The White Pages
A deep dive into the mystifying story behind the internet phenomenon
At the top of the shelf, a note reads…
Shelf 89: Short fiction. Here, you will find short stories. Some to your liking, some not, but whether inspiring, boring or maddening, they might start you thinking.
You might have heard of it, ‘The White Pages’. It’s a page that roams around on the internet, for everyone to open but for very few to truly uncover. What is it? Who wrote it? Are the rumours true?
It only takes one click to find out…
That’s probably the most dramatic introduction to a short story you’ve ever read. If you are familiar with short stories, that is. I don’t think most people (including me) read a lot of short fiction. I wanted to take this opportunity to explain short stories and why they are important to (beginning) writers and perhaps invisible to readers.
The White Pages is one of the short stories I wrote in the last year of my creative writing bachelor's degree. I’m sorry if you’ve already seen it pass on social media about twenty times. It’s going out with a bang, after this, I will leave it be and focus on promoting newer stories. It’s been published once and I’ve made an interactive website to showcase it. And, it’s getting another publication, hoorah!
The publication will happen in JAKE the mag (probably, they said they were going to publish it a year ago, then I didn’t hear from them and now I think they are finally doing it, so by the time you read this I have hopefully inserted a link to the publication — they published it, here it is!). I also made a creepy TikTok to accompany the publication.
But more interesting, I think, is: why do we even write short stories? Especially if no one reads them. Like most writers, I’ve written quite a few short stories for the sole reason of submitting stories to magazines. We do this because publications mean that literary agents or publishers might notice you (emphasis on the might, they probably won’t unless you are in the New Yorker and by then you have, most likely, already found one). If an agent sees that you’ve already been published in several magazines, it proves that other people are interested in what you write.
Besides this practical reason, writing short stories is fun. They are a lot easier to finish and share. They are small projects that you can finish in a few weeks rather than years. It’s also good practice to see if you can write a story with a lot fewer words (usually around 1000 words).
Like any writer, I don’t want my short stories to disappear into a magazine that no one reads (not saying that’s always the case, but we all know what happens to the magazine you get given and disappear onto your ‘to read when I have time’ pile). I created the website for The White Pages for this exact reason! This website has been part of finding an audience and an interactive way to showcase my writing in a way that uses different media than just text. Luckily that also fits the story, but it’s a good jumping-off point to see what I can do with different stories.
Since I am mostly a fiction writer, I plan on sharing some exclusive stories on here too. Be on the lookout for that!
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