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Dearest reader,
Recent interviews on our website have considered the state of the short story. Conversations ranged from childish humour, to sex and self-knowledge, to nineteenth-century sentimental literature and more. What cropped up across the board, though, was a shared concern that in an age of algorithms and waning attention spans, the short-story form has become too predictable.
Camilla Grudova spoke of her wariness surrounding the proliferation of short-form writing on platforms such as Substack, and the ‘heavy didacticism’ this writing can assume. ‘What really draws me to stories,’ she said, ‘is their bluntness, which I find really ambivalent.’ When stories strive too explicitly towards moral lessons, their essential ‘ambiguity and lack of morality’ are placed at risk.
For Tim MacGabhann, the problem lies less in platforms than in pedagogy. He points to the conceptualisation of the short story – accelerated by MFAs and creative writing courses – as a source of homogeneity:
The reason why short stories tend to sound the same is because those structural constraints – start from the epiphany and work backwards – are pedagogically useful. People can learn them.
The result, Tim suggests, is that the structure of a ‘good’ short story has become so familiar it begins to read as 'kitsch' or 'automatism'. What once made a story a ‘good’ short story, now risks making it a bad one.
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Camilla Grudova on Sentimentality, Short Forms and Being Gross
By Devki Panchmatia
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This raises an obvious question: what, then, is the alternative? After all, studying the craft – whether through an MFA or sustained practice via Substack – ought to sharpen one’s writing, not dull it.
For Tim, the answer lies in surprise. To resist proscriptive habits, he begins each story by asking a simple question: ‘Can I surprise myself and, potentially, the other person?’ He continues:
Maybe I don’t always manage it, but I’m definitely trying to see if I can surprise myself. I write four really boring drafts and then I’ll look for the three or four elements and the two or three ways I can recombine them. And then if I’m chuckling to myself, not at the jokes, but if I’m chuckling to myself and thinking, I didn’t know I was going to do that, then I’m onto a winner.
Lillian Fishman, too, spoke to the value of curiosity and surprise, for writer and reader alike. While working on her second novel, Women & Children, she undertook an exercise in writing from another character’s perspective. That exercise became her New Yorker story, ‘Travesty’ – a piece that surprised her as much as anyone:
I suppose, at bottom, I have a very traditional idea about fiction: I think it’s as much – or more – about being curious about other people, trying to come up against them, get close to them, imagine them, as it is about exploring the self.
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Lillian Fishman on Sex, Self-Knowledge and Psychoanalysis
By Emmeline Armitage
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As another way of resisting repetition and monotony in contemporary short fiction, Tim offers his concept of the ‘anti-plot sentence’:
Every sentence has an inherent forward drive, because language unfolds temporally forwards. Even in poetry, the downward vertex suggests a temporal unfolding. The relentless forward action of time makes its way into the plot of the sentence, so how can you frustrate it? How can you conceal it? How can you frustrate your reader’s expectation? How can you delay the point of desire? How does the subject relate to its object with the mediation of a verb? Does the subject appear early, does it appear late? Does the object appear late? Does the object appear first? These things are just ways of taking the story of the sentence and its plot and then working them against each other.
We look forward to reading Tim’s thesis on the subject. In the meantime, if you’re hoping to refresh your own short fiction practice this year, our current December / January issue is now on sale for only £6.95. Inside, you’ll find three stories that, according to the judges of last year’s short story prize, both surprise and amuse.
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You can explore more conversations on short fiction via our website below, and I’ll be in touch soon with news of the next issue.
Very best wishes,
Zadie
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Tim MacGabhann on Short Stories and the Anti-Plot Sentence
By Joseph Williams
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Some Notes on Writing Stories
By James Stern, Brian Glanville, Elizabeth Taylor, William Trevor, Michael Feld, Jonathan Raban and Frank Tuohy
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'Short stories are our natural mode'
By Wendy Erskine
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