I’m giving a presentation alongside other writers who contributed to Short Circuit, the how-to guide to the art of the short story. It will be a mix of readings and talks, and it’s all happening next Tuesday evening (15 December) at Cafe Yumchaa, 45 Berwick Street, London W1. I know it’s bang in the middle of the party season, but if you’ve been inundated with Christmas spirit lately, then a literary event may come as a welcome – and relatively sober – pause from festive celebrations elsewhere. It’s free to attend, and the main action is from 7 to 8.30pm… More here
Also a bit more on the book, which is available from Salt/Amazon, and would make a great stocking filler for the scribes in your house:
Short Circuit is the first textbook written by prize-winning writers for students and more experienced practitioners of the short story. The 288 page guide brings together twenty-four specially-commissioned essays from published short story writers who are also prize winners of the toughest short story competitions in the English language.
I’ve written a chapter for this guide on how to write short fiction. Lots of interesting stuff here and all of it by published writers. Publishers Salt Publishing and editor/author Vanessa Gebbie have done a fine job.
Assignments had to be handed in just before Halloween, so at the moment my evenings are taken up with marking them. I’m really enjoying this, the only trouble so far has been some slight unhelpfulness on the part of my computer…
What I like, actually, is when a few people select the same topic to write about. I’m fascinated to see how many different slants they can find. It’s not just that no two assignments are the same: no two are even vaguely similar. It’s something like a voxpop, only with each person delivering 750 words of crafted text. Whereas if they’d been door-stepped by a TV crew, the probable end result would have been fifteen seconds of crushing embarrassment.
Repetition was something English teachers told you to avoid. ‘Vary your expressions’ they’d say, or, ‘Can you think of another way to say that?’
Repetition is unpopular with a lot of writers too, but when writing for the web it’s OK to use the same term several times. Repetition helps make it really clear what you’re talking about. It doesn’t mean you think your readers are stupid – only that you accept that they haven’t time to hang around, they just want to quickly skim-read the page and get on.
In a magazine style web page that’s a trusted source – a space they visit regularly – online readers tend to slow down a little, but on most factual sites they want to:
get in
find what they’re looking for
get something done
And they don’t want any textual cleverness to trip them up along the way.
(from The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh by William Makepeace Thackeray)
Tea-parties are the same all the world over; with the exception that, with the French, there are more lights and prettier dresses; and with us, a mighty deal more tea in the pot. There is, however, a cheap and delightful way of travelling, that a man may perform in his easy-chair, without expense of passports or post-boys. On the wings of a novel, from the next circulating library, he sends his imagination a-gadding, and gains acquaintance with people and manners whom he could not hope otherwise to know. Twopence a volume bears us whithersoever we will;—back to Ivanhoe and Coeur de Lion, or to Waverley and the Young Pretender, along with Walter Scott; up the heights of fashion with the charming enchanters of the silver-fork school; or, better still, to the snug inn-parlor, or the jovial tap-room, with Mr. Pickwick and his faithful Sancho Weller. I am sure that a man who, a hundred years hence should sit down to write the history of our time, would do wrong to put that great contemporary history of “Pickwick” aside as a frivolous work. It contains true character under false names; and, like “Roderick Random,” an inferior work, and “Tom Jones” (one that is immeasurably superior), gives us a better idea of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any more pompous or authentic histories.
One of those mornings (at the day job) when I’m wrapped up in my work and keen to write more. There’s a faintly anachronistic discussion about whether or not conjunctions may be used to start a sentence, but it’s nice to be working somewhere that considers such things, I’m thinking, as I walk to the market to buy lunch. And yeah, there was a time when received wisdom ruled this to be one of many things you ‘couldn’t’ do, which you knew people did do, really. But that was way back before the accepted usage argument gained credence….
“Authorities do not all agree on the status of sentences that start with coordinating conjunctions. Some [citation needed] consider these to be grammatically incorrect. Others consider it an issue of style.”
“Crowding is what Keats meant when he told poets to ‘load every rift with ore’, … never use ten vague words when two will do…Vivid, exact, accurate, concrete, dense, rich: these words describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings and implications…
“But leaping is just as important. What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more important than what you leave in. Listing is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct.”
from Steering the craft by Ursula Le Guin, in a chapter called ‘Crowding and Leaping’.
