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…

Emerging from the station, turn right, following the footpath along the top of the railway embankment and right again over the dizzyingly high railway bridge. Turn left at the other side and cross the road. You’re now at the foot of Oram’s Arbour, the site of an ancient encampment and where Ben takes the phone call from Chloë and, later, dawdles to watch children playing rounders. His and Bobby’s house is down in Fulflood, across the Arbour to your right. Cross the grass on the diagonal path — you’ll find a splendid view of the city spread out below you as you climb. Face away from the view and continue to the left at the top of the Arbour. Number 5 Clifton Road, the first of the two houses with very steep gables, was our first house in Winchester, where we lived when I was a choirboy. Walk past the front of the house and down Clifton Road to the junction with Romsey Road. Up the hill to your right lies the hospital where Ben works — worth a detour if you’re a fan of the polychrome buildings of Butterworth — and the prison where Hardy’s Tess was hanged. If these don’t tempt you, cross the road and continue along the pedestrianised delights of St James Terrace, where our lovers each walk in the book’s final chapters. Across the railway cutting to your left is what was the Royal Green Jackets’ barracks.

At the end of St James Terrace turn left down the hill and almost immediately on your right you’ll see the corner house that was the model for Professor Jellicoe’s naturist hideaway in the novel. As you can see I took tremendous liberties with the truth, but I hope you can see why the original house has always intrigued me. Carry on down St James Lane. You’re now entering the area of the city dominated by my old school, Winchester College. You can see the magnificent bell tower rising out of the oldest part of the College straight ahead of you, but the school has grown so since its original foundation that many of the houses in this part of town are now part of it.

Cross Southgate Street, then continue directly down the hill by Canon Street. At the end of the street turn left then immediately right and continue along College Street, pausing, naturally, to browse in P. & G. Wells the Bookseller. A little way past Wells you’ll find a pink house on your right where Jane Austen breathed her last. Her grave in the nearby cathedral mentions her Christian virtues and ‘the extraordinary endowment of her mind’ but avoids that tainted word novelist…

A minute’s more walking brings you to the College’s gatehouse and it’s well worth taking one of the guided tours here. If you have an hour to spare, you can now visit the watermeadows and St Cross by carrying on along College Street, following the old red-brick wall that encloses the warden’s garden. Where the wall turns sharply to the right you’ll have a view to your left of elegant Wolvesey Palace, home of the bishop, and the vast ruins — now enclosing choir school playing fields — of the medieval palace it replaced. A part of the ruins is usually open to the public. Continue along the warden’s wall, turning right and right again, to where the pavement brings you alongside the College’s 1960s concert hall. The way into the College from this side is barred to you but you take a footpath to your left, alongside the river.

Winchester is a watery city and once had a network of brooks and streams usefully cutting across it. Most of these have long since been channelled underground, leaving only street names to show where they run, but on this side of the city all the way out to the hospital at St Cross, water rules and you’ll walk through scenery typical of Hampshire’s south — water meadows rich in trout, herons and other wildlife. The footpath leads you alongside some of the College’s playing fields.

The path crosses Garnier Road by the old pumping station and winds on, past moist gardens and allotments, to another stretch of water meadows beyond a kissing gate. Beyond you now lies St Cross Hospital. Well worth a visit for the partly Norman church (where Ben and Bobby attend Shirley’s memorial service) and the lovely complex of old buildings surrounding it. You can spot the permanent residents by the red or black robes they’re supposed to wear at all times. Traditionally any visitor can claim the Traveller’s Dole — a chunk of bread and a glass of beer served free at the gate — but last time I checked this had been replaced by less frugal, non-charitable refreshments served in the outer courtyard.

At the end of your visit, walk almost straight ahead out of the outer gate, around a white fire barrier and on to Back Street. This will lead you past some delightful old houses, including a half-timbered one on a right-hand corner said to be one of the oldest in the city, past St Faith’s Primary School (where I imagined Ben and Bobby’s mother worked) and out on to Kingsgate Road. This seamlessly becomes Kingsgate Street, which you follow for its entire length. As the road progresses you’ll see the cathedral’s nave looming up ahead like a stone battleship. If you feel in need of sustenance, lunch can be found at the Queen’s Head, which has a pleasant garden, or the extremely atmospheric and much older Wykeham Arms.

From the Wykeham Arms pass directly beneath the old gateway ahead of you. This houses St Swithun’s, one of the city’s tiniest but most atmospheric churches, reached by a steep flight of stairs. Turning right then brings you through the fifteenth-century Prior’s Gate into the cathedral close and up against some of the oldest domestic buildings in it, including the Prior’s Lodge. Just around the corner to the right lies Pilgrims’ School, which educates the choristers for the cathedral and the quiristers for the College. To the left of the school’s front door stands the Pilgrims’ Hall, all that remains of the old medieval priory’s guesthouse, well worth a peek if it’s unlocked, for one of the earliest examples of a hammer-beam roof in the country.

Following the road on through the close will bring you past the handsome deanery, much improved for one of Charles II’s visits. Beyond that, keeping to the right, you will come to the Gothic arches that are all that remain of the eleventh-century chapter house. If it’s a sunny day, slip through here to visit Dean Garnier’s garden, which grants magnificent views of the cathedral exterior, as does the well-concealed path you can pick up by passing through the broad tunnel known as the Slype just beyond it.

