Nothing Needs to Happen in Short Fiction, Ever

Everything I've written, for I don't know how long, has been absurd and deranged. So I have been trying to write a short story about normal stuff.

I've been thinking about this while I’ve made breakfast.

I've written, in the past, about sex cantaloupes. I've written about an insect that hates a certain guy.

Well. Last week I tried writing a story about a man who goes to work in an office after two years of working from home.

Or maybe he guys to work.

Is it a good story?

How the hell should I know!

But because it's not utterly ridiculous, I don't trust it. I worry that it's not doing enough.

And that, my friends, is one of the big problems of writing.

It's hard to resist that voice in back of the writing mind that urges you to make things sensational, to put something in there at the end, maybe, that will give the reader a jolt, that will give the reader something to remember, something that will tell them, Okay, now that was a work of short fiction.

Most stories don't need this jolt. They should end, usually, at the same wattage they began.

But that voice that tells you otherwise is loud and hard to ignore. It really is. It says things like, “Remember A Good Man Is Hard to Find? Remember how that one ends?” The voice ignores, when it says this, how that entire story makes it utterly plain that it was always headed for its bleak conclusion, that it clamors along all the way to where it goes, and the ending matches the rest of the story. It doesn’t come out of nowhere.

Okay. You've been warned.