The short story is an entirely different pleasure than the novel. For writers, the form demands precision and intense scrutiny of craft choices. The short story is constrained by its brevity but remains limitless in the opportunities it presents to challenge notions of craft. The short story collection, then, is an art form in and of itself. In conversation, stories produce something new and thrilling. We are let in to linger and marvel at the writer’s world, to listen to its chorus of voices telling us something urgent.
This interview features three writers who published their debut short story collections this year: Ada Zhang, the author of The Sorrows of Others; Nishanth Injam, the author of The Best Possible Experience; and Alexandra Chang, the author of Tomb Sweeping. I called Zhang, Injam, and Chang to learn about their writing processes, relationships with the short story form, and experiences publishing their first collections.
Ada Zhang: The Sorrows of Others is a deep, long glance into other people’s lives. It’s playing with this idea of what the other is in relation to who we are and in what ways we are others to people. There’s this unknowability to each person and I think language and storytelling help us mitigate those gaps and bring us closer, but even they can never really take us all the way. We’re all on our own little islands and this book was my attempt at reaching out.
I think imagination is powerful in the way that it can build our muscles when it comes to connecting. The point of the stories isn’t whether or not the characters are successful in connecting. I try not to make any judgments about that. But I think that in writing these stories, it was me trying to grapple with the essential loneliness of being a person. How are we supposed to move forward? It can feel really damning. Through writing these stories, I was able to comfort myself and hopefully comfort readers.
Brandon J. Choi: Can you speak to your relationship with the short story and the particular joys and challenges that come with it?
AZ: I love a big novel as much as anybody else but there is something about the short story that is just ungraspable. There are so many ways to write a short story and innovate within the form. I think that the form is actually really flexible. It allows for a lot of play. Everybody has taken and made the form their own and put their own fingerprint on it. I think that’s ultimately the goal. My favorite short story writers have all re-imagined what the form can do—and the form can do a lot.
I think that a good short story transcends the form and transcends craft altogether. Craft helps us talk about writing in terms of point of view, character, or plot, but I think any true work will always go beyond craft to a point where these words start to dissolve. What is point of view, is plot, is character? People talk about the short story tradition sometimes as though there is one aesthetic but I don’t think that there is.
BJC: When thinking about what you want to write about or who you want to write for, how do you think the story form enables you to do that?
AZ: I think that the main constraint of the short story is that it’s short. It’s not long like a novel. I say this to my students a lot: constraints in writing are a really good thing. That’s why people like prompts. It gives you a framework to work in and if you go for it, you can subvert that constraint, challenge it, flip it on its head and make it work for you.
I have noticed that because of this inherent constraint, the fact that the short story is short and therefore somewhat contained, I try to glimpse the end at the beginning. It is important to me to be able to see what the ending is going to be at least halfway through the story, even if what I “see” is just a feeling and even if I don’t quite reach it in the first draft. There’s always revision! Still, I never know how I’m going to get to the end. I have to write toward that image or feeling. I really think that the ending is not tricksy; it shouldn’t be a punchline or a bow, and I’m suspicious of a big reveal. People will often think, how am I supposed to end? I think the ending is not separate from the story. It’s just part of the story. It should be able to pass as just another detail, just another line, just like any line from the middle or beginning of the story. It’s like what I think about time. What is plot? In any story, it’s just time and the way it moves and the way we experience time is linear; we have one day, the next day, the next day, until we march right up to death. But time is actually cyclical. We are always living in the present and because of memory, we also are always in the past, and because of imagination, we are always in the future. So the way we experience and move through time is linear, but time is actually not. Being able to glimpse the ending early demonstrates my view of time.
BJC: How do you know when a story is done?
AZ: When you start a story, the whole story already exists. You’re the one who’s going to pull it out of the ether and put it onto a page and share it with other people. The story is out there, independent of you, that’s how I think of it. The moment a story begins is terrifying because just one paragraph in, you’ve already set some rules and expectations for the reader and therefore for yourself which means you’ve already determined in a certain sense how things are going to end. So I think it just helps to have the ending in your mind. Not what it is, but that it exists and is waiting for you.
