Short Story Writing Project: Clear-cut versus obscure

In the comments to my first post, What is a Short Story?, Rhonda voiced an opinion that I think a lot of readers share. She said:

I tend to like the classic short stories that have some sort of epiphany. It doesn’t have to be all wrapped up neat and tidy, but I am having a hard time appreciating-and even fully understanding-many of the stories published in the most current “Best American Short Stories” books each year that don’t seem to have much of a point.

I agree with Rhonda that today’s literary stories tend to have less obvious conclusions and themes than in earlier days. In a story such as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, the themes of remorse and paranoia are very clear. The ending is relatively easy to figure out and the conclusion is satisfying.

Raymond Carver was arguably the best short story writer of the twentieth century, and you can see in his writing that the themes have become less clear-cut and the conclusions less dramatic. In Cathedral, the story concludes with a blind man and a sighted man drawing a picture of a cathedral together. There has been some tension between them at first, but they have moved beyond it. The ending is not as dramatic as The Telltale Heart, but it makes some statement about vision, experience and connection. Still, there are several tensions in the story, especially between the sighted man and his wife, and those tensions are not neatly resolved by the ending. There is no telling if tomorrow will be any better or worse for this couple.

Raymond Carver was a minimalist as a writer. He wouldn’t, for example, describe a room unless he felt that the description of that room was vital to the story. He also tended to portray what he considered to be ordinary people living ordinary and not-too-happy lives. People’s problems weren’t going to be somehow fixed at the end of a story. Their victories and losses were the victories and losses of common people.

The beauty of Carver’s writing was that he didn’t need to say more. A reader could pick up on the themes and get what they needed from his stories without obvious conclusions and clear-cut explanations. Unfortunately, just because a master can pull off this feat doesn’t mean his students can do the same. I think you see many people imitating his style without achieving his effect. This leads to murky stories “that don’t seem to have much of a point.”

I’m not blaming Carver for this movement. He was influential, but the trend towards more obscure stories probably would have happened with or without him. In fact, you can see much of the same style in Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, which predates Carver’s work by fifty years. Author Michael Chabon led a sort of insurgency against this movement by uniting respected “literary” authors together in a collection of short stories called, McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. With that collection he attempted to revive the genre short story market. The result didn’t quite set the world on fire, but the stories are worth reading.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to deciding what to reveal in your short stories. Well, there are some wrongs, and we will be discussing them, but there is no “right” way to write a short story. People’s tastes vary. There will always be literary movements and counter movements. A writer should be aware of them, but they shouldn’t let themselves be controlled by them. It is best to write the type of stories you would enjoy reading, whatever those may be.

What do you think?

Do you miss the more clearly drawn conclusions of early short stories or do you embrace the ambiguity of some modern writing? Who do you like to read and why?