falling in love with the short story form
Whenever I meet a writer, my first question is always: What kind of work do you write? I’m interested in the answer, of course—novels, short stories, poems, essays, blog posts—but I’m also, already, anticipating the next question I’ll ask. Because that’s really the question I care about: Why did you choose that? Sometimes it’s a choice. Sometimes’s more of a gradual inevitability, as someone tries out different forms and searches for the right fit. “[A]fter a while,” the writer Tobias Wolff once said, we each “have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.” For Wolff, it was the short story: I’ve always been attracted to the incisiveness, velocity, exactitude, precision of a short story, rather than the long journey of those kinds of novels that we’ve inherited from the 18th and 19th century, with all that great robustness and confidence. There was a six-month period in 2021 when I was convinced I was a fiction writer. I wanted to write short stories
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