Here is a shortened version of my essay on the short story. Read the full version in Wasafiri 31.

The Art of the Short Story

A Risky Business

Writers like metaphors. So, when you ask a writer about how to write a novel, they often use the metaphor of the journey. ‘It’s like going on a journey without a map,’ they say. ‘You set off for Shanghai without knowing which road to take, but you know when you get there.’ This makes sense if the destination you want to reach is recognisable: a city of lights and towers and a famous bund. But what if you want to go somewhere less obvious? A place of safety, for example. And what about the short story? Can you jump into your prose car and head out into the unknown and expect to get anywhere faster than you would in a novel? A bit risky?

            Writers talk about the short story in slighter terms; they say it is a glance or a glimpse rather than a study. ‘Glimpse’ being V S Pritchett’s term, a writer long regarded as a master of the form. Others mention time: a short story is a moment. For novelists it seems as though it is a minor, short-lived diversion from the main job. I am not sure why they are so shy. Perhaps it is the crude idea of quantity. A feeling that the effort must be commensurate with the number of pages produced and therefore a short story is somehow a lesser thing. Untrue. Flannery O’Connor is right: ‘a good short story should not have less meaning than a novel, nor should its action be less complete’. The imaginative energy you need for a good short story is no less than for a novel, even though the distance you go may be less and the resulting pages far fewer. But who would believe it?

            I started writing short stories mainly because I too thought they were easier and more manageable to do. A novel was a book. A book needed many pages. At least 180. I didn’t think I could find 180 pages in me, never mind a story that would last so long. Raymond Carver said he never had the time for a novel; the responsibilities of staying alive and doing the kids’ washing at the laundromat meant a novel was not going to happen. For me, as a young writer, time was not the problem. I could find the time – children appeared later – but I never had a story that would last long enough to fill a book. A short story, on the other hand, had no such demands. It could be very short. And it could be anything you liked. Ironic that the form that has its definition in its name – a story that has to be short – is so much more flexible than the form that means pretty much anything goes: the novel. A novel should only have to be novel. Alas, not so. The expectations of what a novel should be are hard to escape. But as a young writer I didn’t even think about the choice. I wrote short stories mainly because whatever stories I started ended sooner rather than later and so were always very short. Being short meant that they could also masquerade as poems, or poems could pretend to be stories, and I could live imaginatively without being pinned down. I liked to call it freedom, rather than indecision or confusion. The beauty of short stories was not in the theory or the classifications of form; the beauty was simply its conciseness! You didn’t need a lot of time to read one and, I thought, you didn’t need as much time to write one as you needed for a novel. I was very conscious of the economics of writing and the risks involved. I opted for writing over painting because the investment was low and therefore the disappointments would be less devastating. You didn’t have to spend hard-to-find money on paint, brushes, canvases. You could borrow a pencil and use scrap paper. If you had an office job you could use a neglected typewriter, or later a computer and free software. You only had to invest time and, if you stuck to short stories, you could get away with small amounts and lower the risks. This notion changes when you realise later that the longer gestation of a novel has much more comfort to offer than the brief life a short story enjoys in your hands.

            I was also under the illusion that, to write a good novel, you should understand how a story works. And a short story allows you to understand this much better than a long novel that you can’t quite keep track of and goes off the road. I am less sure of this now, since many very good novelists claim that they cannot write short stories. But I still believe there is a real benefit of writing short stories for a new aspiring writer; it allows him or her to complete the project. It may not be Shanghai but it is the end of the road and to get there really does help. It shows completion is possible and allows you to think about the shape and structure of a story which otherwise might have taken ten years to do. Even so, it would be a mistake to think of the short story as an apprentice form.

            Ali Smith says, ‘the short story is about brevity and really thunks you up against mortality, but the novel reassures that life doesn’t end’. That may be why the short stories you want to read, you do read; whereas the novels you want to read line themselves up on Italo Calvino’s bookshelf of Those Novels I Must Read One Day before they fall into the shelf marked Those Novels I Always Wanted To Read But Now Know I Never Will. In other words, it gives us endings. Shanghai exists, appalling as the thought of such mortality might be.

            So is there anything more to the short story than its brevity? You might as well ask, is there more to life than its brevity. The answer to the former is much like the answer to the latter.

            …

            So what are the risks in all this, you might ask. Here are three:

-        Seduction: for the new, aspiring writer, the short story offers all the romance of fiction, without the commitment of marriage or anything long-term. You write a story and you are in love. Anything seems possible, when perhaps that is not quite true.

-        Impatience: when you have written a short story, you discover it can be done within the life you have been given. And there is nothing to stop you from doing it again. So you do. You begin to expect the transition from vague idea in the head to several pages of completed script can be done sooner than a life can be formed. You become impatient when it doesn’t happen, as though the problem must be another technical hitch like a dodgy computer. You begin to think you can see the whole word in glimpses and that is enough, and that slow stories are just too slow.

-        Deception: you begin to think writing is easy to do. The story is done, it is complete. You begin to think you can write stories. You know what a beginning, a middle and an end look like. For a novel, you think you only have to make it bigger. You forget uncertainty is life. You begin to think the way all those people who tell you that they too would write a novel, if only they had the time do it. As though the novelist is a person with too much time on their hands, and a short story is only a string of words.

…       

            If I am in the danger zone of writing a short story, and feel seduced, impatient or deceived, I try to remember a few axioms which then fill me with uncertainty:

-        make it real. Even in fantasy there has to be a level at which it seems real.

-        attend to the detail. Selective detail is what you can offer, and you need detail to make it convincing

-        use language to its maximum

-        remember the senses we operate through

-        observe the health warnings.

            Short stories are good to read. Not only as a remedy for anyone suffering from the disappointment with a novel, but good to read in themselves. I like the amusements offered by anti-stories, experimental prose, puzzles and games, but the stories that I value create a world I want to be part of and which I want to make part of mine. They are subversive as good fiction often is — changing the way I see things. A good short story should make sense even if the rest of our lives don’t. It should matter, even when we feel we don’t. A short story, like a life, is an uncertain, mysterious, risky work of art that offers an alternative, or even an antidote, to the world as it is.