You can’t make a living as a writer of short stories. “Oddly, though, you can still make a pretty good living by teaching other people how to write short stories. The form survives – and even thrives, in a forced, hothouse sort of way – because it has become the instructional medium of choice in most of our writing programs. The majority of people who enroll in these programs want to be novelists, but novels don’t lend themselves very readily to the workshop format, and so would-be novelists these days spend at least part of their apprenticeship working on stories.”