Elizabeth Baines: “Writing a short story is like dropping a stone into water and watching the ripples as they form outwards in every direction.”
Short is beautiful
Elizabeth Baines charts the return of the short story
Conventional wisdom says that short stories don’t sell. Certainly newspapers don’t review them very often. As a rule, therefore, unless they’re by high-profile novelists and have some possibility of selling on the backs of their novels, mainstream houses don’t publish them .
So why am I currently writing short story collections?
Because, apart from the fact that I’m hooked on short stories, the conventional wisdom is now being challenged. As mainstream publishing has become ever more narrowly-focused and commercial, independent publishers have emerged to establish the short story as a significant and dynamic literary form with a large potential market.
One of the problems that has had to be overcome is the common perception that short stories are apprentice work for novel writing. I confess that I once shared that view. I never studied short stories at school; on my university English course the stories of D.H. Lawrence, the only stories I recall ever being referred to, were very much seen in this light, as try-outs for the themes of his novels. So when a friend’s writer relative heard that I wanted to be a novelist, and advised me to begin by writing stories, this seemed like perfectly sound advice. It’s true, I’m now ashamed to say: I started writing (and reading) short stories because I wanted to be a novelist.
Well, it didn’t take me more than a week or two of immersion in stories (both reading and beginning to write them) to understand that a good short story can have the power of a good novel. In some ways it can have more – its very brevity can give you what Tania Hershman, author of the collection The White Road (Salt), calls an emotional slap in the face. It is just as capable of resonating afterwards in your mind, yet it also has its own very particular ways, different from those of a novel, of achieving this.
It’s a story’s brevity which is its power. Every word must count in a story, otherwise it falls apart. A good short story, to my mind, is a beautiful structure – though not necessarily neat and tidy (another misconception about short stories: the idea that they’re somehow tame) – with all the parts echoing or recalling each other, sometimes complex, sometimes stunningly simple.
In this way stories seem to me more like poetry than novels, and, having written both stories and novels, I’d also say that in this way they are harder (but also wonderfully satisfying) to write. And the experience of writing them is very different, I find. Writing a novel feels like an ongoing forwards rush (however non-linear the novel), but writing a story is like dropping a stone into water and watching the ripples as they form outwards in every direction.
Stories need to be read in a different way from novels, with a different, more studied kind of concentration. For this reason I think it’s a mistake – one I admit I made myself when I was publishing the short story magazine Metropolitan – to try and sell short stories as suitable for a rushed age. Most short story authors I have talked to recently believe that it’s that very rushed nature of our contemporary world, along with the superficiality of its commercial orientation, which has militated against the kind of focused attention which it takes to both write a story and to appreciate it as a reader.
For a time towards the end of the 20th century the short story all but disappeared as a significant literary force. During the 1980s there were still many print literary magazines publishing short stories, and women’s magazines often carried them, but there was that long-standing prejudice in mainstream publishing: when I presented my collection of individually published stories to an agent he saw them merely as a calling card and immediately asked me to write my first novel.
Then, as things became more commercial, print literary magazines publishing stories were unable to survive and the women’s magazines dropped them. (I more or less stopped writing short stories at this time: there seemed no point.)
I think that this compounded the aesthetic prejudice against the short story: unused to them, people have known even less how to read them, and have brought to them the same expectations they have of novels – the need for a sustained read you can sink into – and consequently have found them lacking. It’s an attitude I have encountered everywhere, from my reading group to forums on the internet.
As a result, those publishers who dared to publish collections of short stories, both mainstream and small, tended to disguise them as novels – beginning perhaps with Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting – and were prepared only to publish collections consisting of obviously linked stories.
While I salute this as brilliant marketing, I think that it contributed inadvertently to a demotion of the short story as a form in its own right, and of its possibilities. A good short story exists and resonates alone; it should so reverberate in your mind that you have no need to turn immediately to another. Thus a good short story collection, like a book of poetry, is a book for dipping into, not for reading sequentially and all at once like a novel.
However, for the last few years a shift has been occurring. First of all, the internet happened. At the very beginning literature didn’t take to the internet, but once it did, there was no stopping it. Suddenly it was possible to produce literary magazines again, and this time at the press of a few buttons, without any of those huge costs of printing and distribution, and with potentially far larger audiences.
The form which best lent itself to this new medium was the short story, in particular the rising new form of the very short story or ‘flash fiction’. Short story webzines like Pulp.net, East of the Web, and Storyglossia quickly established a respectable literary presence, but Googling ‘literary magazines’ now brings up scores more, and the list is growing.
A very recent development is the establishment of entirely web-based magazines fulfilling the role of traditional printed literary ones, with high-standard work alongside critical essays, such as The Manchester Review from Manchester University and Horizon, published under the umbrella of Salt, a book publisher that makes much innovative use of the web. Few web magazines pay writers but they have, I believe, created a growing appreciation of the stand-alone short story, which is now being reflected elsewhere.
In 2002 Arts Council England harnessed the new technology with its national Save Our Short Story Campaign, the culmination of which has been the founding of the BBC National Short Story Award for a single short story. It is interesting, and apt, that the winner of last year’s competition, Claire Wigfall, had previously published with Faber a superb debut collection, The Loudest Sound And Nothing, which bore no relation to those collections masquerading as novels, but was characterised by striking variety and proved nothing so much as the flexibility of the form.
Salt, my own publisher, is something of a leader in an astonishing book publication renaissance for the short story. Specialising so far in poetry and short stories, in a very short time they have published numerous single-author short story collections, most of them debut collections. Notable too is Manchester-based Comma, known for its anthologies but also publishing single-author collections – one of which, the compelling and odd-ball Tiny Deaths by Dr Who writer Robert Shearman, won the World Fantasy Awards 2008.
In the wake of this short story publishing boom, new competitions for single-author collections have also appeared: the Irish Frank O’Connor Award and The Edge Hill Prize for published collections, and for an unpublished collection the Scott prize run by Salt.
Last year Salt author Tania Hershman felt compelled by the lack of review space for short stories to set up the website The Short Review. She found herself overwhelmed by newly-published volumes of short stories from both small and mainstream publishers, receiving so many – 58 in the first ten days of 2009 – that she was led to ask rhetorically: “Who says no short stories are being published?”
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