Some Notes on Writing Stories

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The March 1970 edition of The London Magazine was a ‘special short story issue’, featuring stories by Gabriel García Márquez, Beppe Fenoglio, Jef Geeraerts, among others. The issue opens with the following piece, a series of meditations on the form. As the editor Alan Ross declares in his introduction: ‘If short stories, by their nature, inevitably seem to be sprints rather than long distance affairs, they nevertheless need to be exactly paced and even more clearly focused. A story has none of the novel’s margin for error; it must make its impact in the first paragraph and never lose it.’

James Stern

Before I begin a story I must know its end. Why do I write stories? To me, the wonder is that I ever wrote anything at all. Except letters – an art form which I was obliged to practise as soon as I could hold a pencil (Thank you for the lovely present), which had already begun to disappear with the arrival of the telephone, and which in this Age of Ingratitude is as extinct as the go-cart and the governess.

Letters are still my favourite reading matter. I have just been gliding through those of Katherine Mansfield. Marvel as one still does at the most brilliant of her stories, here in the Letters one falls hopelessly in love once more. Again from Letters, those of Dr Chekhov, I have learned more about the art of writing than I have from any other

I do not think Flaubert would have insisted on the word ‘masterpieces’ when in a Letter he wrote that their ‘secret… lies in the concordance between the subject and the temperament of the author’. Not unlike the athlete: the sprinter is not expected even to enter for the mile. But is there a publisher who has not expected (to put it mildly) the story writer to produce a novel? One wonders how many bad novels have been published, in consequence. How many stories ruined.

I write stories because I find it the quickest way of saying something I want to say so badly that it is not enough to tell it to someone in a letter. One must want to shout it, and it must be written in such a way that it can be understood by the old farmer along the lane as well as his grandson of ten. And of course it must stand the test of being read aloud. And when the last word has been uttered, that must be the beginning of the story’s ripple rather than its end.

Of such stuff poetry, no doubt, is made. Have there been in my day English-speaking poets who have written stories of such quality? All of us can think of three: Walter de la Mare, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce.

It is difficult to say by whom one has been influenced. To devour a man’s works does not necessarily mean that they have affected one’s own. For the art of brevity I feel sure I am indebted to Hemingway’s In our Time, for that of sheer story telling to Maugham, to Lawrence and O’Flaherty for their evocation of nature, and to Firbank for his dialogue.

Among the living I admire most a handful of stories by each of the following: Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, V. S. Pritchett, Sean O’Faolain, William Plomer and J. F. Powers.

And if I have to drop one more name, let it be that of William Sansom for this definition: The short story ‘should spread beyond its economy: short, it should be enormous’.

Brian Glanville

Over the past five years, I have written very few short stories; in the five years before that, I wrote a great many. The reason for this sharp falling away is chiefly that I have doubts now about the value of the form, just as I have doubts about the novel. ‘Markets’ and the lack of them really have nothing to do with it; it is simply a reluctance to do again what one has so often done before, when it did admittedly seem to be worth doing. This means that I am looking for new – that is to say, different – subjects, and for new techniques. On the few occasions when I believe I’ve found both, I write a story.

Before those first, productive five years there was a long period in which the short story seemed to me a decidedly secondary, if not a suspect, medium, one in which insufficiency passed for succinctness, amorphousness for poetry. I don’t believe that any more. The best short stories, indeed, are a kind of halfway house between poetry and that hardy hybrid, the novel. The finest stories of Joyce, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Isaac Babel, have a beautiful plangency and reverbation – though Mansfield has always seemed to me to have more texture than shape.

From a very different writer, Ring Lardner, I learned that the world of professional sport can be the raw material of serious fiction, the rhythms of working class speech wonderfully vigorous and intense; not enough, clearly, in and by themselves, but potentially so rich. Previously, I’d been too near to it all to see this.

