The 3 short fiction authors that influenced me most

And the lessons they taught me about writing

I have been interested in short fiction for a while now.

But I owe a lot of the progress I've made to these people:

1. Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was the first writer I became totally obsessed with.

He taught me that purple prose is not a requirement for creating a moving story. His stories have a directness and simplicity to them that rings as the truth. As a young man, the theme of facing down dangerous situations with courage really resonated with me.

There’s a reason his stories have survived the test of time.

He also introduced me to just how weird writers could be.

There are so many weird Hemingway tropes, like the couple that starts to dress the same, and dye their hair the same color, and cut their hair in the same style. Or perhaps weirdest of all, his belief that pregnancy was punishment for sex (condoms did exist back then after all).

My favorite is the final story in a A Moveable Feast, his final unfinished collection of short stories. In this story F. Scott Fitzgerald (another writer I admire) tells Hemingway that he is self-conscious about his penis size and asks Hemmingway to take a look in the bathroom (please take notes fanfic writers). Hemingway tells him “You’re perfectly fine.” and then they look at statue penises at the Louvre.

This was the very last thing he wrote before he killed himself by the way.

“It is not basically a question of the size in repose,” I said. “It is the size that it becomes.”

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

2. Haruki Murakami

Reading Murakami makes me feel like there is magic all around us, if only we were to stop and listen.

By contrasting mundane routine tasks like cooking and cleaning with portals and the supernatural, it makes the ordinary seem magical. The settings for the final surreal scenes are downright creepy and I am here for it. After reading about someone cooking pasta for ten pages, it’s surprising to find out this is actually a supernatural horror story.

I also like the theme that there exists two worlds, the rational external world, and the irrational internal world.

The things that happen outside are heads are real and bounded by the laws of physics. But inside our heads, things become looser and irrational, bounded only by language. And language has the ability to invent anything, no matter how fantastical.

An example of the ability of language to make the unreal seem real:

“The desk thought to scratch its arm but, recalling that it was armless and that one of its legs was shorter than the others, blushed slightly,” … But that’s not all: the desk, its blush receding, can return to the emblem it was ratifying, or the freedom-dimple it was juxtaposing, or the Canada it couldn’t help but upholstering with implacable small fate-muffins.

— George Saunders. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (p. 285).

3. George Saunders

The book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and his Substack has taught me so much about short fiction.

I used to read fiction as entertainment, at a semi-fast speed. His teachings made me realize how much nuance and complexity I was missing. A short story is a sort of organized system, with each element carefully selected to produce a certain effect.

By reading slowly, and multiple times, can we really start to pick up on all these little details.

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In the end, it’s these details that really make reading worthwhile.

These people have taught me so much—and, just like they did with me, I hope to pass along my own learnings to the next person.