Most of my graduate students write short stories.  Stories are tailor-made for writing workshops in a way that novels aren’t.  But publishers aren’t interested in short stories.  I say this as someone who loves the story form, who has written many stories himself, who is often perplexed by the lack of interest in stories since they seem perfectly suited for short attention spans.  And I would never tell a student to stop writing short stories.  I haven’t stopped writing them myself.  But no one should pretend they can do anything for a young writer’s career.

Take the case of the recent Pen/Faulkner awards

Four of the five finalists were story collections.  But only one of them—Edward P. Jones’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children—sold more than 25,000 copies

Amy Hempel and Deborah Eisenberg, two of the other finalists, sold 10,000 to 15,000 copies each

Far more typical is Charles D’Ambrosio, whose book of stories

sold only 3,000 copies.