The problem in the short story, still more than in the novel, is for experience to be distilled and refined, instead of being allowed to overwhelm aesthetic need. No writer has succeeded better in this than Isaac Babel, for whom the horrors, cruelties and excitements of the Revolutionary War set up strange, rewarding tensions, poignant ambiguities. The violence is there, but never grossly there, for its own sake. It has been purified, artistically used, and recreated.

When I am lucky enough to find what I think a valid idea, it may take several months before I feel ready to deal with it. Then it’s a question of releasing the imagination, identifying the character or characters concerned, working out the best – the ideal – technique. One scribbles notes in profusion and desperation, till at last there’s no way out but to begin to write. Then, with trepidation, one begins, hoping that what seemed a fine idea won’t this time be botched, blurred, wasted, traduced by old tricks, worn procedures.

As for the short story writers I admire, I have listed several of them. Among numerous others are Verga, in D. H. Lawrence’s lambent translation, Stig Dagerman, Alexander Baron’s War Stories, the undervalued Irvin Faust, J. F. Powers, and odd stories by Malamud, Rosamund Lehmann, V. S. Pritchett, Mann, Svevo.

Elizabeth Taylor

‘I like to know how people work,’ says Margaret Jourdain, in the famous conversation piece in Orion. And Ivy Compton-Burnett replies, ‘I daresay you do, but the people themselves are not always sure.’

It is extraordinary, this interest people have in a writer’s methods. Is it because the job is seldom seen to be done, so that it has something mysterious about it?

A familiar question is: ‘What makes you decide that it should be a short story, when with a bit more trouble you could have made it into a proper book?’ This is when I appear shifty and often shift. For I did not decide that one. No matter how I may be disbelieved, that one decided itself.

Nancy Hale writes of the first stage of a short story as ‘the coming upon the idea’. Its coming upon the writer is how I think of it myself. It is completely different from the beginning of a novel, which is a conscious scheming. I believe that short stories are inspired – breathed in in a couple of breaths. For success there must be immediate impact, less going into anything, more suggestiveness and compression, more scene and less narrative, all beautiful and exciting restrictions to my mind.

Sometimes, in my own experience, the being hit upon by the idea is almost unregistered at the time. Once, from a bus, I saw a West Indian man sprinting along in the rain, as if running simply for the pleasure of using his stride. Where to, I wondered. Sitting in the bus, I began to guess, to ponder, to stretch my imagination. The small picture of him stayed in my mind for a long time before I began to write the story. The Dedicated Man, in the story of that name, was a waiter I glimpsed standing at a bus-stop (buses and their stops are rich sources of material) on his day off. I longed to know what he was going to do, what sort of day he would have: but I feel that the only tip I would have to give to young short story writers is not to ask too many questions. Henry James said that we could be told too much. He feared that.

Beginnings and endings are important in this form, because of the small amount between them. Of the brilliant beginnings, I think of Katherine Mansfield’s At The Bay – her best story; and it has a very good ending, too. Or Elizabeth Bowen’s Joining Charles, in which the cat acts as a prowling introduction. The moment of arrival into a story – the reader’s arrival – must be carefully chosen. I always feel that Guy de Maupassant’s Boule-de-suif opens as a novel and that the wonderful short story itself begins pages later.

The short story is older than the novel, but it has had long periods of neglect. It is not the publisher’s favourite child, which means that it is not the reading public’s favourite child. And vice versa. Yet to me one of the great pleasures is to open a volume of short stories, preferably all by the same author (like going to an exhibition of paintings by the same artist), to find a group of worlds by, perhaps, Angus Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen, V. S. Pritchett or Sylvia Townsend Warner. There may be something therein that may attain perfection, as novels never do, some magic distillation, almost certainly an intensity of experience.

