Reality Hunger

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book—what everyone else does not say in a whole book

This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set

In order to make it easier to handle, Darwin would cut a large book in half; he’d also tear out any chapters he didn’t find of interest

The merit of style exists precisely in that it delivers the greatest number of ideas in the fewest number of words

Omission is a form of creation

The point, such as it is, often seems to me woefully or willfully obscure in even the most well-made stories. I’ve become an impatient writer and reader: I seem to want the moral, psychological, philosophical news to be delivered now, and this (the rapid emotional-delivery system) is something that the short-short can do exceedingly well. Even as they’re exploring extremely serious and complex material, short-short writers frequently use a certain mock modesty to give the work a tossed-off tone and disarm the reader.

They’re magic tricks, with meaning. Examples: Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Sweethearts,” Jerome Stern’s “Morning News,” Any Hempel’s “In the Animal Shelter,” Linda Brewer’s “20/20,” Gregory Burnham’s “Subtotals.”

The man in the restaurant crushing a wineglass in his hand acts out an emotional complex not wholly explained by a hard day at the office, or being cheated in the taxi, or what his companion just said. If the narrative writer is instinctively curious about the individuating “story,” the distinct sequence of events preceding that broken glass, the lyric poet may be as naturally drawn to the isolated human moment of frustration—the distilled, indelible peak on the emotional chart

Still, the short-short (dreadful label, but what’s better?) feels particularly relevant to contemporary life. Delivering only highlights and no downtime, the short-short seems to me to gain access to contemporary feeling states more effectively than the conventional story does

Short-shorts eschew the furniture-moving, the table-setting typical of the longer story. Here, in a page or a page and a half, I’ll attempt to unveil for you my vision of life; short-shorts are often thrillingly nervous-making for both writer and reader. In the best short-shorts, the writer seems to have miraculously figured out a way to stage, in a very compressed space, his own metaphysic: Life feels like this or at least Some aspect of life feels like this.