ON WRITING SHORT STORIES
It is probably not fruitful or even possible to theorise before
the event, to define a short story without taking examples for analysis. For
one thing, writers who set out to write short stories need to read lots of
examples of the form. New writers sometimes fall into the error of trying to
imagine the ‘form’ of the short story, and then trying to fashion their own
work according to this abstract notion. Does a short story have, as is often
stated, a ‘beginning, middle and end’? Those terms in themselves are the first
stop in the discussion. What is meant by ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ ‘end’?
They are abstractions, and are probably not in fact particularly useful terms
in this context. For a short story is generally not a straight-forward and
simple narrative that re-tells an anecdote – it may contain anecdotes,
but it must first create its own world, its own tone, its own narrative
position, and its own moral position, and therein lies the intense pleasure as
well as the first difficulty of writing short stories. How does the writer take
up and then convey in language alone the narrative voice and tone that will
create for the readers the world into which the writer wishes to take them? You
can read all sorts of rules and regulations about how to write short stories,
but in the end they are often like instructions on how to swim or drive a car –
until you get into the water or behind the wheel, you don’t really know what it
is going to be like. This analogy quickly loses ground because there are in
fact rules to swimming and driving. But swimming and driving are not activities
that set out to create in the way that writing sets out to create. When you
write you aim to fashion and deliver some kind of picture or idea or feeling or
message from your memory and imagination to the imagination of your reader. No
matter what you write about, your work will be an entry of some kind into your
own ways of looking at the world, via the world you succeed in creating in the
story. The writer must have the courage to experiment with language and
material in order to bring forward the features of life that have inspired them
to write in the first place.
I
wish it were possible to dispel the idea, the myth, firmly ingrained in the
minds of many people, that short stories are constructed by following a formula
whereby the would-be writer collects some characters and a situation, some
themes and a plot, and somehow mixes these together and voilà! a short story is
born. The first thing, the very first thing, and, I am sometimes tempted to
say, the only thing is the exercise of the curiosity and the imagination.
Writing fiction is mostly about letting the human imagination flow and express
itself in words and images. When this is done the characters and themes and
plots arrive with a kind of joyful effortlessness – requiring also of course
time and reflection and a certain amount of re-reading and editing. I guess
what I am really saying is that if young writers let their imaginations take
over for a while they will find that writing stories is something that can come
naturally to them. It is this naturalness that is quite often discouraged by
anxious guides and teachers who can sometimes mistakenly put up barriers that
don’t need to be there. My suggestion is that young writers be encouraged to
write first and that they reflect on their work in the context of the
short story in its many shapes and forms after they have written. In
other words content and all the rest can come before abstract form, and form
can follow. But the first things have to be joy and enthusiasm, a curiosity
about life, and a confidence in the use of words.
