Kelly Sather Shares Insider's View of Hollywood in Short Story Collection 'Small in Real Life'

Former entertainment lawyer and screenwriter, Kelly Sather, visits us to discuss her debut short story collection, Small in Real Life: Stories . Her book is filled with nine of her short stories and while most of the stories are set in sunny California, all them contain an element of sadness to it. Sather elaborates, “Yes, there’s loss, but I think also they’re funny and so I think in some of the humor I have in it, it allows that space to feel like, yeah, this is kind of how life is, you know? This is kind of like, it’s hard at times and there’s a humor in our bumping into each other, and our competition with one another, and our desire for something for one another that we, for whatever reason, can’t seem to receive.” The characters in her stories also have some sort of disconnect in their lives and how they go about trying to fill that missing piece is not necessarily advantageous for them. “There’s a need for belonging and a movement towards that and choices towards that that get characters into trouble instead of getting them where they’re hopeful. Like, there’s a lack that they feel and there’s some connection that they’re wanting, but they go about it in ways that don’t work out well for them, I will say… I was just always writing into conflict and I think there’s an aspect of southern California, of wanting fame or some sort of notice that as if that is going to make one feel whole, and so I look at that pretty carefully and how that works for us and doesn’t work.”

As far as why Sather prefers writing short stories, she says that the limited space of short stories allows her more creativity, with each sentence conveying much more meaning. Additionally, the smaller space also feels less overwhelming to fill than the immensity of a novel. “In the book business, everyone wants to hear about novels… for me at the time, I couldn’t hold a novel. I just didn’t know how to hold that much space. It felt too big and almost vacant in a way and a short story had this, the size of it, felt manageable and I could do it in short pieces, which is sort of the time that I had then, and then the other part of it was I was really fascinated with how much you could do in a small space and the demands in a way of the form.” When creating her stories, Sather says that her ideas often materialize when she feels a conflict between two people. “Some of the stories are adjacent to experiences I’ve had. They aren’t exactly experiences but they’re sort of like a glimpse or a moment where I think, ‘oh, what if it went this way?’ and I follow a darker thread and I don’t really know where the story is going to go. I mean, I have a sense of the mood and so I think in ways the mood shapes what’s possible to happen for these characters, but I’m very much discovering them as I’m writing… I try and write for my first draft, not fast, but just keep moving and not worry necessarily about whether this is good enough or whether I picked the right word because I just want the momentum of the possibility of what could happen next.”