The Short and Long of It by Brandon Daily

It’s a pleasure to welcome Brandon Daily back to the site. Daily burst onto the scene in 2014 with A Murder Country, which won the Silver Medal for Georgia Author of the Year—First Novel. The Valley followed, a powerful look at the dark, often insidious nature of life in the fictitious Appalachian town of Corvin Valley. Today, he’s here in conjunction with his newest release, Darkening, a collection of a dozen short stories and a novella. Not surprisingly, his guest post is an ode to the virtues of the short story.

The Short and Long of It: Stories and Novels

“Short story or novel, which one’s your favorite?”

It’s a question I get all the time, both as a writer and as a teacher. Luckily, it’s one of the easiest questions to answer. “Short story,” I say. And I say it quickly.

To date, I’ve had a variety of different story forms published: short stories, novels, flash fiction, and everything in between, but the form I constantly go back to—the one that challenges me most as a writer, reader, teacher, and student of literature—is the short story. But why?

Maybe it’s because short stories were my introduction to literature in school—we always started the semester with short stories and then gradually built up to longer works, wrestling the sustained themes of novels as the capstone to the course. But I don’t think that’s why I love them. To say that my love of the short form is simply because I studied it first in my classes is to discount its power and say that short stories are merely academic and narrative fodder for the long, “more complex” and meaty form of literature. But short stories can be as complex as any novel—hell, read anything from Borges and you can see how these stories can be even more complex. Instead, I think my love of the form is because, to me, short stories allow for storytelling in its most pure and perfect form, especially in the 21st century.

We can blame technology or say that it is merely an evolutionary step in our consciousness, but whatever the reason, people no longer have attention spans that allow for sustained focus. Nearly all of my friends prefer episodic TV shows to movies, music singles to concept albums, and so on and so forth. Why should written literature be any different? I’m not advocating for us to all have short attention spans or wandering minds, and I’m not arguing that we live in a world where we have collective ADD, but I am saying that there is a convenient beauty in more direct forms of entertainment, and that’s a good thing. In this sense, I couldn’t agree more with Edgar Allan Poe, whose first rule of writing a good story was that a story should be read in one sitting. And the novel just doesn’t (realistically) allow for this.

I read constantly: novels, collections of stories, plays, essays, everything, but it gets hard to keep a sustained focus on a narrative that stretches into the 300-plus page range. I often find myself getting to the hundred-page mark of a novel and flipping ahead to see just how many pages are left. And no, for the cynics in the crowd, it’s not that I’m just reading the wrong books—I do this with novels that I hate, and I do it with novels I love. I simply get tired of the characters and their predicaments after a while; I want something new, something fresh. Where the novel doesn’t allow for a constant freshness of narrative, the short story, or rather the short story collection, does. And so, as a reader and teacher, there is nothing more enjoyable than sitting down with a collection of stories and finding myself constantly immersed in a new character’s life (I think of George Saunders’s work here, a writer whom I, as many before me have, call the king of short narrative) or, as with linked story collections, the same character’s world, just with different narrative focuses (Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn come to mind here).

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Both of my novels, A Murder Country and The Valley are structured in prismatic ways: they follow multiple character threads, and though those threads eventually knit themselves together, they are very much stories in and of themselves. In this way, I have always looked at these books as linked collections. I often tell people that I consider myself a short story author who happens to write novels. As a writer, I love the chance to focus on a character and study him or her throughout a singular moment in life. This singular moment is the soul of the short story. Often, there isn’t clear resolution with these narratives, and that’s because short stories don’t tell a life (or lives); they tell a snapshot of a life. That life continues on after the final sentence is read by the reader, yet after that last sentence, that character and his or her story are no longer the story’s (and they definitely aren’t mine as the writer), but they are the reader’s to decipher for him or herself. True reading is an immersive act, one that is mutually shared by the writer and reader, and the short story allows for the reader to participate much more in the story’s creation and meaning than with the novel.

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I think one of the biggest misnomers about writing short stories is that they are easier to write than novels or that they are simple narratives. I call BS on both of those statements. With a novel, a writer can take thirty pages to allow for the reader to connect to a character; he can spend sixty pages setting up the major conflict of the narrative; he can wander aimlessly for a few pages or a few scenes, trying to find the right voice again. But with a short story, these tedious excursions can’t happen. A short story writer gets anywhere from a page to fifteen (or so) to do all of these things: make the reader like (or hate) the character, clearly illustrate and build the conflict of the story, and sustain the narrative in the way intended, never once deviating from it (because there just isn’t room to do so). I can guarantee that I’ve spent more time thinking through, reworking, and editing down the short stories I’ve written than either of the novels I’ve had published, and that’s because with a short story, there needs to be a direct movement that captures and holds the reader, making him or her feel an intended way pretty much from the get-go.

After all this, I don’t want you to get me wrong. I love novels, and I will continue to read and write them until the day I die. But with Darkening, my recently published collection of stories, I get to share a grouping of diverse voices with my readers; these stories are unique in scope, character, and even genre. And I couldn’t be prouder of each one of them. In the end, I realize that short fiction is like poetry: there can be no wasted words; as a writer, it’s my job to pick the right words and simply trust in their power.

Darkening is available from ABC Group Documentation.

Brandon Daily is the author of the novel A Murder Country, which was awarded the Silver Medal for the Georgia Author of the Year Award–First Novel in 2015. His short fiction has appeared in several online and print magazines, and his one act play South of Salvation was performed and won first prize in the CAST Players One Act Play Festival in 2012. Brandon currently lives in Southern California with his wife and two children, where he is a teacher.