The Short Story

The Short Story

Edited by

Ailsa Cox

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

 The Short Story, Edited by Ailsa Cox

This book first published 2008 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Ailsa Cox and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-669-6, ISBN (13): 9781847186690

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................ ix

“Small in a Way That a Bullet is Small”: Reflections on Writing

Short Stories
AL Kennedy ................................................................................................ 1

The Short Story: What Is It Exactly, What Do We Want to Do With It,

and How Do We Intend to Do It?
John Beevers.............................................................................................. 11

The Whole Story: The Contemporary Short Story in Sequence

Lucy Collins & Kathy Flann ..................................................................... 27

Notes Towards the Definition of the Short-Short Story

Ashley Chantler ......................................................................................... 38

How the Listener Was Lured in: What Makes a Good Crime Short Story?
Joanne Reardon ......................................................................................... 53

East, West, and Harmony: the Short Story as a Space for Translation
Jenni Ramone ............................................................................................ 61

Reflected Images: Calvino, Borges and Writing a Short Story

Elizabeth Ingrams ...................................................................................... 78

Anita Desai’s “The Rooftop Dwellers”: An Alternative Subaltern

History
Karen D’Souza .......................................................................................... 91

Treasure from the Colonial Past : A Reading of Sir Frank Swettenham’s

“A Silhouette” and “A Mezzotint”
Mohamad Rashidi Pakri .......................................................................... 105
vi Table of Contents

The Subversive Cinderella: Power Dynamics and Cultural Imperialism

in the Short Stories of Dorothy Edwards
Claire Flay ............................................................................................... 116

The Novelist on Holiday: Martin Amis and the Short Story.

Michael Greaney ..................................................................................... 130

Ray Bradbury: The Martian Storyteller

Andrew Oldham ...................................................................................... 142

Japanese Female Sadism: A Comparative Reading of Junichiro

Tanizaki’s “Tattoo” and Hitomi Kanehara’s Snakes and Earrings
Reuben Welsh.......................................................................................... 156

Oh, Whistle and I”ll Come to You, My Lad

Helen Newall ........................................................................................... 166

Contributors............................................................................................. 178

Index........................................................................................................ 181
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“Pieces” and “Ashes” from Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories by

Dan Rhodes (first published by Fourth Estate in 2000) are reproduced by
kind permission of the author.

“The Lifeguard” by D. Ray Ramsey and “Easy Come, Easy Go” by

Shannon O’Rourke from The World’s Shortest Stories of Love and Death
edited by Steve Moss are reprinted by permission of RP/Running Press , a
member of Perseus Books Group.

“This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected

Poems: Volume I 1909-1939, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher
MacGowan (2000) is reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
 INTRODUCTION

In March 2007, Granta magazine listed its twenty-one “Best Young

American Novelists.” A well-deserved accolade for, amongst others, ZZ
Packer, Christopher Coake, Karen Russell–but, strikingly, these were
amongst a full one third of those named, who were not in fact novelists.
They were short story writers. Some might be about to publish novels.
Others, like Helen Simpson, a veteran of the 1993 Granta “Best of Young
British Novelists”, may continue specialising in short fiction.
The short story has never been in better or worse health, and the Granta
list is just one of the many small pieces of evidence which together go to
prove why this should be. On both sides of the Atlantic, short story writers
are proliferating, often under the auspices of creative writing programmes.
The standard of writing is high, with many new and established talents
exploiting the form’s diverse potential. However, as many writers and
publishers will testify, literary fiction of all kinds is competing with other,
instantly accessible, media products. As Derek Attridge points out in The
Singularity of Literature, instrumentalist views of literature, privileging
content over form, have tended to prevail over less tangible responses.
Academic value judgements collude with those of the marketing
department, looking for seeking out easily dissected moral issues or
political standpoints, rather than aesthetic excellence. Short stories as May
points out are “essential yet seldom read”1 because they typically engage
with the inexplicable, reminding us of those aspects of reality which
escape our standard modes of cognition and classification.
May belongs to a distinguished band of writers, critics, teachers and
publishers whose passionate advocacy of the short story form has made it
such a rewarding field of study for more than thirty years. Short story
theory is unique in that it crosses the divide between critics and
practitioners, many of whom have a foot in both camps. There are several
regular international conferences, for instance those held by the Society
for the Study of the Short Story in venues including New Orleans, Lisbon
and Cork; and the symposiums held at the University of Angers in France.
These conferences, and the publications that grow out of them, sustain a

1
May, “Why Short Stories Are Essential and Why They Are So Seldom Read”,
24.
x Introduction

dynamic and supportive network of short story scholars.

