Four-time Stoker award-winning author Professor Tim Waggoner sold his 200th short story this month, passing a major literary milestone in a career that stretches back decades. The English Department lecturer spoke to The Clarion about his long relationship with short fiction.
“When I first started writing, I was 18 and read mostly novels. At the time I decided that if I wanted a career in writing, I should try to get good at short fiction,” he said.
Waggoner sold his first short story while an undergrad at Wright State University, a tale about time-travel called ‘Shadowplay’ that caught the eye of a literary magazine’s editor. Since then, the author has managed a steady output that has seen him appear in multiple anthologies across different genres over the years.
“Short fiction is a great way to refine the skills you’ll need to write longer works. It gives you a chance to practice story structure, explore themes, and different ways of approaching a story. There’s a lot of room for growth and learning with short stories if you treat them as a training ground,” said Waggoner.
Other benefits of writing short stories include the smaller scope of the work, its focus on character and concept, in addition to allowing writers to try an idea before committing to a much larger project. Short stories, in Waggoner’s experience, can create the foundation for a full-length novel, as was the case with his 2014 thriller ‘Darkness Wakes’.
“Once I described the difference between short stories and novels as being like paintings. A standalone painting tends to tell a single story, just like we do in short fiction. But a novel is more like a series of paintings that tells a larger story through multiple scenes,” Waggoner said.
The sense of freedom that shorter fiction gives writers should not be underestimated. Among the key skills Waggoner says the format can help aspiring and established novelists learn is how to revise their work. Chief among the benefits of short stories, however, is the impact they have on readers due to their length.
Waggoner said, “In some ways they can have more impact than a novel because they’re a short punch. A novel can have a series of those, but people get used to them. Short stories allow you to be more intimate than you would in a novel. In a short story you just focus on a moment. Plus, people are willing as readers to read weird and experimental stuff if its short.”
Looking at the past few decades and the scores of short stories he’s written, a few standout to the professor. Of them all, ‘Mr. Punch’ is among his favorites.
“When I wrote it, a little over half my lifetime ago, it was strange and surreal, symbolic even. It was a story that was so good I realized I had to stop before I ruined it and picked it up later. It was also my first sale to an anthology, everything before that had been for smaller publications. ‘Mr. Punch’ had all the elements of what became my signature style,” he said.
Fans and students of the author won’t have long to wait for his next big work. Waggoner’s ‘Let Me Tell You A Story’ from Raw Dog Screaming Press will be hitting store shelves in a few months. He described it as part short story collection, part writing instruction, and part memoir.
“What I do in that work is look at stories I published throughout my career and talk about their origins, what it was like to write them, and what I would do differently today. It’s something I tried out a bit in my first two how-to-write books and thought, ‘why not do an entire book on the subject?’,” he said. by Ismael David Mujahid