Why I don't write a lot of short stories

Last week I finally had a chance to watch Dreams with Sharp Teeth, Erik Nelson's excellent documentary about Harlan Ellison. I've never met Ellison personally, although I've been reading his stuff for almost thirty years -- I think my first exposure to his work was in fifth or sixth grade, when I found an illustrated version of Ellison's famous short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" stashed in the corner of the school library. To say that the darkness of that story stained my sensibilities permanently is to badly understate the case -- I remember feeling excited and terrified by the narrative voice, and the sense that it was going too far, and I didn't just like it...it resonated with me. I wanted to write that kind of stuff...urgent, vivid and extremely dark.

Ellison's work continues to be profoundly inspiring to me. His stories and essays are remarkable models of imagination and raw nerve. Not surprisingly, when I was starting out, most of my own short stories sounded just like his stuff. Like Stephen King and Peter Straub, and later Jim Harrison and Elmore Leonard, Ellison was one of those writers that I actually spent more time learning how not to write like...if that makes any sense at all.

And then I stopped writing short stories completely.

It wasn't a conscious decision, as far as I can tell. I just started writing novels, and stuck with that. Ellison, of course, is famous for his short stories. He has written novels, including one of the truly great rock 'n' roll novels of all time, Spider Kiss, but he's gonna be remembered for the short stories. Nelson's documentary touches on this briefly, the notion that his career would have been different if he'd written more novels...but that wasn't what Ellison was about. He seems to thrive in the short form -- heightened bursts of high-intensity prose, three or four or five thousand words.

I can't do that to save my life.

Fun Fact: I was recently invited to contribute short stories to two very different genre anthologies -- one, a "romantic thriller" story, and the other, an anthology of speculative fiction. I said yes to both offers, because I'd never done anything like that before and I'm in the habit of saying okay to new experiences, just to say I tried it.

Fun Fact #2: I've probably only written three decent short stories in my life.

Not that I haven't tried. Heavens knows I have. Every so often I get an idea that I think would make a good short story, and sometimes I even try. But usually the results are so utterly unsatisfying -- either too much or too little -- that I end up stashing it in the hard-drive file labeled "Cripples and Orphans." This little folder is just as bleak and depressing as it sounds...it's full of unfinished short stories and ones that I did finish, but they suck anyway.

Fun Fact #3: Sometime in the next few months, I better learn how to write short stories.

Good thing I don't have anything else going on.