Pity the Short Story Writer

The literary world and its discontents

In my youth, I submitted many short stories to literary magazines, journals, and websites. A few were accepted, and that was thrilling. There was the immediate high of seeing your name somewhere else—that undeniable ego-gratification—and the greater hope that these publications were what a literary career was made of. My writing journey, to this day, is both conventional and somewhat strange. I was not an especially bookish teenager. I could enjoy certain assignments in English class—The Martian Chronicles, Catcher in the Rye, Ethan Frome—but I rarely sought out literature beyond the context of school. My recreational reading, if it existed at all, consisted of sports books: biographies of Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, “Pistol Pete” Maravich. All I cared about, until I turned fifteen or so, was being a professional baseball player, and when I understood it wasn’t possible—that I had not won any genetic lottery to throw or hit a baseball traveling well over ninety miles an hour—I entered a liminal period in my life, the late high school years, when I genuinely did not know what I wanted to do when I became an adult. I had no ambition to be a writer or a journalist. Neither occupation meant much to me. At eighteen, my grades and SAT scores were not nearly good enough to land me in an elite college—my default ambition, having gone to a private high school where I undoubtedly was among its poorest students—so I went to a state school on the eastern end of Long Island, Stony Brook. You did not go to Poly Prep Country Day School to end up at Stony Brook University. You went to Poly Prep to take your shot at Princeton or Columbia. My tennis coach, an oily and sin-filled little man, reminded me as much, belching out I thought you were smart when I let it slip to him I was headed to a SUNY. (Stony Brook, in subsequent years, would become far more competitive, and is now considered a New York “flagship.”)

I arrived, in the fall of 2007, unsure of what I would do next. There was no grand plan. I was glad, at least, to be done with high school—to be in some sort of position to build myself anew. I disliked most of the people I went to high school with, if I mildly appreciated the school itself for giving me a strong education. Poly was not flim-flam; it was from the old-school, ingest your Latin and memorize your poems, and you left there, if you paid enough attention, with the foundation to tear through college. But Poly did not inculcate, in me, any love of literature. In the spring of my freshman year, I read a mostly forgotten Jack London novel called Martin Eden and decided I would be a writer, even though the author protagonist suffers a miserable end. It felt, in some sense, like providence, or a divine current coursing through me I couldn’t quite explain. Suddenly, I was charged to write, and at eighteen, at this state school on eastern Long Island, I decided I’d be a novelist. I haven’t stopped writing since then, churning out fiction and nonfiction alike, behaving at times like a man possessed, or one terrified he is running out of time.

The old climb to becoming a novelist entailed publishing short stories. The idea was the stories would attract attention and then an agent, and the agent would shop the novel. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, when I began submitting, this was still one way to break out. Every writer dreamed of publishing in either the Paris Review or the New Yorker. I recall sending one story to the Paris Review and never anything to the New Yorker. The latter felt like scaling Mt. Olympus, with the gods waiting at the top. To even attempt it felt vain, or at least unworkable. I remember the first short story I ever published; I was nineteen, and it was for an online magazine, Xenith, that is now completely wiped from the internet. It appeared while I was in Europe for the first time, studying abroad for one month Italy. I was paid nothing, but I did not care. I was a published writer. I felt, briefly, heroic. Many more stories would be submitted to many different publications, almost all of them rejected. There were a few triumphs, like finding my way into Post Road, a well-regarded literary journal run by Boston College. Overall, though, I found the process dispiriting. You wait months and months and months and the most common type of rejection is the non-answer. A form letter rejection, even, can tickle the heart. Anything beats the void. And the void, when you play the short story game, is what you get.

I also didn’t care very much about short stories. I wanted to write novels. Most writers understand, inherently, how much of a slog it can be to publish a book. In most cases, you need to secure an agent—send those queries, enter the void—and then the agent shops the book. The void doesn’t even disappear then. For my upcoming novel, Glass Century, there were publishers who simply didn’t answer my agent. This has become something of a post-pandemic protocol, for editors to not bother contacting submitting writers and agents at all. But at least this process, by most who want to participate in it, is mostly understood. Getting published in the New Yorker is something else. The writer and critic Naomi Kanakia recently shared a piece she wrote more than a decade ago that is still true: you have virtually no chance of getting a short story published in the New Yorker without an agent submitting on your behalf or establishing some direct connection with the fiction editor. This means the thousands of young or uncredentialed writers who long for the New Yorker literary lottery ticket are dreaming an impossible dream. You can use their online submission form, send a short story, and hope for success. But the New Yorker does not pick from the slush pile. They are not in that kind of discovery game.

Yet the myth persists that they are. Why? Isn’t it dishonest? Yes, it is. Better to level with the audience: we don’t want you unless you’ve already climbed a few rungs on the literary career ladder. We don’t trust your stuff will be good enough. I imagine, though, if the New Yorker did this, they would encounter great backlash from all those they’ve disillusioned. Deception is a much easier road. This is a broader problem with the literary world, and one that extends to other elite institutions; it is increasingly difficult to trust them. It can be hard to tell if a literary critic is leveling with the reader or currying favor with friends in high places. It can be even harder to tell if the biggest publishing houses care much anymore about nurturing the careers of fledgling writers or unearthing new ones. This used to be a point of pride, to try to find an unknown, screwy kid like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Carson McCullers or Bret Easton Ellis and hand them a platform to reach the masses. Editors were empowered to cultivate lists to their tastes, and the profiteering bosses of the old era seemed to be able to stomach more artistic risk. Sonny Mehta could publish American Psycho when no one else would. Today, with so much conglomeration and homogeny at the top, the prestige fiction feels less vital.

To return, for a moment, to the short story, I would not advise a young writer today to spend years submitting to literary journals in the hope of getting their short fiction published. The journals and magazines might mean well, but few of them have dedicated audiences and it’s unclear the stories published there can build a literary career. That ladder is crumbling away. Even the New Yorker and the Paris Review aren’t breaking out stars like they once did. It’s been a while since Cat Person. If a writer believes in their short fiction, they can start a Substack or a blog and begin publishing. The self-publishing stigma is melting away and the best way, in the 2020s, to ascend may be to build an audience, organically, ahead of time. Again Substack, with its network effects, is one answer there. I haven’t published much fiction here but that may change in the future. For a novel, a traditional publisher is most helpful—I don’t want to design a cover, set the pages, or fret distribution much—but there’s no doubt we are entering a period, not unlike the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when some of our best literature is getting self-published. Two of the best novels I read this year, Incel and Major Arcana, were released by the authors themselves, with the latter being republished next year by an excellent indie, Belt. My sense is there’s a lot of talent pulsing below and the prestige literary institutions are not doing what they are supposed to do to surface it. In one sense, this is disheartening. But it also offers an opportunity for the new counterculture. The future is getting less dull all the time.