Patrick Gale on Short Stories

I love the short story. I’ve heard all the tired arguments against it – that you can’t lose yourself in a book of stories the way you can in a novel, that reading stories back to back brings on a kind of indigestion of the imagination, that the very brevity of the form encourages a shallowness in the writing. Piffle, all of it.

Yes of course there are some terrible short stories around, but there are a hell of a lot more terrible novels in print, so as an argument against the form it’s specious. There’s a sad misconception that stories are what one writes as a preparation for a novel; as though writing a novel were both harder and more mature. Agreed, sustaining a narrative arc, and maintaining a reader’s interest, over three hundred pages instead of just thirteen, is a challenge but I would argue that writing thirteen pages in which the reader becomes fully involved in the narrative world you offer them and is left feeling they have had a complete narrative meal and not just an appetiser is a far tougher one. There are an awful lot of narrative appetisers around, and I count myself among their occasional authorial cooks; sometimes the material you pick for a story simply isn’t short story material…

The novel gives one the luxury of unlimited space and time. In a story, all too often written to a tight commission (e.g. taking just twelve minutes to read aloud for a BBC radio slot) there is no space for leisurely exposition. Arguably there is no space for exposition at all. Where the novel gives one corridors, rooms, a whole building to explore, the story will often allow simply one window or one narrow door, opening onto a narrative that must be as instantly “readable” as tears on a cheek or blood on a knife. Back-story that might take pages in a novel must be boiled down to a mere sub clause or passing parenthesis.

Since the story as a form demands things be left out, left unspoken, it is peculiarly well suited to narratives that unsettle, that replicate on the page those moments in life where a hint that was not meant to be overheard or a glance that was no meant to be intercepted have devastating emotional effect. There are incredible stories, by Mavis Gallant or William Trevor, that capture in a few brief pages the death of a marriage by homing in on the moment where a lifetime of trust is betrayed or the moment when a person feels love falter and die.

I suspect the reason the short story can be so effective emotionally is that it mimics most closely the narrative crises of our own lives. As I often try to demonstrate to writing students, the short story is our natural medium. Unless you live alone with neither telephone nor broadband connection, you will be unconsiously making short stories of your life all day long. Every time you speak in a past tense – whether about things that have happened to you or events involvng your loved ones or colleagues – you are shaping the frighteningly random stuff of life into narrative. Short narratives are our way of making sense of the senseless and of gaining a sense at least, of control over events that might otherwise overwhelm us. Say your lover leaves you, or your brother has a mental breakdown: these are events you will be repeatedly called upon to put into words, and with each repetition you will give those words more of a narrative shape until, with luck that particular narrative comes to have an end as well as a beginning and becomes just another of the stories which accumulate to make up your particular version of the story of you. The fascinating thing, of course, for writers of fiction and psychotherapists alike, is our choice of words and the narrative selections different people will make when ordering their particular version of the same events. (There’s a lovely moment in Barbara Gowdy’s novel, Mr Sandman, where a child mishears her mother’s insistence that “The truth is only a version” as “The truth is only aversion” – something I often remind myself when making narrative choices.)

When I think back to the books I repeatedly read as a boy, the ones consistenly in my top five were largely not novels but collections of stories. Saki’s mischievous and sinister Beasts and Super-Beasts, Wilde’s The Happy Prince and other stories, an Edwardian hardback of lushly illustrated myths called The Story of Greece and a marvellous compilation by Eleanor Farjeon called the Puffin Book of Princesses would certainly have been among the books I’d have snatched up if the house caught fire. I think it was precisely their brevity and concentration I relished and the way a story like that of Echo and Narcissus, which can be told in about four sentences, would open out in my imagination like those “magical” chinese shells which “grew” flowers when dropped into water. It’s precisely because a story (a good one, that is) doesn’t tell the reader everything that the reader comes to be so closely caught up in it.

Compared to America, where the short story tradition is sufficiently strong still for story compilations to have reached the top of the New York Times bestseller lists, the UK has a woeful scarcity of public outlets for shorter fiction. Radio 4 commissions five stories a week, bless it, but they have to be both tiny and suitable for broadcast during the school run. Occasionally weekend newspapers run stories, which is marvellous of them, but occasionally is not enough. To have a palpable effect on reading and writing habits, these slots need to be constant like the one in the New Yorker and become as much a part of the reader’s weekend as the gardening column and the general knowledge crossword. But the industry will only go where the market leads and readers, it seems, have lost the short story habit along with the poetry one. The story has yet to find its Richard and Judy but a few committed souls are showing the way. The Charleston Festival now hosts an autumn offshoot, Small Miracles, dedicated to the story and its devotees, and there are a few book groups where volumes of stories have usurped the place of novels but what is needed still is for some of the publishing industry’s marketing muscle to back their effort. The talent is certainly there – the standard of submissions to the National Short Story Prize is terrific – what’s needed are regular, mainstream media outlets, table space in chain bookshops and the marketing equivalent of good lighting…

But trends start with the consumer. So. Go on. Treat yourself in a small way. Keep the book by your bedside and allow yourself a story a night for a week or two. The habit is easily caught and, for the moment at least, you can feel superior in the knowledge that you are not being seduced by marketing babble into reading yet another heavily promoted and discounted novel.

Patrick’s latest collection of stories, Gentleman’s Relish, is published today by Fourth Estate.

Some short story writers Patrick recommends for the unconvinced/uncertain:

• Colm Toibin
• Carol Shields
• Alice Munro
• William Trevor
• V S Pritchett
• Saki
• Jackie Kay
• Chekov
• Ali Smith
• Adam Mars Jones

Want to know more about this author? Read a Q&A with Patrick Gale…