In the UK, the short story is celebrated at literary festivals, such as
Small Wonder in Charleston, Sussex, which is dedicated to the form; and
the Frank O’Connor Short Story Festival in Ireland has been a regular
fixture for several years. However, there has been nothing which would
serve as a specific forum for the many writers and scholars working on the
short story within the academy, and it was with this aim in mind that the
North West Short Story Network developed, through its first conference at
Edge Hill University in May 2006. The day was so successful that it was
followed up with a second conference in 2007, the inaugural year of the
annual Edge Hill Prize, which awards £5000 to the author of a published
collection from the UK or Ireland. The prize was judged by, amongst
others, our keynote speaker from the 2006 conference, the author A.L.
Kennedy; the shortlisted authors were Neil Gaiman, Jackie Kay, Nicholas
Royle and Tamar Yellin, the winner Colm Tóibín for Mothers and Sons.
The names on that shortlist are still more evidence of the health and the
diversity of short story writing; and its ability to combine innovation with
popular appeal. Neil Gaiman is a fantasy writer with a devoted fan base.
Jackie Kay is especially well known as a poet, while Nicholas Royle’s
Mortality incorporates elements from horror genres and film noir. Gaiman,
Kay and Tóibín were all published by the mainstream, Royle by Serpents
Tail, which has been one of the most significant forces in British
independent publishing. Tamar Yellin’s Kafka in Brontëland was
published by a small US-based company, Toby Press. Her nomination co-
incided with her first taste of international success when she was awarded
the Sammi Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her novel The Genizah at
the House of Shepher.
Literary prizes, awarded on the basis of author’s writing rather than her
photogenic or other marketable qualities, are becoming increasingly
important in drawing readers’ attention to new fiction. A.L.Kennedy,
herself a beneficiary of many such awards, including most recently the
2008 Costa Prize, addresses the issues facing the short story writer in a
literary culture under siege through her keynote speech, “Small in a Way
that a Bullet is Small.” She demolishes the myth that readers do not want
short story collections by pointing out that her novels and stories sell
equally well, for the simple reason that they are both promoted by their
publishers. She also questions the validity of generic classification,
affirming the primacy of storytelling itself. For the writer, formal
distinctions are fluid and the story will find its own length.
Despite this reservation, Kennedy goes on to identify the particular
strengths and challenges of the short story, notably the importance of
 The Short Story xi

voice: “It’s like casting a bell, you have to dig a pit and drag in the correct
amount of metal and sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes it’s cracked
and the note is wrong.”2 For both readers and writers the short story
demands intense concentration, and for that very reason it is one of the
most potent forms of contemporary literature.
In “The Short Story: What is it exactly, what do we want to do with it,
and how do we intend to do it?” John Beevers takes up some of the issues
raised by A.L.Kennedy concerning publication and the reading culture. A
few years ago, a revival of interest in the short story was spearheaded by
the Save Our Short Story Campaign, backed by the Arts Council in the
UK. Beevers looks at the campaign’s aims and the findings of its research,
alongside the many and various attempts to define the short story itself.
Why do some readers appear to resist the short story, and how might they
be persuaded to change their minds?
One of Beevers’s suggestions is that we concentrate on the short story
sequence or cycle, a hybrid genre which has recently become much more
familiar, but whose recent origins can be traced back to Joyce’s Dubliners.
In “The Whole Story: The Modern Short Story in Sequence” Lucy Collins
and Kathy Flann configure the inter-relatonship between aesthetic
considerations and practical constraints in the evolution of the sequence of
interlinked stories, beginning with Dubliners itself and moving on to a
more recent example from Ireland, John MacKenna’s A Year of Our Lives.
The theoretical analysis of the short story sequence as an alternative
narrative structure, with a distinctive configuration of time and space, is
interwoven with Flann’s reflection on her own creative process in the
evolution of her own short story sequence, Smoky Ordinary.
Ashley Chantler’s “Notes Towards the Definition of the Short-Short
Story” also examines innovatory and hybrid forms. Like the short story
cycle, the very short story is not a new invention. Chantler considers
parables and folk tales, Kafka’s paradoxes, Hemingway’s In Our Time and
even fragmented verse sequences such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as
antecedents to the current boom in a genre popularised by writers such as
Dave Eggers and Dan Rhodes. He traces this upsurge to 1980s America,
seeing the fragmented and the incomplete as a protest to the grand
narrative associated with a Reaganite worldview; and attributes the form’s
current success to its compatibility with the new electronic media. He then
goes on to debate the various terms and definitions used by practitioners,
including “flash fiction,” “micro fiction” and “sudden fiction.” How long
can a short-short be? He identifies the characteristics of a successful

2
See p.3.
xii Introduction

short-short, using examples from Dan Rhodes and others.

Radio has long been, and still remains, a vitally important medium for
short story writing. Many Canadian writers, including Margaret Atwood
and Alice Munro, have acknowledged their gratitude to Robert Weaver’s
CBC programmes, while in the UK BBC Radio 4 broadcasts a story every
weekday. In “How the Listener Was Lured in: What Makes A Good Crime
Short Story?” Joanne Reardon shares insights from her experience as a
radio producer, exploring the factors which create a bond between
storyteller and listener. Like many popular genres, today’s crime fiction
has its roots in the nineteeenth century short story. Comparing a classic
detective story from Wilkie Collins with a more recent example by the
American Sara Paretsky, Reardon examines how each establishes a
compelling narrative voice, hooking their listeners from start to finish.
Jenni Ramone’s “East, West, and Harmony: the Short Story as a Space
for Translation” also examines the process of transmission, this time with
from a more theoretical angle. Ramone applies three types of translation
defined by Goethe to the stories in Salman Rushdie’s East, West. As recent
translation theory explains, “translation” does not only occur when a text
is transcribed into another language; and the concept of “translation” is
especially useful when considering the reception of postcolonial texts.
Through the close reading of Rushdie’s stories and a comparison with
parallel narratives in his novels, Ramone suggests that there may be an
inherent compatibility between the short story form and translation.
The modern short story is a truly international form. It is difficult to
conceive of the short story in English without the influence of Chekhov,
Turgenev and Maupassaunt; the global conversation is continued in the
dialogue between Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami.3 In the first of
our chapters on world literature, “Reflected Images: Calvino, Borges and
Writing a Short Story,” Elizabeth Ingrams examines the work of two great
fabulists, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Comparing how each writer
uses the trope of the mirror, she contrasts narrative open-endedness in
Calvnino with the movement towards revelation and a search for ultimate
unity in Borges’s stories.
Karen D’Souza gives a detailed analysis of Anita Desai’s “The
Rooftop Dwellers” from a postcolonial and feminist viewpoint. Drawing
on Spivak’s concept of subalternity, she argues that fictional representations
may offer insights into aspects of gendered experience which are
suppressed by the competing discourses of colonialist and postcolonialist

