“Narrow Valley”, by R A Lafferty, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1966, is brilliantly funny and one of the best short stories I have ever read. An excellent one to start with. I read it in the nice collection The Legend Book of Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois and published in 1991. I will be working through all of the stories in this book eventually.
Spoilers —>
Running to about 5500 words, this is an absurd story about a piece of land given to a Pawnee man that appears very narrow by outsiders, but is actually a beautiful valley a half mile on each side. Lafferty has great fun with the idea, and when one of the strangest families in short fiction tries to claim the land, all sorts of weird antics take place.
Lafferty’s descriptions of throwing a rock across the apparently eight feet wide strip of land to the other side are very clever and well “observed”.
Thoroughly enjoyed this one. I have learned that you can be as absurd as you like and get away with it in a short story if you are as accomplished at it as R. A. Lafferty.
Over the last couple of months I have written a few short stories, but it struck me that I don’t have much of a clue what a short story is or the various forms they can take.
I have read a few short stories over the years, but I have read them as a reader, as a consumer, not as a writer. Some have stuck in my mind, although I probably wouldn’t be able to remember the author, let alone the title of any of them. And if I added them all up, it might be a hundred, possibly two hundred, spread over forty years.
Therefore, I have decided to be more consistent, with a view to learning the craft by getting to know the short story form. And the way I will do that is by reading at least one short story every day.
Some will be short short stories, some long, and some might be novellas. I won’t count flash fiction otherwise I will have an easy get-out. I will read from any genre, although I will almost certainly favour science fiction, and both old and new stories. And I will mostly try to read award-winning or reputably published stories. There will be exceptions to that rule, however.
I have read at least one story a day for nineteen days so far, for a total of twenty-four. My aim is to read at least 365 short stories by the end of 2016.
By then, I might begin to understand short story form.
Yes, I know, I have to fill this in with an introductory post that nobody will read because it is called ‘Hello World!’ But it is the hardest post to write because it is the first one and so it is the most important.
But that is all I am going to write in here. If you actually read this waffle, you might be more interested in my second post, which will be far more interesting…