Short Stories: A Novelist Falls In Love by Joseph Amiel

The short story has always been the traditional training ground where aspiring fiction writers honed their skills until they felt ready to bravely scale the Everest of their first novel. My own writing history turned that traditional career route topsy turvy. I had written and doctored a number of screenplays, but not a single short story, when I wrote three chapters of a novel and apprehensively gave it to a literary agent. He said he would get back to me in ten days. On the tenth day he informed me that he had passed it on to the newly-named head of a well-known publishing house. She, too, promised an answer in ten days. On the twentieth day after the agent's first phone call, he delivered the news that the publisher had made an offer for my novel. With absolutely no experience in narrative fiction, I was now a novelist! Magic!

That first novel was followed by others, which have connected me to many readers in over a dozen languages. In all that time I never wrote short fiction nor was I tempted to. Yet I recently reversed the traditional career trajectory by putting aside a novel I was finishing to write, in quick succession, three short-story murder mysteries. You have to be wondering why a lifelong novelist would risk venturing out of his comfort zone into the short-fiction-mystery genre already occupied by thousands of skilled writers? There lies a tale.

To put it most simply, I found myself afflicted by that great curse of the fiction writer: a compelling idea. The germ that led to that contagion was the news that lesbian friends were divorcing but would share custody of the two boys, raised as brothers, to which each had given birth. At about that same time, MWA announced it was soliciting stories for its annual anthology of murder mysteries, this time to be aimed at teenage girls. You are all probably ahead of me: The idea that gripped me was what if the separating lesbian mothers had teenage daughters who considered themselves sisters? For the murder victim I chose the town's most powerful, hated, and lecherous man, the judge who was marrying the mother who had precipitated the same-sex breakup.

I could have said, "What the hell do I know about writing a short story?" Or, after wasting a few days in awkward scribbling, I could have scurried back into the safe, spacious architecture of the long form, no harm done. Instead, over the course of those few days, I wrote the first draft of "Judgement Day." Having labored for well over a year on some novels, I was astonished and overjoyed to find that in less than a week, apart from revisions and polishing, I had in my hands a complete, intriguing story. I asked a few friends whose opinion I trusted to read it. Their verdict? They liked the story.

The truth is it never occurred to me that I might be stepping into a mine field. My unearned confidence derived, I think, from my being a story teller who values succinctness in welding character to plot. My problem with the story was not discomfort with the genre, but rather that my characters and their plot would have to exist within the confines of the anthology´s intended market. Much of today's YA fiction deals with gritty material, but would the judges picking stories for the anthology risk MWA´s good name by presenting teenage girls with a tale that centered on a salacious, if well-deserved, murder? I have no idea if homogenizing that crucial scene might have lifted the story into the table of contents, but it felt like amputation; I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I had so enjoyed writing my first short story that I wanted to come up with another. This one originated with an odd title I couldn´t get out of my mind. That was all I had: a title without the slightest hint of a tale attached to it. What did "The Girl Who Spoke Ventriloquism" mean? Who was the girl? And what was this ventriloquism? I was wrestling with all of that when the gods of fiction granted me a moment of utter inspiration. An image of Killarney, Ireland, which I had visited the previous year, popped into my head and then the quirky film festival hosted each year by a nearby village along the Ring of Kerry. I will be forever grateful that instead of dismissing those flashes of recollection, I seized on them as welcome gifts from my subconscious.

I was on a roll and even had an idea for a third story. When Donald Trump's lawyer informed him that the pre-nuptial agreement was about to expire that limited what he would have to pay his second wife if their marriage ended, Trump directed him to sue for divorce. That act of cold-eyed frugality was the seed for "Deadline Divorce." Like the other two stories, I couldn't imagine them any longer or shorter, which I realized was one mark of a good short story I had gotten right.

I also realized that I hated the idea of waiting months, usually fruitlessly, to hear whether or not a mystery magazine would buy a story. My beloved agent had passed on, so I decided to self-publish all three stories as a book. There would be no advance, but there would be satisfaction in making them available to readers. I chose a title appropriate to their general style, designed a cover, and pushed the upload button. 

Death Can Delight: A Trio of Mysteries can be purchased at Amazon.com in modestly-priced paperback and Kindle.

The excellent reviews have been gratifying. I learned I wasn´t delusional in believing that despite my inexperience with the genre I could write entertaining short stories, and I loved doing it. Be sure that I am now always on the lookout for future lightning strikes of short-fiction inspiration to fill what I will probably call Death Can Delight Again. You see, I have this idea for a story.

Joseph Amiel is the author of the novels Birthright, Deeds, A Question of Proof, Stalking The Sky, and Star Time. He created the web series AIN'T THAT LIFE, which is available, along with more information about him, at www.JosephAmiel.com.  He is a graduate of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Amherst College, and Yale Law School. He lives with his wife in New York.