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How the Internet Saved Short Fiction

by M. Flaming

Like many writers I have spoken to, I turned to publishing online at first both as a matter of convenience and out of a sense of desperation. Although I had written and published a few pieces in the mid 1990’s, for various reasons I stopped sending out work for nearly half a decade. Then, in early 2002, I found myself with a completed story on my hands, and in need of a place to publish it. I did what every good aspiring writer does: I went down to my local independent bookseller and, crouched in the aisle, furtively flipped through a copy of Writer’s Market.

What I found there was more than a little depressing; most print literary journals, I discovered, receive hundreds if not thousands of submissions each month, out of which only a few dozen are chosen for publication each year. Glimmer Train, for example, gets 48,000 submissions per year and publishes about 40 of these, which translates to an acceptance rate over a thousand times more selective than Harvard (where about 11% of freshmen applicants are admitted). Worse yet, most print journals have a response time of three months or more and discourage simultaneous submissions which means that it may take years for a writer to find a home for a story.

It was all of these things, combined with the sheer expense and effort of sending out a print manuscript, which led me to turn to online publications as I looked for a venue for my work. I must admit that until this point, I had spent relatively little time reading fiction online. Aside from occasionally skimming a few e-journals and reading Anna Karenina via Project Gutenberg over the course of several months at a particularly boring job, I was illiterate when it came to the world of creative writing on the Internet. What I discovered when I began to seriously explore the world of literary sites will come as no surprise to readers of this site: that a remarkable amount of genuinely original and powerful prose is being published online.

For me, the most startling part of this discovery was that I had heard almost nothing about the high quality of creative writing that was occurring on the Internet. And this wasn’t simply a case of being out of the loop as a writer and technophile (I’ve worked in the software industry for nearly a decade now) by all rights I should’ve known much more about the world of online fiction. But I didn’t and I was hardly alone in my ignorance.

The Internet publishing revolution

Although the past five years has given rise to a flood of commentary on how the Internet is changing our lives and our culture, these discussions have remained strangely silent when it comes to one of the areas where the online world may be having the greatest immediate impact: literary society, and in particular the short story.

This silence is a result of the generally dismissing attitude of the literary and academic establishment toward online publishing efforts. The traditional literati seem to recognize the validity of internet-based works only to the extent that these works case themselves as “new media” pieces; cybertexts, multimedia e-projects, and interactive fictions have all received their due in the literary press and have been absorbed into the pop-theory lexicon. Until very recently however, most efforts that strayed onto the traditional turf of print were either derided as amateurish and unimportant by the literary authorities, or simply ignored.

Whether the authorities of print literature admit it or not though, the quality and importance of internet fiction is on the rise. Very few printed literary journals--by and large the last bastion of the short story as a literary form in America, and the main venues for new authors turn a profit--turn a profit; most are funded primarily by grants or universities, sources of income which have become increasingly scarce as cash-strapped institutions weigh the need for these publications against the survival of other programs.

Today, even the most widely read literary journals have an extremely limited circulation. The venerable Fiction, for example, has an annual circulation of around 8,000. By comparison, new online literary journals appear monthly and often have a circulation far in excess of even the most successful print publications; the literary site Apostrophe, for example, gets over 100,000 visitors each month.

In recognition of the Internet’s power to reach a mass audience, a growing number of traditional journals have started to produce online versions of their publications. Many, like Ploughshares, offer only teaser versions of their print counterpart, but others like Story Quarterly provide full-text access (sometimes through a subscription fee) to their content. There are even a few innovative publishers, most notably Zoetrope/All Story, that have embraced internet publishing wholeheartedly and that operate their sites as quasi-independent literary journals in their own right.

The fact is that in terms of sheer numbers, the Internet is increasingly where we go when we want to publish or read short fiction and poetry. And in turn, this means that online writing will play a greater and greater role in forming cultural beliefs about what short stories can and should be.

This is not to suggest that online publishing will supplant paper journals; for the foreseeable future at least, most authors will continue to consider literally seeing their names in print as the ultimate hallmark of success, and the physicality of paper and ink carry an emotional and visual weight that are in no danger of being replaced by pixels and bytes. Rather, by providing a low-cost, wide-circulation medium, the Internet will increasingly serve as the frontier where new and experimental literary works can flourish and where new trends and aesthetic expectations are created.