The authors gathered together to hear a reading of the winning story by Victoria Owens (pictured here in the centre). It was my first time having a story published in a collection in which all the authors were women, and I don’t know if that is why, but there was something extra nice about it.
Later I caught up with fellow London author Andrea Watsmore, and a few of us took Jane (and The Little Stranger) to the pub. I wonder what Jane Austen would have made of the girl with the bright blue hair?
It’s quiet here, but busy too, and it’s a place where I feel I belong. Speech is rare because, like me, other people here are busy writing, making notes, or simply reading. Of course, life couldn’t be like this all the time – it’s a relief at times to go over the road for a coffee and hear voices again. But it’s great, I love it.
I was in a different library recently, one newly built with public funds… There were 50 people there, all quietly reading, when in walks this one guy yelling into his mobile. You know those ‘I’m-on-the-bus’ conversations? Well, this time it was ‘I’m-in-the-library’. The person at the other end didn’t believe him, he kept on saying ‘I’m-in-the-library’, louder each time. This guy didn’t want to use any of the library facilities except an armchair; he settled in one near me, still talking. After a bit I gave up and left. A librarian saw, and apologised. ‘I can’t say anything,’ she said. ‘Our new policy says it’s OK to talk or use your mobile phone.’ Weird. There are already so many places to use a phone. Why would we need another?
I met short story writer Helen Simpson once and asked her about the fact that Granta had named her as one of its Best of Young British Novelists a decade or so earlier. “Which novel was that?” I asked quite innocently, thinking that I ought to give it a read. But it turned out she got the nomination while the novel was still in progress, and in the end she never finished it. “It’s hard keeping all that story in your head,” Simpson said. “Short stories I can manage, but not novels.”
When I said what came next might be something Jane Austen would hate, I didn’t mean the video in that last post — which I have a feeling she wouldn’t really object to. No, I meant Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which people may have noticed in their bookshops recently. It is anyone’s guess how Jane Austen would react were she brought back to life to comment (the most annoying aspect, from her point of view, might be that the writer responsible has probably minted more than she ever made from the sale of her own books). But I suppose I’m slightly concerned that if this is a hit, we’ll be treated to a ‘literary’ diet of zombies with everything (which here means, everything classic with expired copyright). Like chips with everything, that could be a little dull. The one person I know who has a copy of this book is saving it for when she goes on holiday, so if you’ve read it or have strong views, do get in touch.
Two hundred years ago, in July 1809, Jane Austen moved to Chawton village in Hampshire, where her brother had inherited the local manor house from a cousin. Jane lived with her mother in a cottage on the estate, now the Jane Austen House Museum. Here, she revised the manuscripts of ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Northanger Abbey’, and wrote ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Emma’ and ‘Persuasion’.
I am not sure whether to be surprised it is as much as two centuries since Jane Austen’s work began to be published, or surprised that it is only two centuries. Her work has had a massive influence on literature and on attitudes to life in these parts. And she is big in Bollywood too. What next? Well, it may be something she’d hate… but if she was around today, who knows?
Narrating a tale in six words is a tall order, but 100 words is a great length to work with.
The hundred-word story been popular among science fiction writers since the 1980s, and is sometimes referred to as a drabble — no, not after Margaret Drabble, but after a usage coined in Monty Python’s 1971 Big Red Book.
The success of Dan Rhodes’ Anthropology, which contains 101 101-word stories, testifies to the fact that it is a length that can be popular with readers as well as writers.
Here are a couple of sample 100-worders:
Mould by Dan Rhodes
I’m hopelessly in love with a bland girl. She has never said or done anything interesting. I spend hours trying to work out why I’m so deeply attached to her. I can’t find the answer. Her hair is boring, her face is boring and her body is boring. Every time I come home from work to find her slumped on the sofa, surrounded by used yoghurt pots, my heart explodes and I feel giddy, like I’m walking on air. I take her lifeless hand, kiss her pale cheek and say, ‘they broke the mould when they made you’. She rarely responds. —From ‘Anthropology and other stories’ by Dan Rhodes, (Canongate, 2000).
