It Enrages Me... Diane Williams

I just discovered Diane Williams. I love Diane Williams. Diane Williams will you please call me so we can speak about short stories.

For those who have not yet discovered her, she is the master of flash or short, short fiction before either was a thing. Think of brief, a page or two, short stories that are elegant, evocative, provocative, and emotionally atmospheric.

Perhaps the best known example from a famous writer you may have read is A Clean Well-Lighted Place by Hemingway. This one story had a profound effect on me. It is heartbreakingly beautiful and sparse, not a wasted word.

This is Williams.

And this is how I prefer to create most short stories. This is not an issue of right or wrong. Just an issue that there is more than one way to create literary art.

And yet, many of the gatekeepers of the publishing world disagree. They argue there needs to be ‘story,’ meaning a clear narrative arc where the protagonist begins as one way and ends in another.

But life isn’t like that, not at all. And art comes in many forms. Just ask the abstract expressionists from the 1950s, especially the women. Good literature, writing that a reader can be moved by and fall in love with can do no more than simply capture a mood or a moment of epiphany in a few spare paragraphs.

A New York Times interview of Williams said this: “I’ve heard lots of criticism of what I’m doing,” she said. “I’ve been told these aren’t stories.” Ms. Williams speaks deliberately, with a calm that is not dispassion but certainty. She sometimes closes her eyes, presumably to formulate her thoughts, then opens them when she’s ready to speak. “It enrages me.”

It enrages me as well.

As I try to market my own collection of stories, I am seeing a publishing landscape that is unfriendly to variation, as such, whole audiences are either unserved or underserved. Perhaps my stories do not deserve to see the light of day. That’s okay. Part of the business, but I am right that there are many markets that are underserved or not served at all because as a reader I represent one of the largest.