Reshaping the short story

The question prompted by the increasing importance and popularity of online short fiction is: how is online publishing changing the form of the short story? Are online short stories identical to their printed counterparts, or has the Internet as a medium effected the ways that stories are written?

Surveying the field of online short fiction, it’s apparent that many stories published on the Internet are not all that different from stories published in print. Certainly the same qualities are appreciated: elegant prose, skillful characterization, captivating descriptions and an engaging plot. But although most individual online stories are not all that different from printed works, in terms of overall trends there are definitely characteristics that are far more common in online stories than printed ones.

The most immediate and obvious of these differences is length; stories published on the Internet are generally much shorter than those appearing in print. The simple fact is that most people find it harder to read text on a computer screen than on a page; one web usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, estimates that reading on the web is 25% more difficult than reading printed text. In part, this difficulty is the result of current display technology but a part of it also stems from the expectations that we bring as readers to page vs. screen; who settles into a comfortable chair with a laptop to read?

Because of this, many online literary journals publish almost as many microfiction pieces as short stories, while microfiction is still viewed as an interesting oddity in the print world. Many literary sites will not consider stories running over 3,000 words, while 3,200 words or above is the average length of stories in most print journals. Other short forms that came close to extinction in print, like the prose poem, are also experiencing a renaissance online.

In addition to their length, the tone of online stories tends to differ from their printed counterparts. This may be a result of the way in which most people use the Internet: describing her online reading habits, one dedicated fan of internet fiction said: “It’s rare for me to spend more than fifteen minutes reading online at a time…. When I finish something [at work], I’ll read maybe half a story and then read the other half an hour later when I finish something else.” She is not alone; a study conducted jointly by Stanford University and the Poynter Institute found that the average user spends seven minutes at a time reading online, compared to twenty minutes for reading printed media.

Because we turn to the Internet as a means of short-term distraction, a relief from work or research, humorous writing is much more highly valued online than in print. Although many print journals claim to be interested in humorous pieces, a look at their contents (or the contents of any Pushcart Prize anthology) reveals that being funny in print is relatively unimportant.

Online, on the other hand, humorous writing is the norm and there is a larger market for comedic prose than for any other genre. As evidence for this fact, one only need consider that the single most visited creative writing publication on the Internet is a humor site: The Onion.

A final difference between online fiction and print fiction is the willingness of internet literary publishers to embrace experimental work and work by new writers. Because of the low cost of publishing online, editors can take a chance on pieces that would be passed over in the print world because they defy conventional genre boundaries or might not appeal to a mass audience. The lack of a traditional canon online also contributes to this spirit of inclusiveness and experimentation; internet publishers are not faced with the same pressures as print journals to emulate the stylistic formula of established publications. Sites like Exquisite Corpse, 5-Trope, and Minima routinely include challenging new works that would have great difficulty finding a home in traditional literary magazines.

Of course, these are by no means the only differences between online short fiction and print fiction, but they are among the key ones. And as the influence of internet fiction continues to grow, we can expect to see many of these trends filter back into the print mainstream as a new generation of writers find their voices online.

Since discovering the world of online fiction, I have spent an increasing amount of time enjoying what it has to offer. Although I still publish some of my work in print journals, I know that I can reach many more readers online than I am likely to do via a print journal and can place pieces on the Internet that might otherwise never see the light of day.

Rather than regarding the Internet as a “second best” alternative to traditional literary venues, it’s time that we recognize the world of online publishing for what it really is: a frontier of incredible opportunity. And, quite possibly, the medium that has given the short story a new lease on life.

Works Cited

Nielsen, Jakob. "Be Succinct! Writing for the Web." 15 March 1997. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html

Poynter Institute “Eyescan” Study. Conducted jointly with Stanford University. March 2000; p. 92. http://www.poynterextra.org/et/i.htm

M. Flaming studied philosophy and creative writing at Hampshire College in Massachusetts and now lives on the west coast of the United States. His short fiction has appeared both online and in print. He also writes monthly book reviews for the literary site Word Riot, and is working on a historical novel.