William Trevor

I have never written a short story in which two strangers on a long, non-stop journey find themselves in a railway compartment with the door jammed. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred nothing of course would happen, in which case there’d be nothing to write about. But on the hundredth occasion it’s just possible that one of the two might, for one reason or another, be in a state, or be drunk, or be desperate for someone to talk to. And so, in this vacuum, one character might gradually proceed to involve the other: a surface peels away, an encounter begins. As a short story writer, it’s this hundredth occasion that seems to involve me also.

Mrs Violet Merriott, cultured pearls on a cream blouse, her grey hair faintly tinted, read about an architect in love, while the face of her husband stirred in her mind. Rosemary’s lips parted, she read. Ian closed his eyes. She dropped the magazine on to her lap and glanced out at the twilight landscape through which, at gathering speed, the train was carrying her in a westerly direction. Her husband’s face was plump and brown and decorated with a sprawling moustache, a face affected by the weather because her husband spent a lot of time outside, in the nurseries he had bought, twenty years ago, with her money.

A man entered the compartment, closing the door with a thump that Mrs Merriott considered was unnecessarily violent.

‘Am I welcome?’ he enquired, in an Irish voice.

Mrs Merriott smiled and murmured. He was an ungainly man, she saw, with red hair and a red complexion; he wore a stained brown suit beneath a similarly soiled mackintosh. Her husband was always well turned out, a rose in his button-hole, a silk handkerchief in his breast-pocket and a tie to match it. She watched while the man sat down in the corner seat opposite hers, still thinking about her husband. She had borne him three children and she had seen to it that a good foreman made a go of the nurseries. ‘By God, we’re busy today,’ her husband would remark at lunchtime and hurry back to the nurseries, calling in at the Heart of Oak on the way for a leisurely glass or two. She’d become used to all that; she hadn’t minded the long years of his lotus-eating or the small lies connected mostly with time spent or not spent in the Heart of Oak. But the night before, calling in at the nurseries for a few carnations and expecting to find that he had long since departed for his evening sustenance, she found instead a scene that upset her. Human cries had attracted her attention to a shed, and being fearful to enter she’d crept to a broken window. Through the gloom she saw her husband standing upright while a woman called Miss Bate, a part-time assistant in the nurseries, struck him repeatedly with a length of green hose. ‘You brute, Miss Bate,’ her husband whispered with emotion. ‘My, my, you’re naughty,’ cried Miss Bate, a most respectable person, Mrs Merriott had always thought.

‘Will you try one?’ the man opposite her said, regarding her with pale, watery eyes. He pushed towards her a packet of ten cigarettes and seemed disappointed when she declined to accept one. A sign on the window forbade smoking. He looked at it, striking a match. ‘Do you never smoke?’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘I have to in my line,’ he said. ‘You know what I mean?’

Again she shook her head. Should she divorce him? she wondered painfully. How could she stay married to a man she clearly didn’t know a thing about, a man with secrets like that? Her hurried visit to London had been no good; the advice shed hoped for from friends hadn’t been any use at all.

‘I make little harps,’ the man said. ‘Little tiny harps in bog-oak, touristy things. D’you understand me?’

She said she did and it was then, while she was still speaking and still thinking about her husband standing in the shed the night before, that she became aware that the ticket-collector was unable to slide back the door of the compartment. He pulled, and hit at the handle with his fist. He smiled. He made a shrugging gesture through the glass, mouthing something at them. Then he went away.

‘They’ll have to get an engineer for that,’ said the man with the watery eyes. He seemed, Mrs Merriott thought, to speak with satisfaction. ‘That’s one of the little harps,’ he said, taking a black object from his pocket and showing it to her.

I don’t know how it goes on, but encounters such as this – between strangers, or people who have known each other a long time, or old enemies, or acquaintances – have been the starting points of many of my stories, offering at least a spring-board from which to work. The brevity of the short story lends itself well to such meetings, just as the greater length of the novel is the natural form for a complicated mass of human relationships. But generalizations are snares, and I can speak only for myself. ‘Why do you write short stories?’ people often ask, and the implication seems somehow to be that it’s a waste of time to bother with what they erroneously imagine is an outmoded form. I find it hard to analyse why I write stories but I think it’s because I like writing them, and because I want to know what’s going to happen when an unhappy middle-aged woman finds herself locked in a railway compartment with a man who’s soon going to notice that there’s something on her mind.