3
The Japanese novelist and short story writer has translated all of Carver’s work,
and absorbed his influence in his own distinctive manner.
 The Short Story xiii

historiographies in the South East Asian context. In particular, D’Souza

looks at the possibility of agency for the female subject through the small,
subversive gestures acted out by Desai’s characters.
Sir Frank Swettenham (1850-1946) is a very different figure to
Rushdie and Desai, a colonial governor, writing his stories and sketches at
the height of the British Empire. Mohamad Rashidi Pakri’s “Treasure from
the Colonial Past” re-evaluates stories published as The Real Malay. For
many of the Empire’s servants, fiction writing served as a means to
transmit their views on imperial policy to the metropolitan centre from the
periphery. These views were often deeply ambivalent and the boundary
between the discourse of colonizer and colonized may not be as clearly
demarcated as some postcolonial theorists may suggest. For these reasons,
it may be worth preserving some of the colonial texts currently excluded
from the canon.
A young Welsh woman hailed as a literary genius at the start of her
career, Dorothy Edwards died tragically in 1934. Since her death she has
been largely neglected, although with the recent reprinting of her
collection Rhapsody she may at last receive more attention. Because there
is nothing obviously “Welsh” in Edwards’s characters or subject matter,
she has not fitted easily into the Welsh literary canon, which has been so
important in sustaining reputations. However, as Claire Flay argues in
“The Subversive Cinderella,” Edwards’s mimicry of the English
bourgeoisie is a deliberate attack on their values from an author whose
own identity remained firmly that of a Welsh socialist. Referring both to
the stories themselves and to a recent acquisition of diaries and letters at
the University of Reading, Flay traces the biographical and artistic journey
of a writer whose work is enjoying a much-deserved revival.
Yet another reputation is re-evaluated in “The Novelist on Holiday,”
Michael Greaney’s discussion of Martin Amis’s short stories. Heavy
Water and Other Stories received a poor critical reception when first
published in 1998. While the bulk of Amis’s novels are treated with
respect, the shorter fiction has been mostly dismissed as trivial or
gimmicky. Greaney suggests that, eschewing the grand themes of London
Fields or Time’s Arrow, the famously diminutive author exploits the
limitations of shorter forms and generates comic effects from incongruity
of scale. When novelists such as Amis turn their hand to short fiction, they
are at liberty to play tricks that are impossible in full length prose.
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a compilation of science
fiction stories, linked together and marketed, like many short story
sequences, as a novel. Reflecting the pre-occupations of the US in the
Cold War period, they confront they challenge conventional hierarchies of
xiv Introduction

colonialism and rationalist discourse. Andrew Oldham celebrates

Bradbury’s achievement as a writer who crosses the divide between “pulp”
and “literary” fiction. Bradbury himself discards the narrow definitions of
genre fiction, proclaiming the primacy of the narrative drive and the
human appetite for stories.
Reuben Welsh’s “Japanese Female Sadism: A Comparative Reading”
compares Snakes and Earrings, a recent novel by Hitomi Kanehara, with
Junichiro Tanizaki’s story “Tattoo” (1910). Both texts use the image of the
tattoo to explore the power of artistic creation and the dialectical process
of becoming; and both address Japan’s relationship with the West. In
Tanizaki’s time that relationship was characterized by an infatuation with
western modernity; a hundred years later, western cultural values have
been internalized and are no longer “other.” Welsh reads Kanehara’s novel
as an implicit commentary on the earlier story from a female standpoint;
both confront the difficulties of maintaining individuality in a commodity
culture. In that respect, the texts resonate not only in for the Japanese
reader, but in the global context.
The volume ends, as it begins, with the practitioner’s voice. In “Oh,
Whistle and I”ll Come to You, My Lad,” Helen Newall explores the
notion that writing itself is a spectral experience, the emergent text
becoming a gothic enclosure, akin to the haunted spaces of M.R. James. If
reading and writing a novel means dwelling in a haunted house, then the
equivalent in the short story is the overnight stay in the spooky hotel room
from which we may never recover.
In their diversity, these essays represent something of the wide range
of short story criticism, and the richness of the form itself. The short
story’s adaptability and formal fluidity is addressed in chapters on the
short-short and the story sequence; the role of radio; and types of
“translation.” Several contributors re-evaluate stories which have
previously been marginalized, either because their authors’ reputations
have faded or because that particular part of their output has been excluded
from the canon. Others emphasise postcolonial theory and the short story’s
abilility to combine the global with the local. For all of us, storytelling is
inexhaustability, and the story of short story theory will be continued
indefinitely.
 The Short Story xv

Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004.
May, Charles E. “Why Short Stories Are Essential and Why They Are So
Seldom Read.” In The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction
Theory and Analysis, edited by Per Winther, Jakob Lothe and Hans H.
Skei, 14-25. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Tóibín, Colm. Mothers and Sons. London: Macmillan, 2006.
Yellin, Tamar. The Genizah at the House of Shepher. New Milford CT and
London: Toby Press, 2005.
—. Kafka in Brontëland and Other Stories. New Milford CT and London:
Toby Press, 2006.
 SMALL IN A WAY THAT A BULLET IS SMALL

A.L. KENNEDY

This is an edited version of a speech given by A.L. Kennedy at Edge Hill

University in May 2006.

