just love.
Annalee: [00:15:07] Aw, I love that, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:10] But there's also, some of our best short story writers have put out collections very recently, like Kelly Link has her first book of short stories in over a decade, I think.
Annalee: [00:15:16] Oh, awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:16] Called White Cat, Black Dog. Tananarive Due, I mentioned before, The Wishing Pool. Sarah Pinsker has a new book of short stories out called Lost Places. And then, you know, our Clarion West student Yvette Lisa Ndlovu has a new book called Drinking from Graveyard Wells. That's incredible. And you know, there's just so many other great books of short stories right now.
Annalee: [00:15:38] Yeah. I really loved Izzy Wasserstein’s collection, All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From. I know I've talked about that on previous episodes. And I also just got back from Boskone, the sci-fi con in Boston where Nalo Hopkinson was a guest of honor. She just came out with a new collection of short stories called Falling in Love with Hominids, and I got to hear her read from it, which was amazing. She's an incredible reader. and she talked a little bit in the intro to that book about how influenced she was by Cordwainer Smith's short fiction. So, it's kind of the, the new generation of people taking some of the traits from this Cold War writer and turning them into something really different. So, I loved hearing about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:23] As with like all kinds of speculative fiction. There's also a lot of people in the literary world who are doing story collections that are basically SFF that deal with science fiction tropes like apocalypses or robots or plagues or fantasy tropes. I’ve read a bunch of those recently, some of which I really liked, some of which left me a little bit cold.
Annalee: [00:16:43] So, okay. We've kind of been dancing around this question, but I'm wondering, if I'm feeling intimidated by reading a lot of short fiction. I've already explained to you my problem with closure. So what advice do you have for getting into it? Like what's the right mindset for going into a bunch of short stories?
Charlie Jane: [00:17:00] So these are some hacks that I came up with while I was like on my short story marathon that I just did, and one of them is you always wanna just like keep moving forward normally. You're just like, I’m gonna keep reading, and just… But I found that oftentimes reading the first paragraph of a short story twice really helped and that's partly because in a short story, the first paragraph is often doing a lot of work. I know from when I was a struggling short story writer trying to break in and knowing that people in the slush pile were gonna read my first paragraph and possibly toss the story out, I spent more time on the first paragraph of a short story than on anything else I've ever written. And so I know that the first paragraph is often trying to pack in a lot of information in one paragraph. Often trying to kind of give you tone and flavor and perspective and POV, but also a lot of like important stuff.
[00:17:54] And I found that when I read the first paragraph twice, it actually made the rest of the story go faster and smoother for me because I kind of got oriented better. And I kind of was taking it in the second time, a little bit more. So, counter-intuitively that actually made it feel like a faster process in a weird way, but also more enjoyable because I felt like, okay, I'm getting this now.
Annalee: [00:18:13] Yeah, that's a really great idea.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:16] And the thing I mentioned before of reading a bunch of short stories in a row. When you get to the end of a story, jump into the next story immediately so that you're, you're still kind of in the flow of it instead of like, being like after every story you're gonna take a break or you're just gonna read one story at a time.
[00:18:33] I feel like that keeps the kind of short story reading brain going and kind of you get into a groove with it. I feel like, on the one hand, I love short stories that are just straightforward and tell a good yarn, but a lot of great short stories are gonna pull tricks on you and are gonna do weird stylistic things or weird formalistic things to try to kind of… because short stories are where you can really get away with pulling the tablecloth off the table a whole bunch of times and lighting everything on fire, whether or not you're naked.
[00:19:05] And so I feel like—
Annalee: [00:19:06] Always be naked if you're lighting things on fire.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:08] The mindset of just kind of being delighted and excited to see what kind of weird tricks the story is gonna do. But going back to the thing about reading this first paragraph twice, I think. Be aware that every story is gonna require you to do a lot of work at the beginning and then you can get caught up in it, but there's gonna be that…
[00:19:26] Like, reading anything involves work and that's part of what we enjoy about it, I think, is that we get to kind of engage with it imaginatively and cognitively. But I think short stories require you to do a lot of work at the start and then you can get sucked into it.
[00:19:38] And the other thing is that, in general, when you read like a big door stopper, like a big epic fantasy novel, information is gonna be repeated a bunch of times in many cases because they wanna make sure you don't forget. And also there's gonna be maybe three pages of describing the food people ate and it's like, yeah, I could read that three page description of a bunch of food kind of quickly and I don't think I'm gonna miss much. I can just be like, yep, yep. food, food, food. Yep. I don't skim exactly, but I do, I read very, like, food, food, food. Okay. And I feel like in a short story you cannot do that, or in a lot of short stories, you cannot do that. You have to actually pay real attention because you're gonna miss clues. And so it's a different of reading, I think.
Annalee: [00:20:21] Yeah, I think that's right. And I was just thinking about the fact that there's some short stories that have really stuck with me, much more than, say, novels. And I think part of that has to do with the fact that they are short and sharp and they can really arrest your attention, suck you in really intensely. Like you said, you have to pay close attention.
[00:20:45] I really, I think all the time about this short story by Genevieve Valentine that came out in 2017 in Clarkesworld, and it's called “Intro to Prom.”
[00:20:56] It’s actually, I guess it's a novelette because it's over 10,000 words, but it's still short. And I mean, it's very deceptively simple because at first, it's just about four teenagers going to prom and you're like, oh, there's some teenagers going to prom. And over time you realize that they're in this domed city under the ocean and that they've been left there by a corporation and the dome is cracking. And they've been in there, we don't know how long, weeks, months, and they have no communication with the outside and all they wanna do is just go to prom. And Genevieve is incredible at evoking the horror of teenage life and also kind of the horror of this environment. And quickly the metaphor of this city under the ocean and the metaphor of being adolescent kind of smoosh together and you kind of see what's going on, that they're reflecting each other. But it's really, I won't give away the ending. You can read it for free online. It's called “Intro to Prom.” But the ending is just, it is a stab to the gut, and I think it's because it's this short, stark story where nothing is happening except for this one set of scenes about these characters.
[00:22:15] And again, even though it's short, those characters have really stuck with me. So I think it shows that you can pack the emotional weight of identifying with characters and feeling for them into a very small space. Into the same amount of, you know, you can put all that stuff in there without the four pages of eating scenes.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:33] Yeah. And you know, I love Genevieve Valentine's writing so much. Any publishers out there listening to this, I would read the heck out of a collection of her short stories because her short stories are phenomenal.
Annalee: [00:22:44] Oh my God, yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:47] And that you brought up a thing that actually also is something that I've noticed reading a bunch of short stories, is that sometimes you're reading science fiction or fantasy short stories, and there's a story where it's like, you get a certain ways in and you're like, okay, so how is this science fiction or fantasy? What is the speculative element? And that's part of what's fun about it is kind of oftentimes you have stories which start off being just like, oh, it's a very grounded story about someone going to prom. And like all the details feel very like here and now and realistic. But then, you actually, it can be fun to kind of start guessing about like where is the speculative gonna come in? How is this gonna turn? What's the thing that's gonna suddenly turn this into like, oh, but they're robots or oh, but there's like a monster or something.
Annalee: [00:23:31] Yeah, or they’re monsters.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:32] I read a bunch of stories, some of Tananarive Due’s stories do this where it's like, first you're like, well this is just a very grounded realist. Oh wait. Oh my gosh. And that can be another pleasure of reading short stories that feels kind of unique to that form. That ability to kind of sneakily go speculative at a certain point. I mean, novels can do that too, but it feels very different. I like that short stories kind of screw with your expectations and kind of can be a little bit mischievous, I wanna say. They can be kind of mercurial and mischievous.
[00:24:03] One of the books that I read that was kind of a literary book is called Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Øyehaug. She's a Norwegian poet and writer who's won a bunch of awards and it's very weird. She'll have a story about like leeches that eat fiberoptic cables and become super intelligent leeches who know everything on the internet. And then one of the leeches will become a celebrity and go on television to talk about how leeches are misrepresented in pop culture.
Annalee: [00:24:32] Aw, so true.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:32] And then it'll turn it into like a weird thing about the main character's marriage, and she's watching these leeches and thinking about her marriage or whatever, and it's just, it's very strange and surreal. She also will have stories. This happens a few times in her book where a story will end and then you turn the page and the next story says, I'm really mad about how that last story ended. That wasn't a good ending. I want a different ending for that story, and then it'll just be like a long rant about that story that just ended and then it'll turn into something else.
