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Story Behind the Story #64:
The Most Important Thing

Though writ­ing short sto­ries is noth­ing I do on a reg­u­lar basis, I read them, and occa­sion­al­ly write them. More often than not I have writ­ten them at the behest of edi­tors ask­ing for a sto­ry for a themed anthol­o­gy, such as “Loss,” or “Guns,” “School Life,” or even the begin­ning of a new mil­len­ni­al, as say, the year 2000.

What Do Fish Have to Do With Anything?In 1997, a col­lec­tion of my sto­ries was put togeth­er under the col­lec­tive title, What Do Fish Have to do with Any­thing? It was pub­lished by Candlewick.

Over time, that book proved suf­fi­cient­ly suc­cess­ful that the pub­lish­er asked if I would like to put togeth­er anoth­er such volume.

I gath­ered up a col­lec­tion of pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished sto­ries and put them togeth­er. (One of the sto­ries had been writ­ten for an anthol­o­gy but nev­er published.)

The Can­dlewick edi­tor thought four of these sto­ries sug­gest­ed a theme—father/son relationships—and sug­gest­ed these might be the top­ic of a new col­lec­tion. But, I would need to write three new ones. That I did.

When I write my nov­els, the char­ac­ters, the plots, and the set­tings are almost whol­ly cre­ations of my imag­i­na­tion. By con­trast, when I write short sto­ries they tend to come out of my own expe­ri­ences or expe­ri­ences I have observed close at hand.

The Most Important ThingThus, one of the sto­ries in The Most Impor­tant Thing is based, for the most part, on some­thing that real­ly hap­pened to me. See if you can deter­mine which one.

Writ­ing short stories—for me—is both chal­leng­ing and fas­ci­nat­ing. Write a nov­el, and one needs to illuminate—as if with barn fire—whole aspects of life. My think­ing about short sto­ries is that one uses a (metaphor­ic) flash­light to illu­mi­nate one aspect of life. A nov­el must (at its best) reveal the whole. A short sto­ry sug­gests the whole. Or, as some­one said, (I don’t recall who) “A short sto­ry is a pho­to­graph; a nov­el is a film.”

A quick snap­shot of how cur­rent read­ers receive a book may be had by com­par­ing the pro­fes­sion­al reviews (Book­list, SLJ, Kirkus, etc.) of this short sto­ry col­lec­tion with the reviews of the same book on say, Goodreads. Where­as the pro­fes­sion­al reviews were upbeat—among the best reviews I have ever had—the pri­vate reviews tend­ed to be down­beat, with a clear­ly stat­ed desire that they wished these sto­ries could have been uplift­ing, pos­i­tive, putting father/son rela­tion­ships in a cheer­ful con­text. While the pri­vate reviews were dis­mis­sive of the sto­ries’ con­nec­tions to real­i­ty, the pro­fes­sion­al reviews applaud­ed that con­nec­tion. Curious.

But, then, one of the curi­ous things about short sto­ries is that they can lead to long discussions.

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