As time goes by and the longer I write anything-or should I say the longer
I write everything-at a certain level the distinctions between form become
less important. A lot of it appears to be more and more packaging. Where
do you draw the line formally between a novella and a long short story and
a short-short story and a literary letter? There are so many gradations or
forms. The only form where I felt particularly I was doing something
different, from the point of view of a writer, was when I was writing a
screenplay and that was largely to do with the layout being a pain in the
neck. Now they even have computer programmes to do the layout for you,
and even that feels the same.
I am telling stories about things that happen to people who I have to
make emotionally and psychologically consistent, convincing and three-
dimensional. So, at a certain level I find there’s no difference and I object
to the difference, and I certainly object to having conversations about
“because you do this, you do this differently” and I will always tend to be
defending my people against swine who don’t understand them. The
extreme end of that would be television. You would also get it in reading a
short story for Radio 4–those of you who are familiar with Radio 4–why
the voice of that has to be a slightly drowned middle class woman who’s
died fairly recently but not that recently….It’s impossible to give a reading
in anything but that style because they make you re-read it and re-read it
until you’re weeping and then you feel approximately like a dead woman
and off you go, and if you don’t do it that way, they will get an actress in
who will because they will do anything for money.
Obviously, there is such a thing as a short story, and when I’m writing
a short story it does also feel qualitatively different than writing a novel
and it does feel different from writing a novella. So, on the one hand I’m
saying, they don’t exist and on the other hand I’m saying they do. I do
object to being in a culture where an awful lot of forms no longer exist.
2 Small in a Way That a Bullet is Small

Where you can’t produce a literary letter; or you can but I don’t know
where you’d put it. You can’t produce a long short story because there’s
nowhere to put it unless you know it’s going to go into an anthology. You
have to have the 2500 word story. There are an infinite amount of stories
that won’t fit in two and a half thousand words. A lot of the time, I think
more and more often that the qualitative difference between forms is to do
with the type of story you’re telling and if you are correctly telling a story
that lasts eleven hundred words it will then be perfect for Radio 4. A huge
number of Radio 4 stories, where people are placing short stories because
there is nowhere else to place them, aren’t perfect for eleven hundred
words and have just been made to be eleven hundred words.
There are stories that are six thousand words long and they are just six
thousand words long, it’s just a pain in the arse that there’s nowhere to put
them and there’s no point anymore. Never ever ever write a novella
because you’re just going to have to claim it’s something else. I have a
novella that is anthologised in a collection of short stories because they
didn’t want to release it as a novella because they don’t sell. In all the
other countries it’s published it’s released as a novella because they sell.
So, that beyond the short story is the form that cannot speak its name. I
object to the general impoverishment of our literary culture. Does a short
story have to be short? No it doesn’t. I grew up with influences in the short
story area, primarily from people like Chekhov and the longer stories from
Chekhov and writers like Hawthorne, with these enormous stories that
nobody would get away with now. So, I never thought of them as short.
Though those I wrote initially were short but that because it took so much
concentration that I couldn’t produce a long one. Do short stories have to
be stories? No, no they can be photographic, they can be certainly not plot
driven; one of the joys of them they don’t have to be all that narratively
driven. It’s very difficult to define as a form, when I am sat writing one;
and when you are sat writing them, you know how it feels. If you’ve ever
written a novella, you know how it feels. So, I’ve spent the past week
trying to define how it feels to be in a short story and why that is different
to how it feels to be in a novel. I certainly have to say that my stream of
short stories is now a kind of prostrate afflicted dribble. I’ve only written
one in about two years because I’ve written two novels in a row and that is
a very different sensation. I think we maybe have to talk about this really
boring fight between the short story and the novel.
I live in Glasgow now and we have the really boring fight of Glasgow
being good but only at the expense of Edinburgh, and Edinburgh is only
nice because Glasgow is full of maniacs. Equal amount of boredom in the
short story/novel argument. As a Scot, I frequently get phrases inflicted on
 A.L. Kennedy 3

me about: “Scotland is a small country so it produces short stories…

because little tiny people, and short stories make a miniature form and it’s
exquisite…but really it’s Russian sitting in a lake on a little thing with a
single hair…” No! It’s like the size matters thing, very very stupid
argument about how thick is your volume and that’s all it is! There is
particular respect for the huge, ludicrously long novel, like it’s everything
you need to say in one fat volume. This idea, because something is small
it’s not so good, it doesn’t take as much effort, it’s not as nice–whatever–
completes the misunderstanding of the short story. The thing about the
short story is that yes, it is small, but it is small in a way that a bullet is
small, and the whole thing about a short story is that you’re trying to give
it the punch that will hit your reader and blow their fucking head off
because you don’t have long. It’s not the death by a thousand cuts you get
with a novel. I remember reading the collected works of Mavis Gallant,
which comes with a front piece from her saying, “Don’t read these all at
once, you could die! It’s not like a box of chocolates and even those would
make you sick. Animal! Read them one at a time maybe once a week”.
And, you’re kind of thinking, “Whooo” and you couldn’t read it in bed
because it’s huge, it would kill you.
At a certain level you can’t read an awful lot of stories at once; it is
“like a box of chocolates,” it would make you ill if they’re any good,
because these are intense experiences. I feel that this reflects reality.
There is a moment when you weren’t in love and then you are. There is a
moment when your mother isn’t dead and then she is. There is a moment
when you didn’t have cancer and then you do. There is a moment when
you thought you had cancer and then you find out that you don’t. It
reflects part of being a human being; the key moments in life are often
fantastically brief and very deeply penetrating, and intense, and you have
this little narrative form which captures all that is necessary. There are
defining moments in anybody’s life, which mark them forever, which
don’t actually take an awful long time; that’s what the short story is about.
It’s this hugely powerful form but no, it’s defined as being miniature. So, I
get very annoyed about that and I think partly this is to do with the fashion
over the last few decades for very journalistic short stories; by which I
don’t mean the Carveresque dirty realism short stories, because they are
proper short stories, but this idea that an essay about what you did at the
weekend will be in a Granta or New Yorker, and as long as it appears to be
taken from real life it doesn’t matter that it’s not actually a fully realised
short story.
What I’m looking for from a fully realised short story is something that
probably has a strong sense of voice, because it is short and you can’t just
4 Small in a Way That a Bullet is Small