[00:24:58] She also… the book's called Evil Flowers and at one point she's just ranting about Baudelaire. She’s like, this book is named after Baudelaire's book Les Fleurs du mal, but actually Baudelaire didn't know shit. And she goes on about Baudelaire and she's like, and if Baudelaire could read this rant, here's the face he'd be making right now. And you turn the page and there's a picture of Baudelaire just looking really, really pissed off . And it's just like, it's a very silly book. And it's a book that just is like, ha. And I find that delightful.
[00:25:27] And Kelly Link is the same way. Kelly Link will just turn your expectations sideways in a really delightful, weird way. Sometimes a really heartbreaking way, actually. She has this retelling of Orpheus where this character goes to find his husband in the underworld, and it just, it has a happy ending that then turns really, really kind of weird and sad, in a way. I don't wanna spoil it, but it's just, it's so devastating. And Sarah Pinsker can be just, you know, I don't know. I feel like I like short stories that have kind of a prankster sensibility and kind of make you feel like anything is possible.
Annalee: [00:26:01] Yeah, but at the same time, like one of the things about Kelly Link and Sarah Pinsker is that they keep you grounded in the characters. Both of them are really, really good at pulling you into identification with a character who feels nuanced and real even if they're a fairy or some other creature.
[00:26:21] And I was just thinking like, as you were talking, that it feels like short stories are playing with genre expectations more than longer pieces are. And I mean, I kind of run a risk saying that because of course there is a lot of people doing genre flipping and twerking and twisting right now, overall.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:41] Twerking.
Annalee: [00:26:41] Genre twerking in fiction. But I feel like there's something… That short fiction can do it in a way that's very compressed. And I wonder if you see short fiction playing around with protagonists in the same way that it plays around with genre expectations. Like would you see like a young adult protagonist showing up in like a more nuanced adult story or vice versa?
Charlie Jane: [00:27:06] Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that because this was a thing that I really thought about, as someone who's been writing YA and who has also written, I've written some adult novels that people thought might be YA because they have younger protagonists in them.
Annalee: [00:27:18] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:18] I feel like when you write a novel with a young protagonist, currently the publishing industry is very kind of firm that it should be a YA or a middle grade book. If it's a young protagonist who's having a coming of age experience, that has to kind of fit into the YA archetype in a bunch of ways. And, you know, that can be wonderful. Like I love YA, obviously, and I read a lot of it and I still write it, but I also feel like I have a huge soft spot in my heart for adult stories about young protagonists. Where you have all of the pain of coming of age and all of the complexity of realizing that adults are full of garbage. But you also have all the irony and kind of meta and kind of distancing stuff. All the kind of defamiliarization that you can get from an adult piece of fiction superimposed over that. And I feel like that that can be really powerful.
[00:28:09] And some of the best works of literature, full stop are written about young protagonists for an adult audience. And I feel like where you're really, I’m gonna get in trouble for this generalization, but I feel like where you're really seeing young protagonists in adult stories right now is in short stories because short stories are allowed to break that rule. And I think it's really interesting.
[00:28:31] Okay, so we're gonna take a little break and when we come back, we're gonna talk about how to write short stories.
[00:28:37]OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
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Charlie Jane: [00:30:14] So Annalee, I noticed recently on Mastodon, you tooted that…
Annalee: [00:30:20] I think we're just saying posted now.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:24] Well, whatever you, you toot posted. You post tooted.
Annalee: [00:30:27] I pooted.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:27] You pooted. Exactly. That's way more dignified. That you were going back and revising some of the short stories that you had written when you started writing short fiction, and you were amazed at how much you have learned about plots and the shape of stories. And can you tell us more about that? Like what have you learned in your time writing short stories?
Annalee: [00:30:50] Oh man. Well, like I was saying, so I'm trying to put together a short story collection and some of my short stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:58] Yes!
Annalee: [00:30:58] Yeah. I mean, you know, hopefully someone will, will be interested in it. You know, I started writing short stories before I wrote novels, and then I wrote some novels and then I wrote some more short stories. And so I think that the practice of writing a novel and really having to think about plotting and how character fits into plot because I'm a very character-centric writer, but I also love world building, which kind of goes into the plot. And so I learned a lot about balancing those things out and sort of giving the characters a chance to explain the world, discover the world that they're in.
[00:31:38] I shouldn't say explain because I think that was, with my earlier short stories, the problem I had was that I didn't understand how to have a kind of character arc or plot arc in such a short amount of time. So instead, I would do this kind of vignette.
