Unfortunately, if nothing changes, commercial literary fiction is headed for extinction. If you read short stories and poetry. Good for you! I mean that. You get five gold stars and an A++ in cultural awareness. I am not saying that you should not support contemporary literary art. Students, English teachers, editors, agents, and aspiring authors still read short stories, but most other people do not.
If you take a creative writing class, your instuctor will insist that everybody will be fascinated by your personal experiences and uplifted by your enlightened opinions. Well, what if she is wrong?
Realistically, if you aren't a political candidate or a drugged-out Hollywood bimbo, there is a good chance that nobody will care how people treated your grandfather when he lived in the trailer park. (I'm kidding, but I think you probably know what I mean.) Everybody has problems.
If you want to see the future of the short story form, take a trip to your local newsstand. Notice how few magazines still publish them. "Atlantic Monthly", one of the last hold-outs, stopped last year. Why do you think that is? Because everybody can't wait to read these little jewels? Uh, I don't think so.
Literary journals and other small presses still publish short stories, but check out their circulation--and try to buy one of these magazines, or even find one in most libraries outside of universities. (In your college stacks, be sure to take your allergy meds before you open a copy--cough!--lots of dust.) Worse, try to make a living selling short stories. I'm not kidding. People used to pay their bills, even in Manhattan, with what they made from such sales. Now, you're very lucky if you can buy a fast food dinner when you have a story accepted for publication.
(BTW--I LOVE the short story form, if not its current incarnation, and so would everybody else, if the offerings were not "too high quality" for "little people" that constitute "the masses". Note: I do not endorse these terms. I have heard them from academics and literary authors bemoaning the lack of government funding for "under-appreciated" arts.)
The novel is headed, unfortunately, in the same direction. In fact, most books sell fewer than 99 copies. Visit this article http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6353274.html
in Publishers Weekly to view some sobering statistics.
The author makes a good point that, in the future, writing with a very small following will have more of a chance to reach its narrow target market through ebooks and other flavors of self-publication, however, that does not alter my position.
I do not believe that short stories, novels and poetry deserve to be relegated to a vanity or marginal purgatory. Good storytelling is very important, and people miss it. In my opinion, some of the substance abuse problems we have in our culture are due to the failure of the arts, especially the literary arts, to do their job.
Stories should be for everyone. People should not have to be indoctrinated, um, sorry, "educated" in MFA programs to enjoy them.
Note: Here is another site with a fascinating collection of statistics about book sales and the many ways people choose to use their time instead of reading (not what you might think).
http://www.bookmarket.com/statistics.html
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Contributor's Note
Comments welcome. This is the red cape. I expect the bull : )
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