Short stories

The release of Coteau's latest short story collection, For the Love of Strangers, by Brenda Niskala, inspires thoughts of short stories in general. You'd think in this truncated age of tweets and blurts and hasty blogs, the short story would be the ideal story form. So why are they the poor cousin of the fiction world? It's stupid.

Here's what's worse. Film adaptations. How many movies do you know of that actually admit to being adapted from short stories? I can think of two -- a local filmmaker made a film of one of Connie Gault's stories, and then there's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And YET, as a film writer explained to me, the first thing she had to do when adapting a novel was to rewrite it as the short story that was its essential core, and then write the screenplay based on that short story. HELLO. Just start with a short story, for the luva, and cut your workload in half.

But no.