The Short Story Is Dead, Long Live The Short Story!

Clancy Steadwell On How Substack Can Save Fiction

Dear Republic,

The pseudonymous Clancy Steadwell has for a long time been one of my Substack faves — endlessly creative, frequently hilarious, a shining knight of the “creative underclass.” The next ROL contest is to discuss the “best thing” you read over the past year. Those entries are due in May 11 at republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com

-The Editor

THE SHORT STORY IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE SHORT STORY!

When was the last time you told someone, “I read this short story the other day that was just fantastic; you have to check it out!” I’d reckon it was a long time ago, if ever. I certainly haven’t done so.

Well, at least not in person. My friends/family circle aren’t really literary types. On Substack, though, such recommendations are kind of my thing.

Essays, though? Non-fiction? Sure, you’ve shared that, been moved by it. Especially stuff from Substack. You sent your dad that essay about some political thing everyone is mad about, and it definitely helped him see the error in his beliefs (actually it didn’t because he just sent you an essay espousing the opposite side of things); you sent your friend group chat that creative non-fiction thing about the beauty of youth; then there was the one about the multi-faceted and complex nature of the characterizations in Mike White’s White Lotus which inspired you to finally re-up that Max subscription.

There aren’t many Substack short stories to accompany these non-fiction sort of posts that enter the discourse, or have even gone viral. You’ve rarely ever discovered a fiction author on Substack who hasn’t already been anointed by traditional publishing. As Sam Kahn called Freddie out for last week, it’s too easy to regard even moderately popular Substack fiction writers toiling away without orange checkmarks as members of the “creative underclass,” hopeless dregs jerking each other off over their silly little stories, a class which I am proudly a part of.

Among the Substack literati and beyond, the fiction discourse is very much centered on novels and the girth of zeitgeist they are able to capture in their many (often many, many) pages. Time reading is even better spent with the classics, among their timeless truths and unassailable value established over decades or centuries of aggrandizement by the publishing establishment eager to release another edition.

So the short story is dead, right?

Not quite yet. The short story is on the brink, not of extinction, but of its moment, a moment brought about by the Substack medium, the cultural trends, and the death and stagnation of its previous gatekeepers.

***

As a long-time proponent, writer, and poster of the short story on Substack, you may assume I have an inherent bias.

You would be correct.

My confidence in the coming resurgence of the short story comes not from a narcissistic fixation on my own work, but the quality of others in the proverbial Substack fiction/literary salon. If you know where to look, there’s an abundance of fiction on Substack that wouldn’t be out of place in a lit mag. I’d like to think of myself as a discerning eye, but I’m just an anonymous and uncredentialed observer so you’ll have to trust me when I tell you that for every mediocre work I find (often by some regular non-fiction writer of moderate success who secretly wants to write short stories but ends up crafting some poor auto-fictitious imitation or sub-par genre screed instead), I then find a random person with 47 subscribers writing things that haunt me, bring me joy, or have such creative prose it gives me a shiver of holy crap, why can’t I write like that?

If they’re so good, why don’t they submit to publications then? Or, maybe they do, and if so, they aren’t being accepted? Why would I want to read something that someone with fashionable glasses or elbow patches did not approve of while reading in a bespoke Instagrammable café?

I am not an expert on lit mags or submission processes or how they work or whatever. All I know is that I don’t want to spend 20 dollars to submit to a place I have very low odds of being accepted to — perhaps not due to lack of quality, but any myriad of factors, including luck of the draw. Besides, I don’t know anyone in real life who reads lit mags. Do you?

Meanwhile, Substack is a growing platform which lends itself best to short and medium form Internet ‘blog’ or ‘email’ type writing in the 8k words or less (ideally 5k or less) range and certainly not to novels. This means that any fiction upon it likely to be relevant to the discourse at large would be either flash fiction (it’s having a great moment), poetry (also doing well), or...the short story.

I post my stories here because it allows me to reach people who might enjoy my work more immediately, and I might enjoy their feedback more immediately. I am confident enough in my work to let the market of attention see my stories rise or fall on the basis of many eyes, rather than boast the credentials granted by only a few.

Still, doubt creeps in when fiction compares itself to non-fiction in the Substack space. The main impediment for stories like mine and for fiction writers on Substack in attaining the heights of non-fiction is a topic I covered a couple years ago in one of my rare non-fiction attempts, namely that we expect a non-passive, more intensive brain activity like reading to be transactional, meaning that we get something from what we put into it, usually some version of The Truth.

We live in a world in which reality is regularly packaged up and delivered in the shape and quality you desire. People now want The Truth in an easily digestible and up-front form. Often, when it comes in long-form writing, that truth is most functionally espoused in the title, to draw you in and let you drill down into the nuance from there. This puts explicitly fiction posts and Substacks at a disadvantage.

Take, for example, these two post titles/subtitles. The first is typical of a non-fiction essay on Substack, the latter how I present my short stories when I post them:

desktop PC cleanliness of our mothers

what the digital clutter of the Boomers says about their interpretations of modern domesticity

vs.

desktop of the hesperus

short story

Which do you instinctively want to click? The first directly tells you the truth that the writer would hope you to derive from reading, and therefore the Truth you’d expect to get out of it. I think, currently, most Substackers choose the first.

Let’s for a second pretend that both stories are espousing the exact same truth, only one does so through a story, adding another layer through which you’ll have to fight to take anything away from it.

Indulging in this extra bit of heavy lifting is mostly a matter of trusting the author —who they are, what they’re about, and whether they’re known to deliver such Truths effectively. More than that, the Truth may be subjective; what you take from it might be different than someone else. This, of course, is why movies, TV, novels, etc. are such great discourse driving machines. Everyone has a different take.

So why not short stories as well? Right now, that little bit of trust and extra brainpower is not present.

But...

It seems to me that Substack itself is part of a vibe shift, the developing of a sort of cultural Ozempic in a society that’s acquired mental diabetes from a surplus of easy meta-informational carbohydrates. It’s a platform of people willing to read long(er)-form writing, the basic prerequisite for short story consumption, and full of readers who are finding that imbibing such quality long-form writing and the nuances within is — while more time-consuming and requiring more brainpower — far healthier than other mediums and, in the way we nowadays laud deterministic self-improvement (no matter how annoying), I think many will eventually make the switch to more regularly sourcing their discourse from Substack-only published short stories by authors they have slowly grown to trust, if only to flex a new brain muscle.

Really, this is about the age-old dichotomy between showing and telling. My rather hopeful and probably lame prediction is that there will soon come a time when it is seen as far more beneficial (and therefore, cool) to spend time reading and talking about Substack posts that may show you something than simply telling you something. Never underestimate the humanistic drive of modern strivers to find new ways to at least pretend to better themselves, especially on a platform so full of pretentious individuals.

All it will take is time, trust, willingness, and some damn good stories, of which there is no shortage on Substack.

Clancy Steadwell is the mustachioed pseudonym of a fiction author writing contemporary lit-fic, usually in short story form, featuring Bildungsromans, romance, humor and local color. One of his stories recently appeared in The Substack Post and another was 2024 Substack Featured.