[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: Jonathan, can you provide insights into the structure of a short story and how it differs from other forms of storytelling, such as novels or novellas?
Author/Instructor Jonathan Blum: Sure, well one thing that I think is somewhat different about a short story versus longer forms is I think that the writer has to start making choices a little bit earlier on in terms of what the story is going to be about. With longer work you have a little more time to set things out at the beginning to handle the setting to do some history of a town like these kinds of things you have a little more flexibility since you have a little bit more space you can you do those kinds of things whereas with a short story, as we saw when I showed you the the Mona Simpson, the Lorrie Moore, and the Ernest Hemingway stories, each of those stories gets to be what it is like and what it’s going to become very quickly like dramatic action, significant internal thought, dialogue moving right into what is important, what is significant because there’s almost a relationship between the reader and the writer. The reader is saying Okay, writer I will pay close attention to your story and in return I expect you to only tell me what is important and what is essential and what is meaningful and if you start straying too far from that and showing me stuff that’s not that important, I’m going to lose faith in you and I may quit reading your story. With a short story there’s just no time to waste. First paragraphs are enormously important and that’s when you’re beginning to create the arena of where the…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BUY THE BOOK – LAST WORD
BUY THE BOOK – THE USUAL UNCERTAINTIES: STORIES
About:
Jonathan Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of two books of fiction: The Usual Uncertainties (Rescue Press, 2019), a story collection, and Last Word (Rescue Press, 2013), a novella. Both were named one of the best books of the year by Iowa Public Radio, and The Usual Uncertainties was named one of the 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2019 by Electric Literature. Blum has twice appeared on KCRW’s Bookworm. His short stories have been published in Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Northwest Review, Playboy, and Shanxi Literature, among others. His short story, “The White Spot,” which was published in Electric Literature with an introduction by Deborah Eisenberg, appears in the award-winning anthology The Best Peace Fiction (University of New Mexico Press, 2021). He has taught fiction writing at The University of Iowa, Drew University, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland, and a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. He has also been a guest writer at the Tianjin Binhai New Area International Writing Program in China. He lives in Los Angeles.
WRITING CLASSES WITH JONATHAN BLUM
Jonathanblumwriter.com/classes
CONNECT WITH JONATHAN BLUM
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