let it lie there. There’s this sense with the short story, unlike a novel, that it
is going to be brief. Even if it’s a Chekovian huge thing, there has to be a
sense that there was life before and there will be life after. The best
comment anyone will ever give you about a short story is, “Oh, I bet you
could extend that into a novel.” You couldn’t–that’s nonsense, it’s rubbish,
it’s a complete misunderstanding of what you’ve done–but it should
appear to be possible that you could extend it or expand it because what
you want with a short story is that it chimes with the reader because
you’ve made it perfect enough that it resonates before and after itself. The
people arrive and it’s as if they were alive forever beforehand and the
people leave and it’s as if they’re going off to the rest of their lives. This
chime, this note, is the key moment; it’s all you need to know for them to
travel with you for the rest of your life.
It’s like casting a bell, you have to dig a pit and drag in the correct
amount of metal and sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes it’s cracked
and the note is wrong. It’s very very high pressure in a way that a novel
isn’t because you’ve got longer. A short story is like a first date, it’s not
you’re going to be with them for months in a polar research station and
you can work your wiles upon them. It’s a speed date, you have to be
really gorgeous from the start, very impressive and funny and attractive,
dripping with pheromones and then maybe they will stay with you for the
prerequisite amount of time. So, the idea that it is less technically
demanding is ludicrous, so I’m probably looking for a lot of voice and
probably looking for really really deep understanding of character point of
view, which as far as literary criticism goes isn’t dealt with quite often.
A lot of the Creative Writing schools that are growing up within
Universities are set within English departments. Why? Writing’s nothing
to do with English Literature; you can put it in the Sociology Department
or Psychology Department or Anthropology Department or an Engineering
Department. If Creative Writing is properly Creative Writing it will have
relevance to any department you want; but the English Department is the
only department that will think it knows what you are doing, which is a
disaster. What you won’t talk about often in a literary context is what point
of view does. If you genuinely have a correct appreciation–third person or
first person–of the point of view of the characters, then you have
everything, You have the world, you have the colour of description, you
have the density of description–you have this sense of genuinely being
within someone else’s skin or this genuine understanding of someone else.
The short story is the form where you most need to have a grip of point
of view or it just doesn’t work, because you don’t have enough room to
not get it right. Every single word really has to be doing something. In a
 A.L. Kennedy 5

short story there is no room for smoke and mirrors, there’s no room for the
nervousness when you start writing, that kind of, ‘I’m going to muck
around for a couple of paragraphs because I don’t really know where I’m
going and I’ll put a couple at the end to join up with the couple of mucking
around paragraphs.” No, you can’t do that; you can be nervous but you
have to cut it out instantaneously because it is so visible if you don’t know
what you’re talking about, it’s so visible if you’re just throwing a
description in the general direction of what you’re aiming at, and you’ll
deal with it later. It’s so visible if you’re not going to emotionally commit
to your character.
I think the short story is the most emotionally demanding form. There
are lots of reasons why I don’t have a life, but I think one of them is, is
that I kicked off with short stories for years. Also, I’m not functional as
human being–but the short stories played a part. They are very very
demanding emotionally, not because they’re autobiographical–I don’t go
for all that “You’re just typing round your life” and just tracing around
everyone you know because I think that’s a very boring way to write–but
in order to produce emotions and effects you have to compare with
yourself.
Within a short story you are much less insulated then you are within a
novel, a novel is very demanding because you have to carry the plot, and
you have to carry long running themes and you have to make the knots
join together (if you wish to be the kind of novel where knots do join
together). So, there is a kind of marathon experience happening; but within
a short story there’s just you and this person –or people–you have to make
very alive from a standing start. You’re carrying them a lot; you don’t
have this sense, as you do within a novel, that you make forty-eight
decisions and by the time you’ve got halfway into the novel the forty-eight
decisions are pretty much pointing you to that end you have to hit because
it’s predetermined by the decisions you’ve already made; and you don’t
have this character history that’s building up and interacting.
I think it is the form where most often, if I’ve got students coming in,
you can kind of tell whether they’ve popped through to the point where
they’re doing it because they’ll come in and say, “I’m really tired,” “I
don’t know if I’m doing this right because I can only do three or four
paragraphs and then I fall asleep.” Yes, it’s hard. It’s the most
concentration that you will ever do as a writer; you’re certainly in the kind
of territory that poets have appropriated, where every word counts on the
page. The demands are very similar; you have to have the musicality
because it’s short, you have to have the shape on the page working
because it’s short, you have to have these boiled down beautiful multi-
6 Small in a Way That a Bullet is Small

