S. 3, Ep. 10: A Chat with Crime Author Art Taylor

The Crime Cafe

Debbi Mack interviews crime fiction author Art Taylor. The transcript is below, if you’d like to read it. Or download the PDF copy and read it later. Debbi: Hi everyone. This is the Crime Cafe. Your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I’m your host, Debbi Mack. Before I bring on my guest, I’ll just remind you that the Crime Cafe Nine Book Set and Crime Cafe Short Story Anthology are available for sale on my website, debbimack.com. Go there and click on “Crime Cafe” and you’ll find the buy links. So, now that that’s been said, it’s truly a pleasure to introduce my guest, the awesome Art Taylor. Art, it’s really great to have you on the show today. Thanks for coming on. Art: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Debbi: I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed reading Del and Louise’s adventures on the road. But the first thing I wanted to ask you before I got to that was, you’ve seemed to have made a career out of writing short stories. Now was that intentional, or are you just drawn to the short story format? Art: Well, two things. Number one I think it’s tough to make a career from short stories. There’s a lot of great markets out there, both anthologies and mystery magazines and, of course, online. But, you know, in terms of actually making a career of it, I don’t think you reach as wide a readership as you might with a novel. Which is one of the reasons why I was very pleased to have On The Road with Del & Louise come out—to have a book out there as well. But the short story form is one that I particularly appreciate. You know, I started reading Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine way back when I was in late elementary school and middle school. In fact it was one of these fundraising drives that the school did where you go door to door to sell magazine subscriptions to raise money for the school. I ended up, don’t remember if I sold any magazine subscriptions, but I bought one myself to Ellery Queen’s and that’s where I first started reading, you know, short stories, mystery short stories at an adult level; building off of having read Nancy Drew and The Three Investigators and that sort of thing. So, the short story, I was always a big fan from the very beginning. And, of course, having been in writing classes both in high school and in college and then went on to graduate school, the short story is sort of the focus for a number of reasons of a workshop setting. Something that people can bring in, can be discussed in full, as opposed to like a novel portion, which I think is harder to workshop. And so, for a couple of reasons, both as a reader and as a writer, I have kind of both fallen in love with the form and then fallen into the form as a writer. I enjoy it. I admire it and then I admire people who can write book-length pieces as well. Debbi: Well, I have to say that I admire anybody who can master the short story form because I think it is the toughest. Art: It’s a, you know, it can be a challenge. I’ve heard, in fact, one of my writing professors (speaking about grad school) who has published, gosh twenty novels, told me once, she said, “I’ve never been able to write a short story.” It is too different for her. And so we hear short story writers like me who are saying that, you know, we wish we could write at the novel length more naturally. It’s more of a chore for us. I hear it in the other direction. A good short story, it is a different approach. People think of it maybe sometimes as an apprenticeship. I’m going to start writing short stories as an apprenticeship toward writing a novel. But they really are two different things. You’ve got to write with great efficiency, have to streamline things, and every little detail not only has to count, but it also has to do a lot of work. The right detail. The right line of dialogue. The right little bit of action. So, I think there is a different kind of challenge there than with a novel which in many cases wo...