Day: January 21, 2009

I was thinking today about the lack of short stories for teens and pre-teens. Since I prefer speculative fiction, I was specifically thinking about the lack of Science Fiction and Fantasy stories for those age groups. Younger groups have short stories in abundance since all picture books are short stories with pictures. Some picture books are delightful for all age groups. But where are the stories that are just for the teens and pre-teens.

I’ve heard other people comment on this gap before. I’ve heard people argue that teens and pre-teens just aren’t interested in short fiction. I don’t believe that is true. I think that they would be very interested in short fiction if there were a delivery mechanism that could get them the fiction that is appropriate to their interests. Teen female readers of the Twilight saga would almost certainly devour short vampire fiction if they only knew where to find it. Teen video game playing boys would probably love to see short fiction placed in those worlds as well. In fact I would argue that the growing popularity of Manga is due in part to the fact that it is short fiction. With short YouTube videos and short television segments, we’re all being trained to acquire our information in snippets. It seems that short fiction should blossom.

In fact I think that short fiction would be a boon to teachers who are trying to help reluctant or struggling readers. Sometimes struggling readers are emotionally and intellectually ready for more complex stories, but they are daunted by the size of the books they must read in order to get those stories. I have this problem with my son frequently. It would be nice if there were a huge array of short fiction available so that these readers could get a taste of the kinds of stories they might like and so that they have the chance to find joy in fiction.

I’m certain that the gap is not for lack of willing writers. I know writers who would happily write YA and middle grade short fiction if there was only a market to receive it. I suspect that there are magazines and e-zines out there who would be happy to buy the short fiction if only people would buy their zines to read it. But teens aren’t buying and neither are their parents. This is where the discussion leads naturally to “New Media.” Using Facebook and MySpace and Twitter to attempt to popularize short fiction is a fascinating experiment that I expect to see occurring in the years to come. I know that some magazines are already sending out adult fiction via Twitter. It would be interesting to have a kids twitter story feed. I wonder if it would be more effective to have the fiction be more user-generated like the lolcats site. Fiction for teens by teens. I know when I was a teen writer, I would have loved to have a place to submit my stuff and get feedback. Are there online communities structured specifically for teen writers? That would be an interesting experiment as well.

Most of this is not stuff that I desire to experiment with. I don’t want to administrate a teen writing website. I’m sadly clueless about using Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. The piece I do intend to experiment with is writing short fiction for YA and middle grade readers. I have one of each in my house with two more on the way. I want to write stories that my kids will enjoy reading. I want to create worlds where they want to be immersed. This world immersion is one argument against short fiction for these age groups. They don’t want to fall in love with a world or some characters only to have it be done a few pages later. Perhaps a series of short stories might be the answer to that. I don’t know what the long term plan for the stories will be. I don’t know that I can ever get them distributed widely, though I’d love to put them into the hands of as many kids as will love them. Perhaps I’ll create a section on my website specifically for sharing the stories. But for now I just need to focus on writing stories that I enjoy writing and my kids enjoy reading.