The first story I ever wrote out of school was about Irish boxer Barry McGuigan. he was 10 years old and loved barry. he had just lost his featherweight world title to american steve cruz under the hellish nevada sun and the only thing that could mend my broken heart was to restore my hero belt. Months passed and there was no talk of a rematch, so I wrote a story about it.
My imagined fight was in Ireland, and I was ringside. in my story I had fixed everything. He had even given Barry some advice on countering Steve’s vicious uppercut. It was the distance, but Barry won easily on points. he hugged steve. his dad sang “danny boy”. When I finished my story, I felt intense relief. the world at that time was quiet and calm. I had created a new reality for myself, and I was able to occupy it for a while, feel the joy I had created by moving pen across paper. now I think of that story every time I sit down to write. I fight for the feeling of righteousness that it gave me, that feeling of peace.
You are reading: Books on writing short stories
It took me a while to get that feeling back. when I left school, where I was lucky enough to be roundly encouraged and told with conviction that I was a writer, I inexplicably embarked on a career of self-sabotage, letting my literary ambitions flourish very sporadically and then burning the results. in fits of disgust. nothing I wrote rang true; nothing seemed worth reading.
Shortly after I got married, my mother-in-law found a file on the hard drive of a computer I lent her (there’s a great and scary writing message!). it contained a ridiculous story about a young lawyer being corrupted by a gangster client. I had forgotten about the story and one of the peripheral characters in it, a simple, pure-hearted man named Johnsey Cunliffe. my wife suggested giving johnsey a new life, and i started a rewrite with him as the hero; the story continued to grow until I came across a draft of my first finished novel, the December thing. I didn’t feel embarrassed, nor did I feel the need to burn it. I felt peace I knew it wouldn’t last so I quickly wrote a handful of new stories and the peace didn’t dissipate. not for a while, anyway.
so a forgotten short story, written somewhere in the fog of my twenties, turned out to be the foundation of my writing career. maybe it would have happened anyway, or maybe it wouldn’t, but I think the urge would always have been there, the urge to put a grammar to ideas in my head. Mary Costello, author of The Porcelain Factory, one of the best collections of short stories I’ve ever read, says, “Write only the essentials, what needs to be written… alone. and the only way to get peace is to write it.”
I know that in this tense, rule-bound, virus-ridden present, many people find themselves with that prickly feeling, that urge to mold a new reality out of language, or to bring out the idea that has been clamoring within they. your imagination and the world. So I’ve put together some ideas with the help of some of my favorite writers on how best to find that peace.
don’t worry
In a short story, sentences have to do a lot! Some of Chekhov’s stories are less than three printed pages; a few comprise a single short paragraph. In his most famous story, “The Lady with the Dog,” we are given a detailed description of Gurov’s nature, history, and motivations on the first page, but there is no sense of stress or overload. Stephen King’s 2010 Collection Full Dark, No Stars is a masterclass in compression and suspense. My creative writing colleague at the University of Limerick, Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, is, like me, a novelist who resorts occasionally to the short form. sarah considers stories to be “the greatest gifts of storytelling. in the best nothing is left over, the focus of it is sharp and vivid but they can also be gloriously elliptical, full of echoes. ” The novel form, as I’ve heard Mike McCormack say, offers “a wonderful lodging for the writer,” but the short story is barren territory. there is nowhere to hide, no room for excess or digression.
My wife once asked me why this bothered me so much. she had just published my first two novels and I had embarked on a whole collection of short stories, A Tilt of the Sun. she had come home from work to find me curled up in a ball of despair. “every sentence worries me,” I complained. “none of them are doing enough.” “Don’t worry about how much you’re doing until all the work is done,” she said. “write the story, and then you can go back and correct all those worrying sentences. and chances are, once the story exists, you won’t be all that worried about those sentences at all. they just will.”
oh. I can still feel the beautiful relief I felt at her wise words. life is full of things to worry about. the quality of our prayers must be a challenge and a constant and fruitful search, a gradual aggregation of achievements. but creativity should always bring us at least some whisper of joy. should be a way to get out of worry.