layered descriptions of things because it’s short. Every metaphor and

simile has to work because it’s short. If you like, it’s the ultimate form of
neuro-linguistic understanding of your reader; you really want to get in
there and just mess with their heads in the most fundamental and enjoyable
way. You know, they’re volunteering for it; it’s a mutually consenting
masochistic experience for them, which is lovely for all concerned.
You really are looking for words with multiple meanings, in the way
you would expect in poetry. Every multiple meaning must be pointing in a
direction, which is useful to you. You are looking at it in intense focus.
Simply because that is the way the human mind works. You are dealing
with an instrument that is very sensitive to language and you have to be
aware of that and really make all of that fire. I think if you are coming
from the short story to the novel then you will attempt to do that within a
novel maybe more than if you went straight into the novel.
I certainly don’t think–and I’ve had big arguments about this idea–that
creating free human characters is indulging the reader. It’s an old
fashioned fear of making the reader too comfortable, which has led to
some rather flat short stories or non-short stories. I think that idea is
probably losing some currency now, but technically, from my point of
view as reader, never mind as a writer, it just makes me think, “Well, you
just haven’t bothered to give me a character.” You can have an ideological
or intellectual reason for giving me a cardboard cut-out but it’s still a
cardboard cut-out. I don’t really care about your intellectual justification. I
also think it’s just not good for people. I think it is extraordinarily good for
people to experience what fiction does. If anyone can genuinely pop you
inside the skin of someone you’re not; if anyone can make you look
through their eyes for a moment with any kind of conviction, that’s a huge
jump. It’s a massively unsociopathic thing to do. You’re actually admitting
someone other than you is human, complicated and complex, and
irreplaceable. Wonderfully good practise for being a nice human being.
If you look at trends within fiction and generally within narrative art,
they are all in the other direction at the moment–which makes me very
worried about Us. But, I really like the short story’s ability to do that very
briefly and deeply and intensely. Partly, that is a personal thing because I
like intensity and depth, I think a good short story can do it in a variety of
ways; it doesn’t necessarily have to be drudging up entrails and being
terribly physical just because that’s what I’m trying to do. I do think it’s
something we’ve lost–this element of imagination within fiction and it’s a
particularly savage loss within the short story because as I keep saying it’s
a tiny thing. You need everything to be working; you need everything to
be firing. It’s a beautiful form. It is a shame that is has been unappreciated.
 A.L. Kennedy 7

My experience of working with the short story? I didn’t know any

better. I came from being a drama student, so my bias is very character
based. It makes perfect sense to me that I came from being a drama
student, writing monologues and audition pieces, to the short story, when I
was back in Dundee, where there was no cultural life of any kind and
nobody to write for. So, I began to write monologues and then to include
whatever would make them work on the page without being out loud,
without the physical presence of a human being. I didn’t think. ‘I’m going
to write short stories”. I didn’t think this was an imperilled form; even at
that point; that was 1986. I didn’t think about markets, I didn’t do any of
the things you were told to do, you know–research magazines who will
accept you. I just kept writing these things because I had no other
opportunity to do anything that had any completion. There were many
satisfactions absent from my life, so I was writing just to fill the gap and
sending them away arbitrarily. At that point, I just came in at the tail end
of places where you could put short stories. Bete Noire was still around,
Stand magazine was there and I had the experience, which all of you
would have had, of being accepted to tiny magazines which then stopped
existing, being massively rejected by all kinds of other magazines. Being
accepted and discovering that the wonderful reward was eight copies of a
literary magazine you couldn’t read because it was awful; or a cheque for
twenty pounds which arrived three years later. It was very clear that you
weren’t going to make money doing this but I wasn’t doing it for money. I
took the decision to be free in what I wrote by subsidising myself.
So, I didn’t have to do what an arts organisation said I’d do, as they are
often much more controlling and demanding than a commercial interest;
and I didn’t have to write commercially, things I didn’t want to do. I flirted
with the idea of writing pornography. Now of course I do, but it’s
Literature, so it’s alright. Why write alternate books of short stories and
novels? I have no idea. It just happened by accident; but initially it was
kind of reasonable for me to have ideas that were not within the novel and
to be writing them up while doing the first half of the novel and the last
half of the novel would be intense and all consuming and there would be
no short stories but when that novel was finished you’d have half a book
of short stories and in the time off before the novel came out you could do
the other book of short stories…
This was when I was young and had energy and was alive. The good
thing for me was that after the first book came out with a very obscure
Scottish press, I was taken over by a London publisher and my editor there
since has been Robert Robinson, who edits Alan Warner, and occasionally
James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, and everybody Scottish. Basically he
8 Small in a Way That a Bullet is Small

made a decision to put an equal amount of publicity and marketing into

my short stories as well as the novels, and consistently my sales have been
the same. The myth of “they don’t sell” is a myth. They don’t sell because
you don’t tell anybody they’re there. I can’t buy something if I don’t know
it exists. I can’t even look for something if I don’t know it’s there. That’s
the same for the novella and the short story. Unfortunately now it’s the
same for the literary novel.
The short story may be getting better, we’ve always needed the blanket
prizes and the visibility that the novel has. The awful thing of late, is that
people have been trying to help the short story by having competitions
where there’s a subject set. Would you ever do that with a novel? Would
the Booker Prize be the prize for the best novel about herring? No. The
whole idea is you write the thing and it’s about what ever you bloody
want. Very often short story competitions are subject related, why would
you do that to a beautiful, subtle, wonderful, infinitely variable form? Or
they have a length limit. Particularly in a competition, why would you do
that?
The length limit is applied everywhere now. We are continually being
told by all the media that no one has an attention span. Over the last
twenty years I have worked with children and been continually told that
they are the worst. Strangely if you are doing something interesting they
have quite a good attention span like all human beings. Now, if you’re
trying to write drama for the BBC, it’s got to be forty-two minutes long;
there’s no hour slot, there’s no hour and a half slot, there’s no two hour
slot. Everything is as brief as possible; everything is on the back foot.
Now we have the argument that Literary Fiction doesn’t sell. So,
although the short story is coming up, the whole edifice is crumbling.
Writers are being offered contracts with no advances; they are being given
the benefit of an editor–it’s the bloody least you can do–if you’re not
going to give me a copy editor, it is going to be badly spelt! It won’t be
proof read, I will have to do that myself and I can’t because it’s not my
expertise because it’s not meant to be, it’s your job, it’s why you take the
massive percentage of my income, which you do. So, overall it’s not a
good outlook. Having said that, if it’s equally hopeless to write a novel or
a collection of short stories, know yourself out and write the collection of
short stories if it’s in your heart to do it. If there is an increased availability
of serious proper prizes that don’t interfere with the form, it maybe there’s
a renaissance because they’re very easy to place. You can stick a whole
one in the Guardian. You can put one on the radio. They lend themselves
to being placed out in the magazines, in a way that extracts from novels
don’t. If you want to practice the art of prose, the short story is the place to
 A.L. Kennedy 9