Please don’t follow Professor Jellicoe’s disgraceful example by trying to slip in through the secure door in the Slype’s middle — the code I give in the book is NOT the right one! Rather, retrace your steps and walk under the long line of flying buttresses along the cathedral nave and enter through the west end. This may be the tourists’ entrance but it also confronts you with one of the most dramatic interior views the country can offer.

Leaving the cathedral by the way you came in, follow the lime avenue out of the close to The Square. Here you’ll find one of the city’s well-kept architectural secrets, the sister church to St Swithun’s — St Lawrence-in-the-Square. Once a chapel royal for Norman kings, it’s now principally a fifteenth-century building, crammed with earlier details, which charms for the Narnian fashion in which it seems to open out from a cupboard-like entrance between adjoining shops.

To return to the station, turn right as you come out of St Lawrence’s, pause to admire the pinnacled splendour of the fifteenthcentury Butter Cross, then head up the high street, past Elizabeth Frink’s fetching horse and rider, as far as the Westgate, then cross the road beyond County Hall and its bronze hog and follow Station Road. The curious who still have the energy can visit the little Westgate Museum, then turn left to visit the splendid Great Hall and the long-since disproved Arthurian Round Table…

PS: In the time that has elapsed between writing this piece and its appearance on Fifth Estate, the author has since discovered that Jane Austen’s house, which was painted pink throughout his childhood and teenage years, has suddenly turned yellow.

The Whole Day Through is the Book at Bedtime all this week on Radio 4, read by Samantha Bond and Nathanial Parker. Tune in tonight, August 10th, at 10.45pm or you can listen again from tomorrow on BBC i-Player.

Last week I sketched out some notes following the novel’s development. This week, as promised, I’m posting the book’s first chapter to see what you think – 7 months before it reaches the bookstores. If this whets your appetite, you’ll find a further chapter at www.galewarning.org in the revamped Latest Title section.

Free download of the first chapter of Notes from an Exhibition.

How this evolved into the longer novel and one about an artist is a mystery to me but I suspect the key lies in the happy accidents of reading. I happened to re-read Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar. That somehow led to me discovering and devouring the poetry of Ann Sexton. Somebody, possibly my sister, saw me reading the Sexton and recommended Kay Redfield Jamison’s study Touched With Fire, which explores the intimate links between manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and the artistic drive. These three stirred up all sorts of memories but especially ones of a sibling’s spells in psychiatric hospital when I was a child and of an intense relationship I enjoyed in the 1990s with a Scottish painter. Graeme had always been open with me about his bi-polarity — it was one of the things that made his company so addictive and his long, long letters so extraordinary — but it made it impossible for him to commit to our relationship and ultimately caused him to throw himself under a train.

I have never had any skills with a paintbrush or pencil. Compared to my siblings I had the visual equivalent of a cloth ear and quite possibly turned to music to compensate for the shame art classes brought me. So to write a novel about a painter was always going to be a challenge. But I knew my heroine had to be a painter, not a writer or a musician, because if her skills were alien to my own I’d stand a better chance of conveying the sheer difficulty in what she achieves.

I know several artists in Cornwall and have a fair idea of how artists work. And my work has always been very image-driven. However I forced myself — an excruciating process — to work through the various technical exercises in Betty Edwards’ seminal Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain in the hope that this would help me start to look at things the way a painter might. It was fascinating — and oddly comforting – to be led to see how much of my clumsiness in art stems from an over-interpretative, “wordy” brain. In between learning to still my brain in order to see clearly and drawing things upside down in an effort to stop my mind impatiently bypassing my eyes, I hit on the idea of Quakerism as the perfect discipline for a troubled artist.

The complex personality of Rachel had already taken shape in my head, and I already knew she would end up working on the fringes of the artistic community of West Penwith, when I quite by chance met an old friend’s mother after talking about my novel, Friendly Fire, at the Cambridge Book Festival. I discovered that not only had she once taught, like Rachel, in West Cornwall School for Girls, but that she had enjoyed several rather scary encounters with Dame Barbara Hepworth. I had been fretting about the degree to which Rachel should interact with the real life painters of St Ives and Newlyn and, by writing her stories down for me, this kind woman gave me the key I needed, those few intimate physical details that would let me make Hepworth a sort of ambiguous demon in Rachel’s life, both inspiration and tormentor. Even in the 1970s the Cornish art scene was still very much a man’s club and women like Rachel and Hepworth who strove to hold their own and be taken seriously had to become a little monstrous. (A similar quirk of fate would put me in touch with a fan of my work who just happened to have been a patient in Toronto’s psychiatric hospital at exactly the period I needed to evoke in the novel.)

It’s a great shame that so few of the old artist’s studios in West Cornwall have survived without being turned into luxury holiday homes. A rare exception, hugely atmospheric even now that it’s a public space, is Hepworth’s which visitors can explore on a combined ticket from Tate St Ives. Her workshop, conservatory and tiny summerhouse are still much as she left them on her terrible death, the subtropical garden is surreally crammed with her sculptures and one gets a powerful sense, in the monastic, distinctly undomestic rooms in which she lived and worked, of the violence she had to do herself as a wife and mother in order to succeed as an artist…

(Chapters of Patrick Gale’s novel, Notes from an Exhibition, will be available on fifthestate from next week)