take it out
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one of the concepts my colleague sarah illustrates is that of a “zero draft”: a draft that comes before a first draft, where your story appears on your screen or page, and contains all or most of the elements desired. draft zero offers complete freedom from any consideration of craftsmanship or finesse.
kit de waal, who recently published a wonderful collection, with a supporting cast, featuring characters from his novels, offers this wisdom on how to get the story from your head to your page or screen: “don’t overthink, but overwrite . sometimes you see a pair of gloves or a flower on the street or lipstick on a cup of coffee and it moves you in a particular way. that’s your message right there. write that feeling or establish something around that idea, you don’t know what at this stage, you’re becoming pure muse, writer energy, so just go with it. and follow it to the end: it can be a day, a week, a year. overwrite the thing and then sit back and ask yourself, ‘where’s the magic? what am I saying? who’s talking?’ when you’ve figured that out, you’ll have your story and you can start creating and editing it.”
Your zero draft is michelangelo’s rough carved piece of marble, but in the basic david shape. it is the reassuring existence of something tangible in the world outside your mind, something raw and real, containing within itself untidy the potential for greatness. And the best way to make it great is to make it truthful.
be honest
This is not to say that you should always speak your own truth or rely solely on your own lived experience, but it is important to stay true to our own drives and ambitions as writers; write the story we want to write, not the story we think we should write. that’s like saying things you think people want to hear: you’ll end up entangled in a knot of half-truths and constructed and co-opted beliefs. you’ll be more of a politician than a writer, and as good and decent as some of them are, the world definitely has enough politicians.
your own experiences, of course your own truth, can be transformed into wonderful fictions and, by virtue of their basis in reality, can contain an almost automatic immediacy and intensity. melatu uche okorie’s debut collection, this hostel life, is based on his experiences in the irish direct provision system as an asylum seeker. the title story in particular has a feeling of absolute truthfulness, written in the demotic of the author’s Nigerian compatriots; while another story, “under the canopy,” feels like it might be an oblique description of events witnessed or experienced firsthand by the author.
take risks
You might as well do exactly what you want to do, even (or especially) if it’s never been done before. You have nothing to lose by taking chances, with the form, content, style, structure, or any other element of your work of fiction. Rob Doyle, an accomplished literary risk-taker, exhorts writers to “try to write a story that doesn’t look like the way short stories are supposed to look: try one in the form of an encyclopedia entry, list, essay or review of an imaginary restaurant, sex toy, amusement park, or movie. make people wonder if it’s even fiction. mix it all up short stories can explore both ideas and emotions; big ideas can fit into short stories. For proof, read the work of Jorge Luis Borges. In fact, I second Roberto Bolaño’s advice to anyone who writes short stories: read Borges.”
bend the iron bar
“When the curtain falls,” Frank O’Connor said of the story, “everything must change. an iron bar must have been bent and was seen to be bent.” one of the first tales that broke my heart was o’connor’s “guests of the nation.” it has been described as one of the best anti-war stories ever written, and one of the best stories by a master of the form. his devastating denouement closes with this pitiful statement from the shattered narrator: “and everything that happened to me after, i never felt the same again”. this line contains a plea to story writers to reach that profound moment, that event or epiphany or reversal or triumph; to reach within the confines of your story at a time that will resonate far beyond your narrow reach.
another great literary o’connor, this time the novelist joseph, who teaches creative writing at the university of limerick, says that “for me, every great short story focuses on a moment when intense change becomes possible or at least imaginable for the character cut the story late, leave it early and find a moment.” joseph quotes the closing words of one of his favorite short stories, raymond carver’s “fat”: “it’s august, my life is going to change. sorry.”
