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The rules seem to be these: if you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. if you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. but nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.

-James A. Michener

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The Rules Seem To Be These: If

James A. Michener

The rules seem to be these: if you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. if you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. but nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.

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Writing Successful Somewhere Else

More From James A. Michener

I was first published in the newspaper put out by school of the art institute of chicago, where i was a student. i wince to read that story nowadays, but i published it with an odd photo i'd found in a junk shop, and at least i still like the picture. i had a few things in the school paper, and then i got published in a small literary magazine. i hoped i would one day get published in the new yorker, but i never allowed myself to actually believe it. getting published is one of those things that feels just as good as you'd hoped it would.

I always was interested in prose. as a teenager, i published short stories. and i always wanted to write the long short story, i wanted to write a novel. now that i have attained, shall i say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, i feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. i feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and i find this more difficult in poetry.

Yes, we could talk to you for days on end about all the bad first dates. those are stories. funny stories. awkward stories. stories we love to share, because by sharing them, we get something out of the hour or two we wasted on the wrong person. but that's all bad first dates are: short stories. good first dates are more than short stories. they are first chapters. on a good first date, everything is springtime. and when a good first date becomes a relationship, the springtime lingers. even after it's over, there can be springtime.

The novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. it invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. it creates empathy. and that's the antidote to bigotry. the novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. it makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. and that's very important.

Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. you know, i think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. what you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. what you look for is a voice. you pick up a novel by someone such as faulkner or hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. and that's what one should demand of a novelist.

I love short stories - reading and writing them. the best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. they are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. the best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry.

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I love short stories. they're like small imploding universes. they are very tightly bound and controlled. i'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. the novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. i don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.

Love gives itself; it is not bought.

We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. so it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.

Passionate love is a quenchless thirst.

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