Michael Feld

At 15 I went to work, and hated it in no time. Nightly I returned to old school exercise books. The Development of Meanders, The Concept of Feudalism, when it’s de les it’s des, this I thought was much more me. To get back into the academic learned life I joined the public library, Adults’ Section. I had seven tickets, the most allowed. The family were worried. ‘What you reading so much, people are people, Michael, you won’t change the world, people are people.’ My friends when they saw my books only cared if there were any pictures. When they saw the picture of an author they said ‘Mickey, you’re a good-looking boy, you got a nice job, you got a nice head of hair, how can a man like you take notice of a face like that?’ Enraged, I said, ‘I tell you why I take notice, writers get the best girls, all the actresses!’ I honestly believed it. Writers worked romantically alone, they didn’t have to deal, let alone double-deal, never deigned to bargain but did grandly what the pricetag wanted. You couldn’t have a better love potion than that I said and I dramatically sat down to do some drama.

Ten years later my plays hadn’t got on proper stages, I hadn’t got on proper actresses, so I turned to stories… hoping… crazed beauties writing c/o The Publisher… you never know.

I have seven big files, full of notes made in warehouses, offices, workplaces generally, listening to the family, out with the boys. Once on scrap, serviettes, anything, they are neatly typed now, stocked under headings like ‘Ladies’, ‘The World Outside’, ‘Art & Soul’. I include as much as possible from the files in stories. That way I am convinced I took some benefit from long hours of tedium. I need the name of the main character before I start writing; I like every sentence to be a bit of a firework, that’s why I rewrite everything, five, six, seven times. I think good writing is nearly always clever and tricky. Like Chandler’s unforgettable description of Chris Lavery – ‘Six foot of a standard type of homewrecker. Arms to hold you close and all his brains in his face.’ Not that I often tangle with good writing these days. Rashly I looked at E. Waugh in October, it was so good and funny it sent the fear of God through me and I was finished for the month.

I go to the library still to flick into ‘Next day the Pope sent for Carmela’ books and ‘Inspector Hawkins had a ticklish task at the Palace of Varieties’ books. Thus I make discoveries, e.g, izzard is old fashioned for zed. For a word fetishist like me that means a day well spent. But often I curse my unnatural alliance with Eng. Lit. Lots of soppy bland men I was near to in the ten awaiting-actress years have freely and enterprisingly made mints – now with a wife and kids it seems wilfully stupid that I was here and they were there and they’re loaded and all I’ve got from them is a lot of notes in file number five headed ‘Getting Living’. Seeking release from such moods I tell myself those practical men die away dead when they run out of breath but I could carry on after extinction – IF the words are right. Me! Priggily going in for Life after Death! A boy like me with my looks and my head of hair has to worry about writing to get on the firm with actresses and posterity!

Jonathan Raban

The first sentence of Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party reads: ‘And after all the weather was ideal’. That conjunctive ‘and’ works as a pivot, a point of gravitational balance between the continuing life and language outside the story and the internal, conclusive activity of the story itself. It’s characteristic of the short story as a form to indicate its precise relationship with a known external world; to mediate between the familiar, contingent patterns of a society inhabited by the writer and his readers, and the new, intensified, often metaphoric shape of the fiction. Much more than the novel, the short story deals in pastiche, in metaphor, in mimetic social detail. The writers I admire most – Angus Wilson, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor – bring to the form both a caustically observant ear and eye for accent, social class, personal eccentricity, and a capacity for metaphoric generalisation, an ability to endow their small,
exactly-rendered societies with the transcendent resonance of a poetic image.

