But You Said The Short Story Was Dying

Literary journals spring up like weeds, and follow roughly the same life span.

Those who are enamored of the short story start up those magazines, publishing twice a year, once a year, every other month, or however many they can manage. They want to share their love with the reading public who surely wants their reading in small, bite-sized nuggets.

Look, that commuter there, reading on a tablet. There's the perfect audience.

The person waiting for a train to arrive, for the traffic light to change, for the wee little ones to finish their ballet-football-piano lessons. They need those small pieces of fiction to entertain them.

Except that literary journals routinely fade away after a few years, with no one buying.

The major journals that manage to carry on, largely as part of a university creative writing program, bemoan the death of the short story.

Readers don't seem all that interested. They want full length novels.

The short story is supposed to be dead, but people want to read, just not short stories, and publishing wisdom still says they want their reading in bits and pieces. Ergo, they must want a novel in serial form, a variation on the short story theme.

Do readers really want that?

Amazon thinks so. Other publishers are following suit, taking advantage of e-publishing to crank out novels one chapter at a time.

Charles Dickens did it. Why not bring it back?

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In the Victorian Era, life was not so hectic and a person could actually retain a plot line for a week, stored up in a head that was not cluttered with endless tasks, phones ringing, calls to return, e-mails to return, schedules to meet, carpools and playdates.

Dickens could publish his novels a chapter at a time and everyone waited for the next installment because there was no other way to read the novel. There was no Netflix, no central storage place that gathered up the chapters and released them all at once so the reader could sit down on a Saturday afternoon and binge on a full season of David Copperfield.

Maybe modern readers do a lot of reading while commuting, having only an hour at a stretch. But if the short story was a perfect fit for them, the short story would not be dying out, but would be blossoming. Yet it isn't.

Is the serial novel filling a niche that's gone unfilled of late, or have publishers mis-read the public's sentiment? Maybe they say they want something quick, but once they've consumed a chapter, and they want more, there isn't any there. And then they get upset, they get frustrated and they turn on the publisher, refusing to be aggravated further.

That's the other thing that the Victorians didn't have. Instant gratification. It's the sort of sentiment that could keep the serial novel from really becoming a financial windfall for a publishing industry that isn't sure where it's headed.