The Sense of an Ending | Karen Kao
I think a lot about the craft of writing. The poem, the essay, the short story and the novel each have their own internal rules, all of which are to be broken if a writer wants to achieve something new. Lately, my obsession has become short form. The short story has all the same requisites as a novel: voice, characters, arc. But because it’s short form, everything must be compressed. You don’t have hundreds of pages at your disposal, maybe only a dozen at most. So you haven’t got the time to paint a sweeping landscape or people a multi-generational cast of characters. You may not even have enough space to get through a single day. Short story writing is about choices. Not that I know much about the matter. Only three of my short stories have been published and I have enough rejection letters to paper a small whale. But I try anyway. I read and listen. And as soon I think I’ve figured it out, I hear the admonishing words of John Gardner in The Art of Fiction (p....