Maybe I don’t get it. I’ve been reading a lot of short fiction lately in an attempt to learn more about the form—and also to hone some of the articles I do in game writing—and the best I can figure is that it’s all subjective. Part of me, I suppose, suspected this, but I’m sort of shocked to see just how little form there is to the form. It’s not just a matter of subject and voice, but a difference in the very ideas of what a short-story should strive to do.

I’ve busted out Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary, a book that must have come to my shelf from some forgotten English course, and read works by Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence, and Jamaica Kincaid this week. A lot of these are, by my pedestrian standards, boring. And that makes me feel like a petty, ignorant plebe.

For me it’s the same with novels and short stories, but even more important with short stories: Start with something exciting. Do not start slow. You can dawdle after you’ve hooked me, but don’t make me wait for a hook. A short story should, in my opinion, start aggressively and waste no time.

Last night, mired by words I wrote and couldn’t bear to re-read or re-write anymore, I opened up a copy of The Paris Review I bought, I dunno, ’cause there was a guy smoking a hookah on it, and looked for short fiction. This issue has a really invaluable interview with Norman Mailer, though, including a page of his first-draft text marked up with his redlines, and that’s what I ended up reading. Still hungry, I went to the Paris Review website to look for some nighttime reading (and submission guidelines).

For some reason, I got hooked by this story, “Icebergs,” by Alistair Morgan. In hindsight, I couldn’t tell you why. It had voice, I suppose, and just enough building tension to keep me curious. At the end of it, though, I felt like I’d been had—it doesn’t amount to much, dramatically. Plus, like a vulgarian, I can’t quite make sense of its language: It’s very stiff, like everything else I’ve seen in The Paris Review, like strict, formal grammar is more important to them than voice, which goes against my instinct for storytelling. Are they being pretentious snobs or am I being a parochial groundling?

To get a sense of modern short-form fiction, I follow links from Warren Ellis’ site and fiction-finders like Futurismic’s Friday Fiction roundups. Are blogs the future of short fiction? Are the choices for selling fiction really divided between “literary” snobbery and some plebeian pulp ghetto? Is that how it’ll always be?

I’m being melodramatic here, I know, but I’ve reached a point where I feel torn between striving for “respectable” work and the genre stuff I adore. I’m genuinely confused about my own snobbery, and wondering if trying to move “up” from gaming to short fiction (though I think, with a bit of practice, I can do both) is folly. Times like this, I wish I had people around I could talk shop with—people who would talk writing with me here in person.

Then I hear a piece like this on NPR, about Irish literary writer John Banville’s recent exuberant turn to noir pot-boilers, and I get hopeful again.