The short story in Britain today: enough to make Conan Doyle weep

I am not sure if it’s properly understood quite what a crisis the short story is now in. Superficial signs of success and publicity — such as Alice Munro winning the Nobel, or the establishment of another well-funded prize — are widely mistaken for a resurgence. But what has disappeared — and disappeared quite recently — is the wide spread of journals willing to pay for a single story.

That is what sustained the genre in its glory days. Edwardian magazines such as the Strand happily paid their star writers the equivalent (or even more) of a doctor’s annual income for a single story. There were dozens of such publications between 1890 and the outbreak of the first world war. The result was a golden age of the story, as writers saw that it was worth their while to dedicate a significant part of their practice to the short form.

As recently as the 1980s there were still a good number of journals in this country regularly publishing short fiction and developing individual talent. That now seems to have disappeared. The BBC pays approximately £50 for a single short story, which is hardly worth anyone’s time. Newspapers will occasionally publish one, but not in a way that could develop any burgeoning talent. Instead, there are prizes, some of them well-funded; but they are obviously too random from a writer’s point of view. I have often wondered, attending one of those grisly awards evenings, whether Conan Doyle would have been happy to put on a dinner jacket and sit with a smile on his face waiting to hear whether he was going to be lucky enough to be paid at all for writing a short story. He might even have found the idea humiliating. With the funds one Sunday newspaper makes available for its annual short-story prize, it could afford to pay handsomely every week for a short story.