A novel invites digression and a little relaxation of the grip because a reader can't endure being held that tightly in hand for so long a time.
And I think the reason is exactly the reason people don't read poems. Because short stories are very demanding in their way.
And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.
Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.
Because we're very nomadic; 80 percent of Americans move at least once every 5 years.
But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.
Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
I have to be honest, of course, but I have to be sure that my honesty comes in a form that is not destructive because it can very easily become so.
I live with it a long time. It usually takes me a while, two or three weeks, to even figure out what the story is about.
I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.
I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.
I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.
I'm very conscious of working from memory but I also know that someone else who was there at the same moment would write something different about it.
Irish and Jewish seemed a good mix somehow, the way collie and labrador seem a good mix. It had a certain something.
It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.
Our grandfather was a doctor and our great-grandfather was a doctor and our great-great grandfather was a doctor to Napoleon, and they were very proud and insular.
Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.
So you're continually searching for new ways of using the story form to most perfectly contain and express the story you're telling.
That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.
The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.
There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves.
There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
They want you to shut the show down the way you do with a novel. And the best short story writers don't work that way.
When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.
Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.
You're setting the bar a little higher each time to keep it interesting for yourself.
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