In terms of knowing when a story is done, I keep returning to what I heard a writer say once. I was young at the time and he said that the work is never finished, only abandoned. At a certain point, it is about letting go. When you can see the piece objectively and see why someone would think it’s a good story and also why someone might overlook it, and you’re okay with both outcomes, it’s a complete story. You know that this is a story for someone out there and maybe it’s not for others. I imagine that’s what it’s like with one’s children. They teach you a lot about yourself and you hope that they find people who are going to love them but you also know that you can’t protect them. They’ve got to go out there and find their people. A lot of it is letting go.
In my first drafts, it’s very clear what tools I’m using to make things happen. In the later drafts, I try to leave craft behind and journey the last leg alone. You have character, point of view, and place, all the great fiction angels, guarding you, marching with you into the story, but you have to be willing to leave them behind at some point. Craft gives us tools, not rules. They should not be constraints that hold you back. The real constraints are the ones that are unique to you, unique drafting problems that you have, that you have decided to face in the story. If you do that, that’s when your story becomes unlike anybody else’s story.
BJC: Beyond writing individual stories, can you talk about how you approached assembling them? Do you think your work lands differently when put together?
AZ: You know what? I actually do. I didn’t think that they would have a cumulative effect but that was naive of me because every time I’ve read a story collection, that’s what has happened to me. With individual stories, it’s like dropping singles and then the collection is the album. The most pronounced way that I felt this was when I listened to my audiobook. Of course the performances were incredible and the experience made me realize that the whole is something different from its parts. It’s greater, bigger. The story is a form, and the collection is a form in and of itself, which is great because your story gets to be itself and also be part of a family.
Craft gives us tools, not rules. They should not be constraints that hold you back.
I was rereading my collection to refresh myself. “The Subject,” the first story, was my attempt to up the ante for reading the rest of the book. I realized it was actually the last story I drafted. That makes sense to me because by then I’d written quite a number of stories about Chinese immigrants, Chinese citizens, Chinese Americans… There’s always discourse on representation and I started to feel a responsibility to engage in this conversation. I have my thoughts but I didn’t want to just shoot some tweets out into the world. All my questions about what we owe people we’re making art about live in that first story. It’s the last one I wrote because I had done all this work but began to question whether I had a right to be writing about these people. I don’t think there are definitive answers here, which is why I think we should let our stories do that rigorous and deeply imaginative work. That’s how “The Subject” came to be first in the collection. At one point, we wondered if “Compromise,” the last story in the collection, should be first but I think that would’ve changed the tone.
BJC: I’ve heard you talk about Chekhov, William Trevor, and Yiyun Li as sources of inspiration. Were there any books you found yourself returning to while writing your collection or any books or writers you wanted to be in conversation with? Who have you learned from and how have you been influenced when creating your own aesthetic?
AZ: Influences while writing the book: Mavis Gallant, Edward P. Jones, William Maxwell, Toni Morrison, James Alan McPherson, Denis Johnson. And all the names you mention. I love these writers. I guess what I’ll say about lineage is that by learning about your tradition you also learn how to break free from that tradition, meanwhile carrying the best parts of it forward. This might also be true of life.
Nishanth Injam: I wasn’t much of a reader or a writer when I was in India. It wasn’t until after I moved to the States and worked a tech job that the idea of writing occurred to me. I had moved to this new country where I didn’t know anybody and I had this keen sense that I was going to live a pretty narrow imitation of life. It felt like a deep loss. I was extremely lonely. I couldn’t switch my job and just hated it. I had all these obligations back home so I couldn’t quit. And I was desperate to create an alternative world in which I could be more in touch with myself, with the past and the person that I was before I had come to the States. I was building these stories to keep myself alive in a deeper sense. When I started writing, it wasn’t necessarily to achieve something. It was purely to help me live.
It also helped that I found out about MFA programs around then. I saw that they usually workshopped stories and I was trying to get better at my craft so it seemed like stories would be easier, but I was so wrong.
Brandon J. Choi: Can you speak more to the pleasures and difficulties of the form?
