There Are as Many Different Stories as There are People Writing: An Exclusive Guest Post from Brandon Taylor, Author of Filthy Animals

I’m a bit of a short story enthusiast. Part of this was practical: for many years, I worked as a literary editor, and as a matter of course, I read hundreds and hundreds of short stories, looking for those handful of startling and moving stories to publish. When you’re in the position to read scores of stories a day, you develop a sense of the vast array of techniques and approaches writers bring to their storytelling. There are as many different stories as there are people writing, and while stories might fall into broad categories of genre or style or voice or subject matter, what ultimately shines within a particular story is a manifestation of the unique circumstances that have gone into its creation. Which is to say that in my less cynical moments, every story possesses something wonderful to marvel at or appreciate, even if the story itself is less than impressive.
There is this presupposition that a short story is a casual, fleeting infatuation, something lightweight and easily forgotten. But I always feel like a short story is more like a sudden, hard rain that drenches you down to your core. To read one of Alice Munro’s stories is to feel suddenly, deeply immersed in a moment, a life, a world, a whole shimmering context of subjective experience. I mean, perhaps a story is like an affair or an infatuation, but think back to those first, intense encounters with the people who meant the most to you. Those earth-shifting moments of understanding someone and being understood, where even if they’re no longer in your life, you remember the dizzying sweep of it. That’s what a short story is.
A short story collection isn’t like a novel, where the potency of epiphany or revelation are dispersed across hundreds of pages. Instead, a short story collection is like being struck by lightening again and again. It’s like taking those rare, shining moments that are strung through our lives and, and aligning them so that one passes through their glow one after the other. The power of a story collection is that it focuses and heightens. The stories speak to each other in strange, mysterious ways, and what you’re left with is something memorable and as immersive and rewarding as a novel-length story.
Sometimes, I hear from people that they don’t like short stories or story collections because they want to feel immersed in a book. They get attached to the characters and do not want to let them go. But I think a short story is a different kind of immersion. Rather than standing in a slowly-flooding room. A story is a deluge. The water is upon, high above your head, before you realize it and you have no choice but to let it thunder down over you. A story is a special kind of overwhelm, and it’s that feeling of saturation that I’ve turned to in a year when I’ve felt my relationship to the world and to time thin out. A story is a way of feeling more forcefully, deeply tethered to the world and its firmament. So I think everyone should read them.