Roaring Water Bay by Lane Ashfeldt
Auntie Rose was the vintage of the oldest penny buried in the garden: 1892. She wore her hair in a white bun. She made bread and scones, she planted hyacinths and forsythia, she scolded and comforted, clucked and sweetened. In her late nineties she went ‘home’ on a visit. Within weeks she was dead and buried in the cramped family grave, as if the very land itself had killed her. Only then did I learn of her lost child, the ‘sin’ that made her leave, and understand why she would say to me, defiant, “they can scatter my ashes over Roaring Water Bay”. —Published in www.the-phone-book-com
[this post was adapted from a longer article by Lane which was previously published by Arts Council England].
I put this up late yesterday as a comment but then it seemed to vanish into nowhere. Thanks for both public and anon entries to the “what is Romantic” tiebreaker. Good answers all round (this includes the one that came anon). I like the way Mr Taradash brings Mills & Boone into this. Reading his and Ossian’s definitions, it does stretch the brain a little to figure out how we get from the Romantics to Chick Lit. But I think the phrase “limp-wristed heroism of the Celtic twilight ” swings it, really. So the winner is…. Ossian.
Well done Ossian, will be in touch to schedule delivery of your copy of Punk Fiction.
Someone asked my advice about this the other day — which prompted this post. It is a question many people ask themselves when they write their first story. But “How long is a short story?” is not always a helpful question, as short stories don’t have to be a set length. “How long do I think this particular story needs to be?” might be a better place to start.
There are norms, however. In the UK, most published short stories are upwards of 2,000 words, and rarely more than 5000 words. Chekhov is often referred to as a master of the short story, but his stories can seem surprisingly unbrief to a modern reader, clocking in at often upwards of 10,000 words a tale. A random example, ‘On the Road’ (1886), is nearly 7000 words long and opens with a 500-word description of the setting and main characters.
Since Chekhov’s day (most of his stories were first published between 1883 and 1903), story lengths have shrunk dramatically, perhaps to fit shorter attention spans, and perhaps also to fit newly available means of delivery – including screen, phone, blog etc. Readers have also have become more sophisticated “users” of narrative, capable of speedily picking up subtle narrative clues.
Hanif Kureishi’s story ‘Weddings and Beheadings’, controversial runner-up in the National Short Story prize a few years back, weighed in at just 1007 words. And going shorter still, the hundred-word story has been popular among science fiction writers since the 1980s. It is sometimes referred to as a drabble — no, not after Margaret Drabble, but after a usage coined in Monty Python’s 1971 Big Red Book.
There are a number of online outlets for very short fiction, referred to in order of decreasing size as flash fiction (approx. 1000 words or less), micro-fiction or one-page stories (usually 250 words or less) or nano-fiction (how short can you go?). Ernest Hemingway is among the writers who have played with the six-word story, with the following: “For Sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”
Other six-word miniature stories include William Gibson’s, first published in Wired online: “Bush told the truth. Hell froze. And AL Kennedy’s, (from the Guardian): “He didn’t. She did. Big mistake.”
Such admirable brevity is not always a plus in the marketplace. Stories published in print magazines in the UK will rarely fall below 800 words (or exceed 3000).
An answer as imprecise as “probably between 800 and 3000 words” may not be what you’re looking for, but for writers working in the UK it is a quite a useful answer. If targeting a particular publication their own guidelines (typically listed under ‘Submissions’ where the publication is a website) will narrow this down.
Does anyone reading this know who the Romantics were? Or why they were called that?
This is WITHOUT Google, without any other online search or phone-a-friend, just what you KNOW. I am just as interested in wild guesses as I am in the truth. Who you think they are? Or might be? If you cannot hazard names, hazard a century or a theory about how best to describe them. Imagine there is a huge prize to motivate you (there isn’t).
Actually there could be a prize, will have a rummage and make an offer tomorrow…Answers in a comment box please. Anonymity guaranteed if wished – just say Not for publication in your comment. Ta very muchly…
Things are hotting up over at The Green Press who are gearing up to launch their first book in about 10 days time…It is great to see as new small press come online, full of ideas and enthusiasm. If you are in or near north west London, why not mosey over to the launch event on 28 May. See their site for details.
