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    The William Trevor Reader: “The Ballroom of Romance”

    by Adam O’Fallon Price Feb 08, 2022 3 minutes

    In the second-to-last installment of this column, I wrote about “The Original Sins of Edward Tripp” and concluded by saying most great short story writers are sadists. Tweeting that thought garnered a few RTs and some people offering counterexamples, mainly Grace Paley, whose famous “giving characters the open destiny of life” defines the opposite view. But I believe Paley and those like her are the exception: the short story is an inherently cruel form.

    The main reason for this is, well, they’re short. The open destiny of life is mainly available to characters who exist the story, more or less. Here is the definition of a short story that I give my students on the first day of Intro to Fiction Writing:

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