Thoughts on why there are so few critical assessments of short stories

The other day when I posted a very positive review about a short story by David Naiman, I tweeted about it and included a notice to David. In turn, he posted a very kind thank you, retweeted it, and then a couple of people following him started following me. (I have 37 Twitter followers now! Imagine!)

Yesterday, Lisa Taddeo "liked" my Tweet linking to a positive review about her story A few weeks ago, I got an email from Eli Barrett when I blogged about his story. While blogging through Best American Short Stories, I got a reply on Twitter from Amy Silverberg, and Jacob Guajardo was cool enough to even follow me.

Posting positive reviews about writers, even if you run a blog that gets maybe 3,000 views a month, is a good way to make writer friends. And if you run a blog and are also a writer struggling to get picked up by a more noticeable venue, writer friends are good to have. Which means when I'm reviewing a story, I have only motivations to post positive reviews and no reason to post negative ones. That doesn't really promote honesty and healthy, vigorous criticism.

Naiman, when he responded on Twitter, noted that almost nobody is doing serious criticism of short stories these days. He's right, and I think I can understand why. Almost all the people reading short stories are writers themselves, so who in their right mind would provide honest criticism? Instead, what you're likely to get--and what we actually have--is an endless back-scratching chain of positive "reviews" that don't really review much. I say good things about you so you'll say good things about me. That's good for networking, but it's not great for the ecosystem of short fiction.

If there's a movie you like and you want to talk about it, you can easily find people online to talk about it with. You can find a dozen Youtubers picking apart the movie at length. If there's a song you like, you can find an online community to talk about it. But if you read a short story, and you want to dig into what it means or what works and doesn't work about it, you're usually shit out of luck. There's a reason I get 3,000 views a month; they're almost all headed to the reviews I've done. Almost nobody cares what I write about my own writing process. My blogging buddy Karen Carlson gets a lot more hits than I do, and she mostly is doing the same thing: reading short stories and talking about them. In fact, if you Google one of the short stories from BASS or Pushcart, she's usually the number one result after the story itself, and I'm often #2.

That's not a great sign for the health of short fiction as a viable commercial and cultural activity. Which is an absolute shame, because there is great fiction being written in America today, but almost the only stories anyone talks about, if they talk about them at all, are the ones the New Yorker puts out. And even that is usually just a day or two of chat on Twitter.

I find writing reviews somewhere between exhilarating and as exhausting as writing fiction of my own. It's definitely a lot more fun to write a good review than a bad one. The bad ones, I don't Tweet about. I feel bad about them. But I feel I need to write them, because without honest criticism, the ecosystem collapses.