Apparently the publishers of ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ discovered by chance that it’s no bad thing in sales terms for a book to have a thematic link with chocolate. This was not uppermost in my mind when I wrote a story — part fiction, part travel memoir — set in a squatted German chocolate factory. Had I been thinking sales, my story might not have contained dodgy, going-off chocolate – unlikely to have such a positive impact!
The curious can find an extract over at Identity Theory. But to what extent a writer should be thinking sales is another story… When commercial appeal comes naturally, great — but it’s a hard thing to fake. Lots of good writing would never have been published — might never have been written, in fact — if all writers and publishers chose their projects on the basis of sales predictions.
Predictions can only apply to cases where there’s a precedent, hence the copycat trends you see in fiction. (Which incidentally operate in spite of common-sense factors like boredom: just because a customer bought X book, does not mean they’ll buy X + 1. They might actually have got bored with the whole subject of X.) In cases where the writing is genuinely new, then chance is the operative word. Chance, or risk-taking, may not be very fashionable in an overly spread-sheeted economy, but this is what what the publishing industry was built on.
A story by one of my co-writers in the Punk Fiction anthology is up online at the Independent. The story’s called ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ (after the song by The Only Ones) and was written by Paul Smith from Maximo Park. If you want to hear the song, on the other hand, you should find it here… Thought I knew this song, but the version in my head was more poppy, with less guitar– someone else must have covered it?
[OK, this is not the story the BBC recorded - but it is a true No 4 bus story.] It’s about the time I left my laptop on the bus.
It’s your worst public transport nightmare, isn’t it? And you can’t imagine how anyone would… Well, here’s how: the No 4 rambles around north London like a free sightseeing tour, and by the time you reach the last stop you’re nearly asleep. Downstairs the driver helpfully flashes the lights a few times to signal to passengers that the last stop is coming up. He leaves the lights off in the end for some reason, so you stumble downstairs in the shadows, neglecting to notice the bag with your bits and bytes in it. Of course you’re some way down the road when it occurs to you how nice and light you feel, walking along without… without your bag!
So yeah, I did finish ‘Solo’, in spite of the hefty page count. It’s billed as a hundred years in one life, but this doesn’t quite feel like what you get. Still… What I like about this novel is, it’s not afraid to be a little bit weird, to take an idea and run with it, maybe go a bit over the top here and there. Its anarchic structure means you sort of end up with two books – different yet connected, flipsides of the same tune in different styles.
Last night was the first of The Pulp.net Short Story Cafe, held in the warm and cosy environment of Costa Lower Regent Street. An hour of stories and good company, with doses of caffeine to ensure it was not so cosy that we fell asleep on the sofa…. Here are a few pics…Stars of the show were Helen Simpson, Chris Killen, Stephen Moran and Davy Spens. Thanks for their help to Daniel, Amanda, Bud McClintock, Anne Mulleanne, and to Jules Rayne and many others in the audience simply for being there and being in a good mood. Whoever said writers need to be miserable, you’re wrong – some of the time, at least.
Been too busy to post, lots of emails, phonecalls and meetings and so on about LitCamp. I am glad it’s billed as an unconference because no one (including me) knows exactly what to expect. Don’t want to jinx it by going on too much here, but it’s been really good to find so many writers with strong ideas to contribute. All happening Fri 12 September at London Metropolitan University. Programme up, and final few tickets on sale, via the LitCamp site.
This blog is meant for news about my writing but right now I’m waiting to hear back on some stuff I’ve sent out. One hour can be a long time.
Other than that? Bit of day job, bit of hustling to find a new day job, a lot of why spend so much time in a city anyway? I mean I love it, but. You know…
If you are anywhere near Cork in the first half of July, try to get yourself over to Bantry for the West Cork Literary Festival taking place from 6-12 July 2008. Last year I was invited to read my story ‘Dancing on Canvey’ at the festival. I found it very open and welcoming, and the town itself is a gift of a location. There were plenty locals among the crowd, especially at the free events in the library. I like events like that — often the sheer cost of entry at literary events can be excluding.
