There is nothing quite as powerful as a story. It is one of humanity's oldest surviving art forms for a very good reason, and one that predates modern technology and will survive long into the future after we have moved on to our eternal reward. They aren't going anywhere, in other words. We connect much too well to tales of wonder and adventure to ever have them fully detach from our imagination.
Even now, one of the most popular forms of entertainment online is streaming, but one of the things most commonly clipped out from said streamers' streams would be stories they tell about things that happened to them. It remains alluring even to people outside the space. The allure of the story stays strong despite advancement in technology and the form said entertainment is delivered in. People still love a good anecdote.
So what is it about stories that manages to stick to us? Why is it that we are always interested in these tales that have little to do with our own lives? Is it really just because we can gain something from them for ourselves, or is there more to it? How do they always remain so relevant despite the state of society or the people in it?
Sure there are favorite stories that come and go, but people always cling to the form anyway. Every popular movie is remember for its story, long after its effects become quaint with the passage of time. Old films are still watched today for their storytelling prowess, for instance. The biggest criticism with new movies is the writing above all, which is why they fade from relevance so quick and would even if the effects weren't lame.
As I said, stories are king. They are what the audience is always looking for.
But then how can one explain the failure of the mega pubs? How can one explain low book sales from OldPub at the same time NewPub exploded in relevance and quality? All of this is a consequence of the industry's failures to give the audience what they wanted. Surely if people wanted to read then they would be buying books from the biggest billion dollar industry industry that sells them, right? But we know that isn't the case.
An industry consisting of middle aged cat lady urbanites and their industry of writing workshop belt lines to teach authors how to write books people don't want have chased audiences away long ago. That seems to be fine, though. The industry appears completely oblivious to their cratering and is under the delusion that it's still the 20th century, that they are some kind of respectable elite class who are above the common man and know what they are doing, and that they still matter to anyone outside of their tiny, shrinking clique.
If they weren't allowed to force their stuff on kids in school thanks to government interference, they would have deservedly folded long ago. OldPub is a 20th century industry that has no relevance in the 21st.
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| This explains a lot about their relevance. |
That small clique is what tried and failed to control publishing since at least the last days of the 20th century. They are even at the point where they are mimicking one of the things that killed the comic book industry: unending variant covers.
Except their version is much, much worse. That's right, they're making people go to different book stores to buy a complete story. It's probably the worst thing they could do, and a good sign they have learned all the wrong lessons.
It is clear now that they are tail-spinning into the ground and unable to pull up. There is no way such an oblivious industry is sustainable, and in no way can it continue to call itself a true "traditional" or professional as an industry. It is merely old and dying, it's time over.
The days when these people had control is gone. Even though less people read than ever before, more people also read independent and small pub books than any time since before OldPub existed. This shift started happening years ago as something noted with the Pulp Revolution that the perception of reading was changing.
Normal people had already started to have enough of the dying mutation of OldPub and wanted stories again. It's hard to image how different things have become since the first PulpRev hashtag was typed out on Twitter, but it is not the same as it was then anymore. The new era has already begun.
So what is all this meant to say? Well, it goes to show you how powerful at artform storytelling is that is managed such a wide swerve over the centuries to the point that there is still a class of individuals who wish to control it with an iron fist. Even when the billion dollar mutation of an industry can't sell anything, and their stores are either filling with Japanese manga or closing at a rapid rate, they still want that control.
And all OldPub can try to do is squeeze money out of their dwindling audience. There is no growth here, only death. Readers deserve better than this kind of scummy behavior.
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| Buy from the right retailer to get the full story! Surely not a practice to worry about... |
But where exactly did the obsession with storytelling as an artform come start from? Why are stories so powerful?
Starting from the very beginning: anecdotes, campfire and bedtime stories, myths and legends, and speculation about the world and the universe itself, all formed into being the ultimate art-- a pure expression of humanity. Covering everything from faith to love to adventure to romance to history, everything was fair game. Genres never existed before we forced them onto storytelling. In the beginning, everything was a romance toward God, creation, and existence itself: the joy and gratitude for being alive at all.
And the purest form of the tale itself, is the short story. This is where it started from.
It is hard to believe now because of how devalued it has been, but the short story is actually the original form of the story. The "short" was only added to differentiate it from the longer forms that came into fashion later. You see, stories were originally meant to be told in a sitting and were later expanded and built on for those who wanted something longer and more involving. Somewhere along the way we not only forgot that, but lost the art of the short story altogether. They are not quite as abandoned as poetry, but close enough to them that we should see it as a warning.
But what was it that eventually killed the form as a viable mainstream form of entertainment? If they were around so long, why did they fall off in the late 20th century? After all, people still read books for a longer period after pulp magazines vanished and magazines fell completely out of relevance. So what happened? There has to be more to it.
The main reason for the devaluing of the form is that short stories became hinged on gimmicks to be sold. Much like variant covers or selling bonus chapters to books separately, OldPub stepped all over them in an attempt to wring more money out of them. Instead of giving the audience what they wanted, they sold to smaller and smaller audiences and decided to milk said dwindling base for more and more money, once again. Just look at how many times Weird Tales was revived. It's never sold on the stories inside, because if it was it could live off a new title: it is meant to survive off the carcass of someone else's invention.