NI: The pleasure is that you could be done quickly and you can take on a voice that might not be immediately accessible to you. For instance, I could take on the voice of a tailor, even though I’ve never worked as a tailor or have significant experience being in close proximity to one. I can become this person who mimics somebody’s consciousness and their patterns of behavior enough for the length of the story and still make it convincing. Whereas, I think that inherent lack of knowledge comes through in the span of a novel because it’s too many pages for you to keep up that pretense. The other thing that I like about the short story is that you can really play with structure. With the novel, I think, because you have more room, the structure matters less. Then there are pleasures of language. You have less space so you can make every sentence count. With the novel, I think readers are less likely to spend time rereading a sentence. You always want to keep moving within the space of a novel. As for disadvantages, there are difficulties with the form as it has traditionally been practiced in North America. If you’re coming at it from a different culture, it might be challenging to get your story to fit into the general perception of how a short story should work.
BJC: Can you elaborate?
NI: One general working definition of a short story is that a good short story should have two stories. There’s an over-story and there’s an under-story, and then both of them meet at the end. You think the story’s about X all along and then the story turns out to be about Y. Another definition is that a short story should be like a pinprick that you feel at the end of an injection. When you are being injected and then take out the needle, that’s when the emotions should have you writhing in pain. The other definition is that an ending of a good short story should always result in complexity of afterthought. I have issues with almost all of those. I think the form itself has been so contaminated by the world we live in and by capitalism that it seems weird to expect pleasure or a release of emotion only at the end. You can compare it to a masculine orgasm where it’s only pleasure when the man comes at the end. It’s also the sense that emotion is permitted at certain expected hours and any unmanageable or uncontrollable emotion is only seen as irrational or not valid. It’s also very capitalistic. It’s a value system that rewards atomization. Because thoughts by themselves are not as dangerous. You can construct a story with a point in mind and bring it out at the end, and that mode of storytelling is very safe.
There are other forms of storytelling. For instance, there are many oral storytelling cultures within India, in which there is no expectation for a short story to end in a certain way with everything neatly tied together. There’s no pressure to make every single sentence accounted for. It can be this loose thing but it can still have its own power and be its own thing. Growing up, I remember reading short stories which were like tiny novels. They didn’t have all these formal constraints. So when I moved here and encountered those definitions, I was shocked to see all these perceptions, which were actually held by people practicing the form and not clearly stated anywhere. I think that’s an experience many writers of color have. We are usually told that our stories are not correct in terms of craft. Matthew Salesses does a wonderful job of showing all the ways in which our writing gets marginalized in his Craft in the Real World.
BJC: I read that this collection was your MFA thesis during your time at Michigan. How do you think you changed as a writer during your time there?
NI: Before the MFA, when I wrote the initial drafts of these stories, the heart of the stories was there, but there was much to improve formally and linguistically. You have to know that when I started writing, I couldn’t even hold tense and had absolutely no idea what the past perfect was. I struggled with grammar. I used to write sentences with ellipses because I didn’t know what a sentence was, functionally or otherwise. I went from that to writing sentences that people were calling lyrical and beautiful. When I got into the MFA, I became more conscious of how every word choice contributes to the meaning of the story. This is not something that people usually talk about because a lot of writers are writing in their first language. People sometimes read a sentence and judge if you are any good. If you are able to write a really good sentence, does that make you a better writer than someone who’s gutting their heart on the page? My opinion is that you don’t exactly know where a writer is on their journey, and those kinds of judgements are silly. Even if you are somebody who grew up with English, you are still writing from your subconscious where you’re trying to find words. There is always an effort to translate the unsayable.
The MFA gave me the space to read and write and see how my work was being perceived by others and the ways in which I was falling short. The community and the friendships I formed there are invaluable. The MFA gave me friends I would trust with my life. If you can find friends whose work you can be excited about and who can similarly be excited about yours, then you can all grow together. That’s really the best thing you can hope for.
BJC: What do you want the readers to leave the collection with?
I was building these stories to keep myself alive in a deeper sense.