[00:31:53] Like I would just tell like, oh, here's a scene from a life, which actually is one way to do a short story. That's just sort of a day on the life. But I'm not good at it. So, I should not be allowed to do it. And so, I don't. And so now I think when I set out to do a short story, I focus a lot more on what is this character gonna go through and how is that gonna help us identify with the character and sort of see the world through that character's eyes?
[00:32:24] So I hope that my more recent short stories do that a little bit better. I mean, I'm sure they're not perfect in any way, but they're, they're certainly better than some of my early efforts. So I wonder if you could talk about your… You've written a shit ton of short stories, so why don't you talk about your journey as a short story writer.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:45] In a lot of ways I had the same journey that you did specifically in kind of zeroing in on character and what the character's going through and how the character sees the world they're in, and having a strong viewpoint from the beginning of a story. I think that's a thing I really struggled with and when I put together my short story collection that came out in 2021, Even Greater Mistakes, I went back and looked at a bunch of my short stories that I'd written 20 years earlier and oof.
[00:33:13] Yeah. I mean, I feel like I wrote, I was, for a while there, I was trying to write one short story a week, which I think was a good exercise in terms of just forcing yourself to get better at writing beginnings and endings and kind of get better at developing ideas quickly. And in some ways it was a really good practice. In some ways it was a terrible practice because it really meant that for a long time I was writing a lot of really substandard short stories instead of. Trying to take the time to write one really good short story.
[00:33:13] I don't really regret it. In retrospect, none of those short stories turned out as good as they could have. And a lot of my short stories would just be like a cute, clever idea, and then a bunch of wacky hijinks, and then it's over. Sometimes there'd be like a twist ending or something, but, oftentimes it was really rudimentary. A lot of weight was resting on the cute, clever idea, and the characters were just there to kind of move the plot forward and to kind of react to stuff that was happening.
[00:34:10] Those stories were not particularly deep or emotional. They didn't have any emotional punch.
Annalee: [00:34:17] Yeah. I feel like one of the failure modes with short stories is that instead of having the main characters be the main characters, the McGuffin is the main character.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:26] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:34:26] And it's kinda like, oh, we're, we're all just dancing around this McGuffin. And it's like, you know that the whole point of the McGuffin is that it literally is content less. It's job is to help… is to be an assistive device, not to be the point of the story. So, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:42] Yeah, no, that's very true. And like I had this editor who was a complete jerk, but he actually helped me a lot back in like the early 2000. This literary magazine editor published one of my stories and he spent like a couple hours on the phone talking to me about the emotional core of my story and how to get closer to the emotional core and what is it that's really urgent and intense for the characters in the story.
[00:35:09] And it was like a little seminar in how to do that, and it still took me a long time. It took me another decade after that before I wrote a story that I felt really had a strong emotional core to it, because I was still just trying to do kind of clever, funny, cute stories.
[00:35:24] I think that plots are also a thing, like I think I got better at coming up with plots that actually were surprising because things happen for a reason. Not just like wacky, wacky, kind of. So, I don't know. I think it's a process. And to your, what you said before about your stories still aren't perfect. That's certainly true of mine. And I think, I don't know, I wouldn't really wanna read a perfect short story.
[00:35:46] I think that might be, that might lose a lot of what makes a short story like beautiful. It's a process. I think a good short story is one that that takes you places and makes you feel stuff and leaves you feeling like you've been on a journey.
Annalee: [00:35:57] Now I’m imagining a short story about a person who read the perfect short story and then they just explode or whatever. Or they just like, all they do all day is just like clutch that short story and kind of like rock back and forth and moan happily and so they never do anything else in the world.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:11] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:36:11] So, I'm gonna ask you the question that people always ask me, and I never have an answer, which is, how do you know when you have an idea if it's a novel, a novella, or a short story or something in between?
Charlie Jane: [00:36:25] Man, it’s so hard. I used to have a really cut and dried answer for this, which is that if it's a contained story that doesn't have a lot of subplots or doesn't have a lot of additional characters who are gonna have their own storylines or kind of more complexity spinning off of it, then you might be able to get it into a short story.
[00:36:44] But then my novel, my adult novel that I'm trying to finish right now, I actually decided to break that rule because I was like, I've been writing this really complex YA trilogy, and I was like, I wanna write a novel that's very contained and has a few characters and doesn't really have a lot of subplots.