I arrived the night before and went straight to a reading in a church at which Bernard MacLaverty was telling journalist Brenda Power how his family used to eat sandwiches filled with segments of orange. I am a sucker for a Belfast accent and listening to Bernard made me want to rush out and buy his book of short stories, Matters of Life and Death. The next day I grabbed a quick coffee in Organico before my own reading in the local Bantry bookshop. It was early in the day so I kind of thought there’d be no one there, but no. A good crowd, lots of questions and debate. Brenda Power and even Bernard himself was there (sat on the floor at the back as all the chairs were gone). I felt really pleased they’d made it along, and had a good feeling about being there. I don’t know, just being part of something I guess.
Later I went to as many other events as I could fit in, many of them in Bantry library. And in the evening there was the Fish Prize ceremony. My story won first place in the Historical Novel Society / Fish Prize ‘Short Histories II’. Judges also placed it second in the Fish International Short Story Prize. It was really nice to meet other writers who’d won prizes: Vanessa Gebbie, Carys Davies and Kathleen, and several from further off (a few from America).
Set up some new dates to do more community teaching for Pulp Net, looking forward to that, have learnt a lot from the ones I’ve done before and will aim to keep it simple as we have to pack all the computer sessions into two 3-hour blocks. Which calls for very good timing, and good advance prep too.
When you spend too long sucked inside the screen – that is absence of life. What you do about it is up to you, maybe you are happy there. Maybe when we all run out of space to walk around on this planet, you will not mind at all. I try not to spend too much time inside the screen but today got links to White and Nerdy and the 30-Second Bunnies.
Ok so I have a blog. But I have standards, I am not going to twitter. Not ever. Over in Apple HQ I have heard they have plants that twitter. If you need to know what this is about, go see it here. If on the other hand you are lucky enough never to have heard of twitter, whether for plants, animals or humans, then you can survive perfectly well without it. OK. Back to work…
I was teaching some teenagers to make a shared website today, for Pulp Net. They called me Miss, which made me feel incredibly old. Half of them started making entries about music and adding myspace links, while the other half went on about God, or god, or gods, or science. Whichever heroes you’re into, I guess.
Still can’t quite believe this but I was invited on an international writers retreat, in Scotland. What an unreal start to the year, ensconced in a Scottish castle with another fiction writer, two poets, and the ghost of a parrot.
I posted this later as I was offline most of the time up there, even phone reception was tricky, especially when there was a gale blowing. I was glad of the poor weather because I just wanted to work work work. Odd to attempt this without the internet. Good and bad. Some day-job type work needed to be brought with me, although I felt guilty about this. Poor form.
What do I remember most? The porridge, the Silence, Doris the weekend cook and her stories from the outside world, the snow, Edinburgh all empty and quiet after the new year and full of thrift shops, the battle for sufficient caffeine, the battle to finish my book, the envy I felt when the other fiction writer wrote half a book in the first fortnight… Envy also of the poets who could start and finish a piece in a morning, and take the afternoon to walk and dream. (Almost made me get the point of poetry!) But I got some stuff done all the same, if I was not the front runner on wordcount.
Oh yes, and I remember the night we briefly escaped the castle in M’s car… This was a visit to the shops purely for supplies (I tried to get him to drive to the sea but he wasn’t having it), and I remember how stoned we all felt, after not having left the castle for two weeks, as we piled out of the car and into some huge overlit supermarket. Stoned at the sheer quantity of stuff on sale, all that packaging. Eventually I bought crisps and whisky as both were in short supply at the castle. There were plenty good books, though – if I ever had a castle I’d want one with several libaries, too.
I was really pleased to have a story accepted for Brand Literary Magazine. I like the look of the publication and the stories I’ve read there. It is almost book length so it really must be quite a feat putting it together. The editorial team do their job with immense attention to detail, so it was an honour to have a piece accepted. Hopefully I’ll get to meet editor Nina Rapi at the launch of the new issue.
When I wake the wind’s tearing at the trees as if to rip them out by the roots, but all I care about is whether it’s too late to sneak out to the dance. I grab my coat and am running along Brandenburg to the creek by the time I wish for my gloves and scarf. It’s not just raining, it’s snowing: long sharp needles of it pointing into my skin. I’ve never been out in a winter storm at night, but the last thing I feel right now is fear. More, exhilaration. A bizarre conviction that if I can find the right place for take-off, I’ll be able to fly.