NI: When I read a book, I don’t always want to be just entertained. I want nourishment, something that will help me live a richer, more meaningful life. There are so many collections that come out every year and so many good books that are out there already. Why am I spending all this time trying to add something? Why am I contributing to this massive pile of good literature? Why do I write? Why do I think that I have the right to say anything? Finding my answers for those questions was challenging. When I arrived at my own particular answer, I knew I had a book. I wanted to tell stories, not for entertainment or pleasure. But to move me along in the path of greater love. I wrote the stories as a way of making meaning and holding onto and transforming the love that I have. I think a lot of that is in the title story.
BJC: When writing this collection, were there any books that you found yourself returning to or any that you wanted to be in conversation with?
NI: When I started writing short stories, I googled what the best short story collection of all time was and one of the answers was James Joyce’s Dubliners. I still stand by this when I say that when I wrote my collection, I was writing to be in conversation with James Joyce. It’s crazy, but it’s true.
We have this Western canon, of thinking and art, and I’m just a small individual from a faraway place, leading a nondescript life, and trying to make meaning from it. Who should I look up to for instruction? Obviously, I’m going to be looking at all the greats and seeing what I can learn from them.
I’m really interested in epiphanies. Nobody believes in epiphanies these days because nobody learns anything the first time. You have an epiphany but you keep making the same mistake. Sometimes, that epiphany is something that holds after multiple times. My sense of epiphany is different. It comes from transcendence, from trying to move out of limbo. I’m trying to elevate myself to a better place, to being a better person. I’m naturally attracted to books in which there’s a similar strain. I see that in Dubliners. If you are sitting there in Dublin a hundred years ago, writing these stories, trying to be artful and truthful to your vision of life in Dublin that you want to present, why shouldn’t I be, in my own small way, be similarly truthful, similarly artful?
Alexandra Chang: Tomb Sweeping is a collection that follows characters who are going through some sort of transition or dealing with loss. It’s a slice-of-life collection that focuses on the ordinary grief that ordinary people tend to experience, and the deeply affecting and moving moments in their day-to-day lives.
The collection likely started when I started writing short stories and thinking more carefully about short stories as a form. The oldest story is from nine years ago. That became the title story. At the time, I did not realize that it was going to be a collection because I was such a baby writer that I wasn’t really thinking in terms of books or even the possibility of publishing. I was thinking: What are stories? How do I want to write stories? And also, how do story writers I love do what they do? What resonates with me and how can I take what I learned and apply it to my own version of this form?
Brandon J. Choi: How has your relationship to the story form changed over time?
AC: We have this exposure to very canonical work, like Hemingway, Cheever, Carver… There are so many things happening in these stories that are moving, but maybe don’t necessarily reflect what I want to do as a writer. In an undergrad workshop (that I took after undergrad, when I was a staff employee at Cornell), I was exposed to flash fiction for the first time. I read Lydia Davis. I read a lot of very weird stories. My professor was J. Robert Lennon, and he is also a very strange and fun and experimental short story writer. That really opened up the possibilities of the short story for me. There are incredible things that you can do with structure and such a short amount of space, like two, three pages. The emotional effect can be huge. That really changed what I understood a short story could be and the limitlessness of a short story.
BJC: You have spoken about constraints in past interviews. Can you elaborate on what your writing and editing look like when working with constraints?
AC: Constraint is basically a way into a story, because for me, there are limitless ways to approach a story. To me, that is both exciting and very daunting. Having certain constraints like, for example, committing to writing a story in vignettes, helps. Or, for example, I’ll have a story take place in only one month of time or only one day. I wrote this one story that didn’t make it into the collection, but it had very long sentences to capture a tiny amount of time—the constraint being that I had to expand time as much as possible. Those kinds of directives/prompts/constraints—whatever you want to call them—can give me a lot of creative energy. They give me a sense of direction and a path to go down with a story that I may previously have felt paralyzed by.
BJC: It’s something to push on versus free falling in nothing.
AC: That really is how it feels, because there are just so many ways to do a story. Which, I mentioned, is also why I love stories. That there are so many ways to approach a story, but without constraint, I don’t know that I would necessarily finish very much. That’s why I find novels so hard, too. Talk about a form that’s incredibly capacious and very flexible. There are no constraints on it in terms of length or anything.
