Fantastic Metropolis

Ray Nayler was born in Quebec and educated in California, where he studied American Literature and Film Noir at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His short fiction has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Heist, Blue Murder, The Edge (USA), and The Berkeley Fiction Review, among others. His short story “Cutting Wood, Carrying Water” appeared in Crimewave 4: Mood Indigo. TTA Press has just reissued his first novel, American Graveyards, in which Lance Bailey, PI, on his last case and his last legs, track downs the murderer of his true love. But before Bailey can exact his final revenge, he must unravel a web of conspiracy and murder in the Mojave Desert. Haunted by an enigmatic nightmare of being a deep sea diver losing his air supply, the well-past-his-prime Lance finds himself struggling to keep up with a world that is growing more and more fragmented and deadly with each passing moment. His one saving grace is the secretary who has been loyal to him all these years, whose very life depends on Bailey’s ability to come through against the odds one last time.

David Soyka: There was a time in the 1920s and 1930s when a writer could actually make more money writing short stories than novels. Today, the opposite seems true. While rumors of the death of the short form may be greatly exaggerated, what with the plethora of university-associated journals and nascent web and electronic “publications,” these aren’t well paying—and often don’t pay at all—while also being very much a niche marketplace. As someone who first made his mark as a short story writer, to what extent does the prospect of a wider readership, not to mention additional income, play in your decision to write in a longer form?

Ray Nayler: I think that what played more into my decision to write longer was being able to form and execute more complex ideas. For a short story, I would start with a pretty simple situation, place it in a scene, and go from there. When you’re writing for the short story market, at least for the market that I have been targeting, you’re looking for around 3,000 words. What that trains you to do is to cut everything extraneous out of your idea and focus. You have to characterize and move action at a very good clip, or you won’t have room to progress the story along sufficiently. You learn techniques to deal with this: you learn how to quickly define a character through actions and gestures. You learn to start the story in the middle, to drop your reader into the action quickly, and you learn when to get out. But the form, while amazing, can be limiting. I found that, more and more, I was coming up with ideas that needed more space. Ideas that were more complex than I could work out in a short story. So I had to write a novel. I just needed more room for things to play out. At the same time, I think that the short story form is flourishing these days–not necessarily as a paying form, but definitely as a form in general. I think that the level of short story writing is, in general, very high. Crime stories and Mystery stories have a market and do quite well. More than a paying, viable economic market, what they provide is a proving ground for young writers and an opportunity to get their names out there. Economics isn’t everything, and the short story form is a very rewarding artistically, if not financially.

David Soyka: The cliché is that the short story writer is a sprinter, and the novelist a long distance runner. True enough, on the surface, since you’re obviously spending a lot more time with characters and plot line in a novel. But are the skills really necessarily different?

Ray Nayler: I don’t think that the skills it takes are very different at all. I think of a novel as a tightly controlled tale, rather than a dumping ground for excess character study and the like. A novel, to me, should have enough of an idea behind it to carry it through without any need for padding. As a writer, I don’t like subplots much, or side characters. I like plots. I like strong main characters that are well developed, and well-developed supporting characters. I like for everything to fit together pretty neatly. Short story writing taught me to do that. I learned to discard. To trim away the fat, so to speak. I want things lean and concise. At the same time, I’m not the kind of writer who covers a large amount of time in a few words. What I write is scenes, rather than description of the passage of time. I like dialogue and action, and that’s the way that I structure my work–around the scene. That takes up a certain amount of space. A short story for me is usually one to three scenes. A novel might be fifty or so. You can get a lot more depth into fifty scenes. You have more time for subtlety.