do it; I think at its finest, the demands are great, at the edge of what you
want to do.
The humanitarian aspects of prose–this is an extract from a book called
The Survivors by the first Jewish padre who went into Bergen-Belsen
Concentration Camp. He felt the stuff he saw, and the things that he learnt,
were so important that he had to write a book about it. It’s a journalistic
book, a record of what he saw. He is not a good writer, so it’s not that
good a record. As history it is very interesting. It’s not a great book but
there is a very interesting bit in it and I think if you’re practising prose
correctly, it’s not that you may write good journalism but there is
something in the quality of prose that is special and necessary to human
beings and human civilisation, and there’s a nice little quote very early on.
He’s gone into the camp for the first time and he’s seen people and he’s
asking what they want, and –I certainly found this interesting–he’s talking
to this couple in their early twenties, and he says:

“Can I do something for you?”

Sadly they shook their heads.
“No, there is nothing you can do for us”.
“Would you like to write to somebody? Is there someone I might help
you to find?”
“No, there’s no one. We have no one left. Why did you come and save
us? It would have been better if we have been left to die”.
“You’re both young you still have your life before you. Let me help
you’.
“No, there is nothing you can do for us”.
In their bereft and lonely state they were inconsolable…

It’s not great prose:

…and I sadly moved away.

“Rabbi please,” I turned back,“There is something you can do”.
“What is it?”
“Bring us Steinbeck”.
“John Steinbeck? What can he do for you?”
“He can write what is in our minds. You can write and describe what
you see in this camp but only Steinbeck can write of what is in here,”
touching their foreheads with significant fingers.

That for me is what you want, to write the impossible thing that you
cannot touch. Factually, non-factually, it’s just huge, there’s deep
understanding there of, apart from anything else, of making something
from nothing. That small daily triumph that you have as a writer and I
10 Small in a Way That a Bullet is Small

think within the short story because it is such a demanding form and it is
so, relatively speaking, small, if you make something that genuinely
changes someone permanently and I believe you can, maybe in a tiny way,
if you can really chisel in, like the Carver story “A Small Good Thing”–I
will never forget that, I am a different person because I read that. He did
that to me and for me. That is such a precious and important and
wonderful thing to do. Sadly, publishing and commerce and marketing and
all that myth gets in the way. It’s our job as writers and people and human
beings to get the nonsense out of the way, the intervening nonsense, and
allow these forms to flourish and to become as variable as they should and
to flower in the ways they should.

Transcribed and edited by Ailsa Cox and Andrew Oldham

 THE SHORT STORY: WHAT IS IT EXACTLY,
WHAT DO WE WANT TO DO WITH IT,
AND HOW DO WE INTEND TO DO IT?

JOHN BEEVERS

There is a current re-awakening of interest in the short story in British

literary and academic circles. This is largely the result of the Arts Council
funded “Save Our Short Story” campaign.1 This commenced in 2002 and
culminated with the introduction of a major prize (£15000 inaugural first
prize) awarded for the first time in 2006 to James Lasdun for “An Anxious
Man.”2 At the outset of the campaign, a report was commissioned from
Jenny Brown Associates, and research undertaken in the second half of
2003.
The aims of the campaign were determined at the outset to be:

• Increase the number and visibility of high quality outlets for short
fiction.
• Give the short story form more prestige and a higher profile.
• Enable writers to specialise in the short story form.

At first glance, these might appear to be straightforward objectives.

However, there are underlying complications. Does the Arts Council
intend to encompass all short fiction in these objectives, for example,
romantic short fiction associated with some women’s magazines; or to
restrict their attention to the developed short story, the genre that has
evolved as an art form over the last two hundred years or thereabouts, the
so called “modern short story?” This isn’t clear.

1
The campaign has since been re-named “Story”; full details on
http://theshortstory.org.uk.
2
The 2007 prize was won by Julian Gough for “The Orphan and the Mob”. In
2008 the prize was relaunched as the BBC National Short Story Award to reflect a
change in sponsorship.
12 The Short Story: What Is It Exactly, What Do We Want to Do with It,
and How Do We Intend to Do It?