BJC: I want to talk more about revision. I imagine your stories with their various structures and constraints were very different to write but also very different to edit. Can you speak to your editing experience for this collection?
AC: It was hard, not only because each story has its own mechanisms that I recognize and want to honor, but also because my relationship to each of the stories was so different. Some of them felt very old and then some of them still feel extremely fresh to me.
One thing that I hadn’t really considered before I started actually putting all the stories together was ordering. How does a story move into another in terms of what it’s about, or even an emotional state? What would I want to leave a reader with as they enter a new story? That definitely took up a lot of time for me, more time than I probably needed to spend on it.
Still, even with the older stories, it was exciting to re-enter each and see something new I wanted to change in it, even if it was as small as wanting to change a comma to an em dash or changing a word like “home” to “house.” Those small moments as a writer can breathe a lot of new life into a story and give a writer a new relationship to it. And then, of course, there were the huge revisions. “Cure for Life,” for example, was told in a completely different perspective before.
It goes back to a sense of play for me. I want to write about stuff that is important and moving, at least to me. But in the writing itself, I also want to remain playful. With each new revision, I approached it open to discovering something new about the story that I hadn’t seen before.
BJC: Though this is your debut story collection, this is not your debut book. How is the experience of editing a story collection different from that of a novel?
AC: I have this new analogy for writing and editing a short story collection versus a novel. Writing the novel felt like having this huge, open expanse of land and thinking, what do I want to build here? It can be any kind of building. It can be a corral for horses. It can be a skyscraper. Whatever. The beginning is just this empty plot of land. Because of that, the novel was a very lengthy and difficult process because I just had no idea what I was doing. But it was also kind of exciting because I had no idea what I was doing. It was a lot of constructing and then destroying and reconstructing and tearing down again. I think I wrote 50,000 words across two summers and then immediately cut 30,000 when I started revising.
Stories feel more like stepping into an empty room and thinking, what do I want to put into this room?
The stories in this analogy feel more like stepping into an empty room—but it’s already a room that’s there—and thinking, okay, here are these four walls and a floor and a ceiling to work with. Or maybe it’s a circular room. I’m stepping into a space and now I’m thinking, how do I decorate this particular space? What do I want to put into this room? Now rearrange the furniture and the decor I’ve put in there. It felt more manageable to write each individual story and it felt lower stakes in the sense that I could experiment and play and it wasn’t ever going to be a waste of time if it didn’t work out.
With the novel, after spending so much time writing, writing, and writing all these words, I felt like I had to stay committed to the project. The novel also took a lot more of me in a shorter amount of time. The stories were these fun things that I was working on over a longer period of time. I was following whatever impulses I had. I think short stories are where a lot of writers really learn to be writers. And because of that, there’s so much love and respect for the form. I don’t think that I could ever let go of writing short stories. There are definitely writers who only write novels, but there are so many of us who are deeply invested and tied to the short story.
BJC: When writing Tomb Sweeping, were there any books you found yourself returning to, any books or writers you wanted to be in conversation with? Thinking in terms of literary lineage, I am curious who influenced you and your aesthetic.
AC: Some of my stories are in direct conversation with specific writers and stories that, after I read them, inspired me to write. That’s something that I need to constantly remind myself of too: reading other writers is a huge source of inspiration. If you’re feeling blocked or down on writing for whatever reason, return to these story writers who you love, who have inspired you before.
Some examples: Maile Meloy, Stephen Dixon, Lucia Berlin. I think I carried A Manual for Cleaning Women around with me for two years. Yiyun Li. I’ve read every single one of her books. I read Gold Boy, Emerald Girl when I first started writing stories, and Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger.
There are so many new writers I feel in conversation with as well, like Asako Serizawa’s Inheritors and Shruti Swamy’s A House is a Body. Shruti talks about writing stories that are deeply feminine and emotional, almost in opposition to this very canonical male, everything-is-subtext, minimalist style. Shruti’s stories are so dreamlike and disorienting, but in a way where you can tell that she’s very purposefully taking you on this journey. I really admire her work and it inspires me to write in new ways.