[00:37:00] And it's kind of grown subplots over time, but I'm still trying to keep it small and contained and kind of intimate and very much like a stage play rather than like a big movie with a million set pieces. And I'm actually really loving that. But I think that really what it comes down to be, if I'm gonna be honest, is that when I start writing something, if I can get it done in a few pages, it's a short story. If I can't, then it's not. It's really just like, okay, you start writing it and you get a few pages in and you're like, is this, can I see where this is going? Can I see the ending? Do I know how to kind of bring this to a landing gracefully? Or at least do I have an inkling of how to bring this to a graceful landing? Or am I just consumed with needing to know a bunch of stuff that I don't know yet? Am I really consumed with feeling like, oh, but these characters are gonna do this, and oh my gosh, this is…
[00:37:48] It’s just really about like, how much material starts to suggest itself as you get into the story and how much you are not gonna be satisfied if you don't go deeper or further. Versus, sometimes you can really love a set of characters and an idea, but you're like, I think that I can really satisfy myself by just writing five or 10 pages about them and then I've really gotten what I wanted to get out of them. And it's kind of know it when you see it.
Annalee: [00:38:13] Yeah, I think so too. We've talked about this many times before, but you are a pantser. You write by the seat of your pants. I'm an outliner, so I always start out knowing if I'm doing a short story versus a novel versus a novella. And oftentimes it's literally because I've been assigned. Someone's like, write me a short story or write me a novel and it is due X date.
[00:38:38] And so then I will come up with an outline that is either novel length or short story length. I mean, the outline itself is not… The outline has the intention of leading to something shorter or longer. And so I think that now maybe that's one of the skills I have, is that I'm able to like actually outline for a length that I want.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:59] Yeah, and one thing that I think about a lot, which I don't know if it's helpful or not, but back in the ‘90s, Francis Ford Coppola had this whole theory that short stories are movies and novels are TV shows, and so if you could tell the story in a movie length, like, in 90 minutes, ideally, the perfect length for a film. That means it probably has a beginning, middle, and end, and it's pretty just like straight ahead. There might be some curves, curve balls in there, but it's pretty straight ahead. If it's gonna go in a lot of different directions and go all over the place, then it's a TV show, it's like eight episodes. It's gonna have a bunch of different twists and kind of set pieces and things.
[00:39:37] And obviously movies can be art movies, they can be Sundance films that are kind of smaller. But I do kind of think in those terms. If it feels like a movie idea, it's a short story.
Annalee: [00:39:45] Although, of course, Francis Ford Coppola famously created my favorite adaptation of Heart of Darkness, the movie Apocalypse Now, which is based on a novel.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:55] Right.
Annalee: [00:39:55] And actually. I mean, again, I love that novel. It's probably one of my favorite novels, and I do think that Apocalypse Now captures it. It's a short novel, to be fair. Like it is not a doorstopper. But anyway, I kind of agree with that.
[00:40:12] So I have a question for you, which is, why is it so much easier to start a story than to finish one?
Charlie Jane: [00:40:20] Yeah, that's a really good question. I feel like I often will start a short story with a lot of energy. I'll be like, okay, I have an idea. I have a character. I'm gonna just jump in. And like when I wrote a short story a week, I got really good at just kind of creating a fun opening where it's like the naked on fire thing you mentioned where we're like in the middle of a situation, stuff is happening, characters are already kind of amped up to 11 and right in the first paragraph, we’re in it, things are happening. And then you get about halfway to two-thirds of the way through and you're like, wow, I don't, I don't have a clear, even if I was outlining, sometimes, I'm just like, wow, I don't know how I get to the end of this.
[00:41:00] And I have to kinda stop and think because at that point there's a thing that happens in the magic trick of a story where you have to kind of do the sleight of hand that turns the bouquet of flowers into the rabbit or whatever. And you have to kind of figure out how that's gonna work. And there's a lot of mechanics. And oftentimes if you're trying to do a story that's not just like clever, clever, wacky, wacky, if it's gonna be about the characters and their feelings and their motivations and their viewpoint on the world, like you were talking about before. To stick the landing, to make the ending gel, you need to be really, really in those characters heads and understand exactly what the characters are thinking at this point, so you can let them kind of move forward and make some, some mistakes and find their way and stuff.
And that's usually, I have to do a gut check and it can take, like sometimes, I put short stories on hold for like, I put them on the back burner for months while I think about where the heck is this gonna end up? Because I just have to really think about the characters and how to get them to where they need to be and what is the ending that's not just clever, but feels true.
