Mari Ness -

So benpeek is ranting a bit about rants about short stories, noting that people don't rant and scream as much about lousy short stories as they do about lousy episodes of, say, Doctor Who. (His point there might have been better made had he specified which of the many many versions of Doctor Who he was chatting about, but moving on.)

And I thought about this, and realized that yes, we do get mad at bad television shows and movies beyond all seeming reason, ranting and raving and even in one recent conversation of mine this week, threatening violent acts in relation to a recent terrible episode of Bionic Woman. We rant and rave and discuss or say we're going to refuse to watch TV or movies for awhile, although few of us actually reach that stage.

But with a short story? Not so much.

And I can think of one reason for this: deep down, or not so deep down, we're well aware of the vast amount of money spent to produce a really lousy hour of television or movie entertainment – compared to the almost negligible amount spent on writing a short story. The short story process works more or less like this:

1. Writers spend a few to several hours hammering out the details and the words of a specific short story, sometimes complaining to friends about the process. Now, admittedly, it's a bit difficult to calculate how much this time is worth and the money the writer might have made in the process – if the writer is a high paid attorney billing $500 an hour (not, in my experience, typical for most writers, but let's pretend more of us are called John Grisham) then, sure, this could be a fairly significant financial cost of time. Let's say $10,000, because I'm in one of those grumpy sorts of moods where nobody is paying me enough for the time I'm spending on these short stories. Add in another $5000 for the time spent by friends critiquing the story – sure, they haven't spent as much time as the writer has, but on the other hand, they have sense not to be writers, so they're probably financially more valuable than you are.

2. Short story gets sent to editors and starts the acceptance/rejection process. Let's say a nice average of 8 rejections to every 1 acceptance for any given short story; editors don't need to spend much time rejecting that one story (before the editors on my friends list start to howl, yes, yes, I know some of you do spend significant time on your rejection letters, but quite a few editors out there just don't have the time and don't bother.) The purchasing editor makes various changes and the story is paid for. Outside of a very few very limited markets in the U.S. (The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and I'm blanking on any others), most writers will receive anywhere from $25 to $1000 for a short story. Throw in $1000 for the editor's time spent on that particular story – ok, $2000, and the costs of printing and/or webhosting and/or podcasting – I'll again be overly generous and say $5000 (again, for that particular short story – and if production costs are higher I will guarantee the market is printing other things within that production costs.)

We've spent, on a generous budget, about $18,000 to produce this story. Let's round it up and say $20,000.

The typical budget for a television episode?

$500,000 and up. The budget for a single episode of ER is around $15 million now.

The typical budget for a movie? $1.5 million and way, way, way up. And the number of people involved? Far, far beyond the people involved in producing any short story – even at The New Yorker.

Even on the amateur level, filmmaking can be a major investment – pop over to newbabel's journal where he occasionally talks about everything that he had to go through just to create a short trailer for his film.

So when we see an extraordinarily stupid or lousy or just plain boring television show or movie, I don't think we're not just reacting to the other stupidity of said show: we're also reacting, on some deep level, to the utter waste of that much money. This is money that could have been handed over to us to buy utterly cool things, or solve poverty, or whatever. Instead, it was funneled into junk.

So I think that on some level, that's what we're responding to – and why short stories just don't generate that kind of passion and rage. Because they just don't involve the same amount of money.