The commitment isn’t as high for a story as a novel in terms of structural, or formal play, or voice work. You can do experiments in voice in a story that you can’t do in a novel. I do think that there are certain things that you can do in a short story because they’re shorter. That’s the form I feel most comfortable in, and that I’ve read the most of, and that I think about the most. I do think that the short story is my base narrative unit. My process is that I walk through the world and wait until I can feel a sufficient weight to power three or four stories, and then I’ll sit down and write them.Īs for the difference in form, I think because I’m always thinking in terms of superstructure and thinking in groups of stories there’s maybe not much difference in my approach to the novel or the short story. Even my stories that are not narratively connected are resonating with other stories in a larger system. I’ve got what you could call “manuscript brain.” I can never just write a one-off. But I am always writing in constellations of stories, and I’m always thinking about the manuscripts. Sometimes those connections are narrative, and sometimes they’re thematic, or sometimes they’re connected by location, or sometimes they’re connected by time periods in a person’s life. I sometimes won’t start a story until I can feel out the four or five stories down the road from it. Characters always come with constellations of relationships. I can’t start writing a story until I know the shape of the manuscript into which it’s going to fit, because the characters don’t just show up. Then they look up, and years have gone by, and they have written thirteen stories, and they all just so happen to go together. They are able to follow their impulses down into the morass of storytelling. I’m curious if you think that you can achieve things in the short story that you can’t in the novel, and if there’s one you feel more at home with?īrandon Taylor: I think that there are some writers who are able to work on a story at a time.

You had your spectacular debut novel, Real Life, and now you’re following that with Filthy Animals, a short story collection.

Thomas Wee: I thought that I would start by asking you about the differences between the forms of the short story and the novel. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. His work has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed Reader, O: The Oprah Magazine, Gay Mag, The New Yorker online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, as well as The National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award.

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