[00:42:05] So Annalee, one thing I've noticed is that some of your short stories feel like they later inspire some of your novels. Like for example, before you wrote Autonomous, you wrote “Drones Don’t Kill People” and some other short stories about robots. And I feel like your short story “Robot and Crow” really anticipates your novel, The Terraformers in some ways. So do you feel like you're someone who uses short stories to try out themes that you later want to kind of delve into deeper in a novel?
Annalee: [00:42:33] I definitely think that that has happened. It was definitely not intentional. Actually, I was mentioning earlier that I wrote something for a Sunday Morning Transport and that story which is called “A Hole in the Light” definitely has inspired my next novel that I'm working on right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:52] Yes.
Annalee: [00:42:52] Yeah. So, if you wanna learn more about sad amoebas check out that short story. And there's definitely the amoeba characters that I created in that story. It was one of those moments where I was like, this is definitely a short story, but I love these amoebas and I love writing about them and their bodies and like their social relationships. And I was like, yeah, I definitely, I wanna write a novel about these amoeba people. So, my novel is gonna be about, it's gonna be set like literally billions of years later but it's going to have amoeba people who are the descendants of the ones that we met in that short story. And I think for me—
Charlie Jane: [00:43:29] I’m so excited.
Annalee: [00:43:29] I am excited too. And I think that I have a tendency to, as you may have noticed in this podcast, I kind of learn through repetition and I use iteration a lot to help me develop ideas. And so it makes sense to me that I'll test out an idea. It's not even testing. I'll write about an idea in a short story and I'm like, wow, I like that, I wanna iterate that and make it bigger. And you couldn't accuse, say, this story that you mentioned the “Robot and Crow” story of being the same as The Terraformers, but it definitely has the same themes. It has non-human animals that can speak. It has a cute robot friend.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:18] And it's about kind of cities and systems and like, you know, yeah.
Annalee: [00:44:22] Yeah. It's about resource scarcity in a world that pretends to have everything. And that's kind of a thing I'm obsessed with.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:31] I've definitely used short stories to kind of lay groundwork for novels before, in particular, like, when I started working on All the Birds in the Sky, I was publishing this story called “Six Months, Three Days.” And they're not the same at all, but they have some of the same feeling. And like the response to “Six Months, Three Days” definitely made me feel like I was on the right track with All the Birds in the Sky and kind of gave me a way to go forward.
[00:44:54] So, I feel like there’s a symbiotic relationship between short story writing and novel writing, and I feel like when I don't write short stories, which I currently am kind of not writing short stories, unfortunately, I feel like something is missing from my novel writing at a certain point. You prime the pump for writing novels, partly by reading a lot. I think that's really important, but also you prime the pump by writing shorter little things and getting to kind of play around more with lower stakes, usually. Lower stakes in terms of like, if people don't like this, it's just a short story. It's not gonna be my book that I'm promoting for the next two years or whatever. You know, I mean…
Annalee: [00:45:30] Okay, you're giving me PTSD right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:32] I'm sorry. I also have PTSD.
Annalee: [00:45:34] No, that's okay. I just got off doing a huge promotional tour for The Terraformers, so I'm, you know. It was lovely, but I am a little rung out.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:42] I'm just ramping up promotion for Promises Stronger Than Darkness, so you know, it’s a whole thing. I'm putting on my little straw hat and I'm gonna dance around.
Anyway. So, yeah. But I mean, I love reading short stories. I love writing short stories. I really do feel like, even with novellas becoming so much more important, short stories are the lifeblood of speculative fiction. And I want us just to all celebrate them all the time.
[00:46:05] And you know, with that, thanks so much for listening. This has been, Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just randomly stumbled upon us, we're in all the places that you find podcasts. If you like us, please leave a review. It really helps. If you wanna become more a part of this universe, this cinematic universe of podcastery you can join our Patreon and hang out with us in Discord. And just for like a few bucks a month, you can become part of that community at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. You can find us on Mastodon, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, I guess we're still on Twitter. You know, you can find us everywhere.
Annalee: [00:46:40] Kind of.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:40] And thanks so much to our valiant and you know, just incredibly resourceful producer, Veronica Simonetti. Thanks to Chris Palmer for our wonderful music and thanks again to you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode and meanwhile, you know, keep making up stories.
[00:46:59] Bye!
Annalee: [00:46:59] Bye!