Short Stories (Richard Ford)

The Granta Book of the American Short Story

An excerpt from Richard Ford's excellent (6500 word) introduction: STORIES I LIKE

My own until-recently-private standards for what comprises a good story written by somebody other than me should be, I think, mentioned here, along with two or three gate-keeping remarks: that standards almost always come after the fact and by themselves neither predict nor produce great short stories; that the very best stories observe standards all their own, discovered unpredictably in the private rigors of writing; that toward short stories I feel vulnerable to any conception of form that inspires invention and discovery; and that I'm willing to call a piece of writing a short story if that's what the writer says it is. Ultimately, it's a good thing that American short stories remain as dissimilar and as formally under defined as they are.

As for me, I've always liked stories that strain my credulity, rather than ones that affirm what I know, and in payment for that strain make me aware of something I didn't know-the otherwise inaccessible. These are stories that prove, for example, the connection between bliss and bale, or the discrepancy between conventional wisdom and the truth, or that reveal affection residing where before it had seemed absent. Such stories concede what I believe-that literature is a privileged speaking which readers come to hungry for what lived life cannot usually provide.

I've always liked stories that make proportionately ample rather than slender use of language; feeling as I do that exposure to a writer's special language is a rare and consoling pleasure. I think of stories as objects made of language, not just as reports on/or illustrations of life, and within that definition, a writer's decision to represent life 'realistically' is only one of a number of possibilities for the use of his or her words.

Forgive me, but I like stories that I finally come to feel I understand; that is, whose purport I become confident about because of some gesture in the story itself-this, even though the story may not make a lick of ordinary sense. I don't consider stories to be documents for analysis or texts for study. But since as a willing reader I know stories are made things and without a natural form, I like them to have contemplated all the important curiosities they arouse in me, or at least create the illusion that they've contemplated them.

I like stories that end rather than merely stop, stories that somehow assure me that their stopping point is the best moment for all progress to cease.

In broader terms, I like stories I don't feel I could have written myself, and that are at least smarter than I am about their own subject matters. Otherwise, why bother reading them if you don't have to?

Beyond that, even though I prefer stories in which the goings-on inside seem to matter in the way life and death seem to matter, if that is not the intention, then I like the story's effects to compensate for that preference of mine. I like stories whose ends you can't predict when you've read to the middle. Often mid-way of a story I make just such a silent prediction and am always disappointed when I'm right. Though whatever's there at the end needs, for greatest power, to arise somehow (plausibly?) out of the story's terms.

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace 'out there' there exists an urgency-a chaos, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers.