New Fiction

I've been thinking a lot lately about new fiction. The conversation was started at my writing group. One of the group brought in an essay she is preparing for a conference in Romania, of all places. The essay's thesis, so to speak, was this: Outlets for the short story have dramatically decreased to the point that a short story writer is unable to support oneself by writing short fiction alone. This brought about quite a discussion, and the consensus was that this is true, to a point. The financial part, certainly. Three of the members of our group are well-published and really fantastic writers, but they must supplement their income by teaching, freelancing, or working office jobs. They write, but must work other jobs to pay the bills. But the other side of this debate is that outlets for fiction have increased with the Internet and with the rapidly decreasing costs of self- and small press publishing. It seems that many small journals are "flourishing" around the country. (Quotes mean that these journals may be small, labor of love projects that aren't really financially viable, but are publishing great pieces.) The debate about fiction outlets begs the question: is the short story surviving? I think the answer is a resounding "yes." This is a time when many, many people are writing fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction (a kind of large, amorphous field that has yet to be defined) and other kinds of genres that also are difficult to categorize. With a cursory google search of literary journals, many pop up--and not simply self-indulgent journals run by a group of friends. Any MFA program worth its salt runs a literary magazine, and many journals have sprung up with only a web presence. Many publish quality stories by well-recognized authors as well as up and coming writers. At final glance, this is a good time for fiction writers.

Of course, it would be nice to make a living by simply writing short stories. But that day, if it ever existed, is over, and fiction writers have to be satisfied with publishing for fifty bucks and a year's subscription until they work their way up to the admittedly few national publications that pay well for stories.

Like any model, I think this model has its pros and cons. It's a kind of weeding out procedure, on the one hand. On the other, there's a lot of fiction out there published in the New Yorker or Harpers that just isn't that good. Why is it published? My sense is that nepotism plays a part in publishing, just as in any other industry. For those of us without connects, it's a matter of making a name for oneself in the small, well-respected journals that eventually translates to a book deal or a series of pubs in magazines with national distribution.