One of the pleasures of writing a short story is the opportunity it affords for mimicry; you can adopt the language and gestures and mannerisms of another person, distorting one feature and toning down another until they assume a mad, or comic, or horrific consistency. You can be your own Frank Gorshin. The bright, self-deprecating ironies of Angus Wilson’s June Raven, the Mayfair hostess in More Friend Than Lodger, or the chilly sexual assurance of Doris Lessing’s Third Programme interviewer in One Off the Short List, are initially brilliant acts of impersonation; the writer as actor. And the strength of the impersonation enables them to be much more than that. To imitate the language of someone else is to intensify it, so that you squeeze in the voice and attitudes of your subject like the folds of a concertina. The compression itself generates metaphor – a latent force, larger than, yet obscurely contained within, the rough, ‘pre-fictional’ life of the character at large.

In this sense, writing a short story is to discover the metaphors implicit in another person’s style; to expose through imitation and exaggeration a kind of hidden absolute, a language that takes off from the minimal, mechanical fidelities of social realism into mysteriously truthful flights of fancy of its own. What distinguishes the short story from the slavish, merely reproductive accuracies of the sketch is the inventiveness of its lies, told with an almost facetious regard for the plausible detail. Its dependence upon an external social and characterly life – the pivotal and’ – is deceptive; by adopting the manners of that life, it shrouds them with suspicion and ambiguity. More than any other literary form, it raises the dark question of the inherent fictionality, the inventedness, the metaphoric duplicity, of that world which we innocently inhabit and call ‘real’. One of J. L. Borges’s stories begins with the phrase, ‘The Universe, which others call the Library …’, and most short stories, even if they’re less noisy about their intentions, cast the same aura of doubt over the frontier dividing the real from the fictional. Pirate-like, they pillage reality, returning from the most unlikely places with the spoils of metaphor.

Frank Tuohy

Whenever I start writing a short story, I see a place first and then the people in it. Novels seem to involve dragging people off on journeys, put the short story does not. Often the place contrasts with the people; I write a lot about exiles, who have gone too far to remain in genuine contact with any social background. Partly this may be due to upbringing: in my childhood, the professional classes were like potted plants; they might flourish or wither, but were always portable. I distrust the statements of fashionable journalists that everywhere is getting the same; once you get inside a foreign language, enormous differences appear.

Many modern American and English stories seem imprecise to me: the physical setting has bored the writer, because it has been previously overdescribed. Because this never happens with the Russians, Chekhov is still the master of the short story to me. I nurse an unadmitted feeling that, given his example, and that of other writers like Babel and Bunin, nobody should seriously wish to do otherwise.

One can write short stories while doing a job, whereas the composition of a novel of sufficient intensity to be any good is like doing a stretch in hospital. Other difficulties attend the novelist: a few years ago, it was knowing about, or reading about, his characters’ jobs. (Yet all those novels about administration and committees were very dull.) More recently, sex: the novelist is obliged to take part in the bedroom experiences of any character to whom he gives importance. The result is often either voyeurism or monologue; the first is embarrassing, the second difficult for English writers because their inexpressive demotic sounds churlish when dealing with emotions. A novelist who wishes to keep a decent interval between himself and his subject matter may try satire, but his subjects, to be recognisable, will have to be derived entirely from the newspapers. The short story writer avoids many of these difficulties. It’s true that his financial reward may only be pocket money – but this is not always the rule. An American sale, or even a few reprints in anthologies, can earn more than a first novel.

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James Stern was an Anglo-Irish writer of short stories and non-fiction, known for his extensive letter writing.

Brian Glanville is an English football writer and novelist.

Elizabeth Taylor was an English novelist and short-story writer.

William Trevor was an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer. He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was nominated for the Booker Prize five times.

Michael Feld was a London-born, Jewish writer of essays, plays and short stories.

Jonathan Raban was a British travel writer, playwright, critic, and novelist.

Frank Tuohy was an English writer and academic.

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