Of course, the moment doesn’t have to be the end, and the end of a story doesn’t have to be incendiary or revealing, or contain an unexpected twist. mary gaitskill’s story “heaven” describes a family going through change, trauma, and loss, and iron bars bend in almost every paragraph, but its ending is memorable for the moment of relief it offers, in a gently described subdued from the perfect grace of a summer afternoon and a family gathered for a meal. “everyone sat on lawn chairs and ate from the hot plates in their laps. the steak was good and rare; Her juices spilled onto the salad and pasta as Virginia moved her knees. a light breeze stirred the loose hair around their faces and tickled them. the trees creaked faintly. there were pleasant insect noises. Jarold paused, a steak fork poised above his chest. ‘like heaven,’ he said. ‘it’s like heaven’. They were silent for several minutes.”
hear your story
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Beer Trip to Llandudno, Kevin Barry’s abridged masterpiece from his 2012 collection The Island Lies Dark, is another story that has remained pristine in my consciousness since I first read it. Part of the magic of that story, and of all of Barry’s work, is his dialogue: the earthy, terse, perfectly authentic exchanges between his characters. When I asked Kevin about this, she said, “If you feel like you’re getting to the final draft of a story, print it out and read it out loud, slowly, with a red pen in your hand. her ear will catch all the evasions and false notes in the story much faster than her eye will catch them on the screen or on the page. listen to what is not said in the dialogue. too often, the story and drama lie just below the surface of the talk.”
Such scrupulous attention to the load each language unit carries and the work done by the played and unplayed notes can really make a story shine. Alice Kinsella is an accomplished poet who recently turned to the grandly stylish short form with her sublime account of early motherhood, “Window.” “Poetry or prose,” says Alice, “the goal is the same, to make every word earn its place on the page.”
ignore all
And as counterproductive as it may sound, here’s one final piece of advice: once you sit down to write your story, forget about this article. Forget all the advice you’ve been given. free your hand, free your mind, let yourself be carried away by the infinite possibilities and create what you want from those 26 little symbols. We come from the heart of the stars. we are the universe, telling itself its own story.
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donal ryan is a judge for the bbc national short story award at the university of cambridge. the finalists will be announced on September 10 and the winner on October 19. For more information, visit www.bbc.co.uk/nssa.
books for budding short story writers by chris power
If short story collections occupy a minority position on publishers’ lists, short story books are an even rarer commodity. In the 1970s, academic Charles E May published Theories of the Short Story, which he followed up in 1994 with The New Theories of the Short Story. These volumes, out of print but readily available secondhand, collect some of the key texts on short fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 revision of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales Twice Told, to Elizabeth Bowen’s follow-up to Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov influence, and Julio Cortázar’s brilliant dissertation on some aspects of the story (“the novel always wins by points, while the story must win by knockout”).
Frank O’Connor’s
The Lonely Voice (1963) studies 11 great short story writers, from Ivan Turgenev to Katherine Mansfield, and argues that the quintessential subjects of short stories are outsiders: ” There is in the short story in its most characteristic form something we don’t often find in the novel: an intense awareness of human loneliness.” O’Connor’s assertiveness makes disagreeing with him part of the fun. As wrote his compatriot sean o’faolain: “it was like a man taking a machine gun to a shooting gallery. everyone falls on their faces, the owner immediately goes to the hills, and when it’s all over, and you look warily, you find out he’s trashed the place but he’s got three perfect targets.”
I have a similar relationship to George Saunders’s remarkable study of seven classic Russian short stories, A Bath in a Pond in the Rain, published earlier this year. I don’t buy the general argument about empathetic fiction, but this is a book packed with striking observations and practical advice from a master craftsman. your 50 page perusal of chekhov’s 12 pages “in the car” is amazingly good.
steering the craft by ursula k le guin isn’t specifically about short stories, but she could certainly write them, and her clear, practical advice is invaluable to anyone who wants to learn about two of the prerequisites of craft. form: rhythm and conciseness.
my last recommendation is not a book, but the new yorker: fiction podcast. Appearing monthly since 2007, each episode features a writer reading a story from the magazine’s archives and discussing it with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. these conversations are a wonderful education in how stories work. i highly recommend ben marcus on kazuo ishiguro (sep 2011), tessa hadley on nadine gordimer (sep 2012), and zz packer on lesley nneka arimah (oct 2020), a discussion that moves between craft, fairy tale and motherhood.
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