At the same time, short stories were turned by jaded editors and cynical publishers into a joke. Instead of being about anything, they were about nothing but self-mockery, sold to the terminally irony-poisoned crowd.
No longer were short stories being sold as tales of adventure, romance, or wonder, but whatever cute novelty that the publisher wanted to sell at the time.
Eventually, the audience caught on and got the idea that short stories were meaningless, because that is the lesson of the stories they were being sold. Nothing mattered, laugh at everything, take not one thing serious. This is the opposite of what the form was meant for.
And this is how they are still seen as in OldPub to this day.
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| Exactly what purpose does something like this serve? |
Where else could one even find a short story in the modern world? Given that even shorter books have been deemed unsuitable for publication (the last time I checked, 100K words was the minimum one could submit to OldPub), there are few places a hopeful reader could even begin to find them. For awhile, it even seemed like they might be going extinct.
To be honest, they were.
Of course, there is the elephant in the room: what about magazines? Well, what about them? Magazines truthfully ended their relevance in the storytelling world when pulp went away by the middle of the 1950s, and some would say even before that by the start of the 1940s. At the same time short stories were at their modern peak, a group of anti-social Fanatics swarmed the industry and chased the audience out.
Readers fled towards comic books and b-movies, where they remained for decades afterwards until those industries had the same invasion of self-serious professional geeks. What remained on the magazine rack dwindled as the decades went on to the point that the only ones eventually reading them were those reading for the brand of the magazine: not the stories themselves. It became about the brand over the art.
And so it went with the remainder of the 20th century when it came to the arts. Audiences continuously fled to other mediums as the medium was swarmed by people who hated what they loved. At the same time, the visual arts in technology became more striking to the eye and allowed adventure and wonder far beyond what publishers would allow in their industry. Super Mario Bros. 3 could be the highest selling game of all time, but "Science Fiction & Fantasy™" would scoff at a story about a plumber exploring a foreign world filled with danger to rescue a princess. That disconnect should be extremely obvious to everyone today.
By the end of the 20th century, little remained of the Golden Age of the short story. It had to be found elsewhere.
But what about today?
Due to the rise of independent publishing during the 2010s being made viable thanks to the internet, new markets began to finally explode. The "traditional" industry ever since the internet became ubiquitous in everyday life had done little with it. Instead of growing and reaching new avenues, they continued to do what Fandom always desired for their clubhouse and closed up ranks to instead fellate their own egos. People were reading more than ever before, since that is the nature of the internet, but still OldPub only shrank and books were still becoming more and more irrelevant. If it were up to OldPub, reading would be a cult, not a hobby.
This lead to things like the Pulp Revolution coming into existence by the middle of the decade. Readers and writers had reached their limit of patience with the old industry and began looking for something else. They also began reading things the industry had buried for decades and learning truths certain cliques had deliberately hidden from them. A movement like this never would have seemed possible even in the first half of the 2010s, but it was really inevitable. Things had simply broken down far too much by then.
It wasn't just PulpRev, though. There were all kinds of new readers and writers, people that had deliberately ignored the old industry for years and were seeking alternate means of creation and storytelling. OldPub's relevance has only shrunk over the years. There has been no new trend emerging from it for years, and there never will be again. They are too deep in their gimmicks and tired outdated "genres" to care about the stories themselves anymore.
OldPub is done; now it is NewPub's time to shine.
One thing that has definitely changed is that the new market and writers that have sprung up in the age of the internet is their relationship to the old industry. That is, they have none. It is as if new writers and readers have completely bypassed the dying OldPub industry to find what they wanted online instead.
There have even been entire new magazines springing into existence to reach brand new audiences that OldPub long ago abandoned and refused to cater to. Their books only got thicker and more bloated as new readers demanded shorter and leaner tales instead. The novella, the novelette, the smaller novel, and, yes, the short story, forms that were once abandoned by OldPub, are now viable again. NewPub is dead set on essentially returning to the roots of the form.
A fascinating aspect of the 20th century is in how much was destroyed during that time that has managed to find new life in the 21st. Almost as if it is being set right again to the way it is supposed to be. I don't know how things will turn out in the next couple of years as the '20s roar on, but it is good to see so many realizing a problem and working to fix it.
That is what makes the history of art and entertainment so fascinating, after all. There's always a way to right the ship.
For the first time in ages, short stories are finally approaching their former glory again. It might take some time to reach another Golden Age, but we are on the way towards one right now. Should we reach it that will be due to NewPub discarding the rotting corpse of the dying old age and remembering it is the audience that comes first. This is the way forward.
It is the only way forward.
We've got wide open spaces, gates blown out as the gatekeepers die off, and plenty of options ahead of us--avenues that were never possible to travel before. Stories have returned to where they belong, and short stories themselves are now finally a viable form of creation again. Hopefully they only get more ubiquitous as the new age rolls on.
Even as the world changes around us, there are some things that never really change, no matter how much some might want it to. There is some comfort to be had in that.
As long as people are around, so will stories survive. And we're going to be around for a long time to come. That means there will be plenty more stories to tell.
We just need to keep telling them!
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