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There’s a screenwriter friend of mine who has taught me a lot about the art of story from a screenwriting perspective, and it suddenly occurred to me today that the art of story when writing a screenplay is almost completely different from the art of story when writing a short story. I’m not exactly sure what it is. He would say that it’s because you an get inside a person’s head and tell the reader what that character is feeling.
I just read a short story by John Updike in a collection of the best American short stories for 2004. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what made this story so great. It was emotional, nostalgic, …and boring. You got inside the characters’ heads, and got to see what they were thinking and feeling, but there didn’t seem to be any drama in it. There’s something about that kind of short story that alienates me from the characters.
At first I thought, “maybe I’m just not that way. Maybe I don’t get all sappy and emotional.” But then I realized that “of course I do.” Maybe it’s just other people’s thoughts and other people’s nostalgia that I can’t seem to relate to sometimes. Or maybe I’m just someone who needs to see clear-cut moral decisions like does Spidey save the cable car full of children, or save the woman he loves.
I’m trying to wrap my head around whatever Updike and other writers like him have. Despite how boring I find those kinds of stories, I can definately see the talent behind them. Not only do I find that admirable, but it also attracts that certain kind of discriminating (aka snobby) reader that a lot of literary magazines cater to. And for some reason that seems to make, in the eyes of the (snobby) world, some stories greater than others.