These were some of the findings of the research project, produced in

March 2004:

• Approximately half of those who do not read books of short stories

say they do read short stories in magazines, with women more likely
(82%) to say this than men (32%).
• Half of those reading short stories in magazines but not books say
there is no difference between the two, while others feel that
magazines have easier stories, or more romance, or stories aimed at
the magazines readers–i.e. people like themselves
• Of short story collections sold, the majority were by writers best
known for genre novels. Frederick Forsyth sold 116,310 copies of The
Veteran. The best selling “literary” collections were The Devil”s
Larder by Jim Crace, 7270, followed closely by Hateship, Friendship,
Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro, 6145.3

In these extracts concerning magazines, the report appears not to

differentiate between “genre short fiction” and “literary short stories.”
However, the decision to introduce a prize as the main thrust of increasing
awareness, together with the tenor of the website which describes the short
story as “one of the elite forms of modern literature,” implies that the
promotion of excellence and the “the modern short story” is the priority.4
In order to pursue this argument, it will be necessary to properly
differentiate between what I have referred to above as “genre short fiction”
and “the modern or literary short story.”

Defining the Modern Short Story

The term “short story” is relatively new. Not until the OED supplement of
1933 did the term, designating a particular kind of literary product, gain
formal admittance into the vocabulary of English readers.5 There is
currently no agreed term for a shorter work of fiction which is not a short
story, that is to say, a short fiction which does not meet a notional

3
Jenny Brown Associates Book Marketing Ltd., The Short Story in the UK, Report
and Appendices, March 2004. http://saveourshortstory.org.uk (accessed March
31st 2004). While the main body of the report is still available at the time of
writing, via the Story website, this site is now defunct.
4
http://theshortstory.org.uk/about us (accessed January 12th, 2008).
5
Reid, The Short Story, 1.
 John Beevers 13

definition of a short story as a work of art.6 There are however precursors

to the modern short story that have been overtaken as the form developed.
I will mention two of these, examples of which are still being produced
and typify genre short fiction.
The yarn is situated in the oral tradition, and is a near relative of the
tall tale. Consider Frank O’Connor’s introduction to The Lonely Voice, a
classic study of the short story:

“By the Hokies, there was a man in this place one time by the name of Ned
Sullivan, and a queer thing happened to him late one night, and he coming
up the valley road from Durlas.”
That is how, even in my own lifetime,7 stories began.8

The yarn is basically an anecdote. It is frequently, though not always, an

apocryphal tale such as King Alfred and the burning of the cakes, or Isaac
Newton and the falling apple.They may take several of the rudimentary
literary shapes posited by Andre Jolles in his Einfache Formen (1930)
such as the local legend or joke, or may be attached to a proverb or riddle.
The yarn is “usually narrated in the colloquial and casual tone appropriate
to the raconteur working in the oral tradition,”9 and the word derives from
sailor’s slang in which “spinning a yarn” was a rope-making metaphor.
The sketch is also not a short story as we usually define it, i.e. as a
work of art. Washington Irving, one of the main practitioners of the sketch
had this to say about the form in The Sketch Book in 1820:

For my part, I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch the

materials; it is the play of thought, and sentiment, and language, the
weaving in of characters, lightly, yet expressively delineated; the familiar
and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life; and the half-concealed
vein of humor that is often playing through the whole,—these are among
what I aim at, and upon which I felicitate myself in proportion as I think I
succeed.10

Hills comments that:

Any incident in a sketch is rendered as an example of a character’s

behavior, not as the account of something that happened to him that moved

6
Bonheim, The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story, 166.
7
1903-66.
8
O’Connor, The Lonely Voice, 13.
9
Reid, 33.
10
Quoted in Brander Matthews, “Introduction,” The Short-Story (1907) available
on http://bartleby.com/195/101.html (accessed January 12th, 2008).
14 The Short Story: What Is It Exactly, What Do We Want to Do with It,
and How Do We Intend to Do It?

or altered him, as it is in a story. It’s assumed that, confronted with the

same situation…the character in a sketch would react in exactly the same
way again, no matter how many times the action was repeated.11

Having identified examples of what the modern short story is not, is it

possible to define the obverse?
The first issue is one of length. How short is “short?” Here we run into
immediate difficulties. Bonheim, citing Short Story Index Supplement
1964–1968, tells us that this listing list incorporates 11,301 short stories,
between two and a hundred and fifty pages in length.12 Depending on the
format, the larger figure equates to a word count greater than 50,000. This
is not particularly helpful, as we note that some novels are shorter than
some stories. (Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea, only runs to
a hundred and six pages, even in the most generous format.)
Valerie Shaw reminds us that, during the development of the form,
length had been somewhat determined by publishers’ requirements rather
than literary considerations.13 In the Tatler magazine for example, a sheet
could accommodate 2000 words, and this determined the word count.
Shaw goes on to quote V.S. Pritchett, who wrote in the London Magazine
(1966) that the short story was an inextinguishable lost cause, and pointed
out that it was difficult to publish stories longer than 7,000 words; and
after 10,000, impossible.14 Henry James mentioned the hard and fast rule
among contemporary magazines of keeping inside the range of between
6000 and 8000 words.15 Somerset Maugham noted in the preface to his
Complete Short Stories16 that the smallest item there came to about 1,600
words, and the longest to about 20,000, and that was approximately the
median range–though some authors would include briefer and longer
work: in Frank Sargeson’s Collected Stories a few pieces are less than 500
words, while one runs to about 32,000. Currently, the length of stories in
the annual anthologies Best American Short Stories ranges between 4000
and 9000. The National Short Story Prize requires a length of no more
than 8000 words, whereas the Bridport maximum is 5000.
Poe is widely quoted as having said that a tale (taken as a synonym for
“story” at the time of the quotation) is that which is capable of being
perused at a single sitting. William Saroyan is credited with pointing out

11
Hills, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, 2.
12
Bonheim, 166.
13
Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical Introduction, 7.
14
Ibid., 8.
15
Cited Reid, 9.
16
Ibid., 10.