Wendy Erskine: ‘Short stories are our natural mode.’
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Reproduced with permission from the introduction to the collection 22 Fictions: New Writing from Desperate Literature and Brick Lane Bookshop, edited by Kate Ellis and Robert Loyko-Greer, out now with CHEERIO.
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I never set out to be a short story writer. I found the conceptualisation of the form off-putting: these literary Fabergé eggs, with every word driving the story forward, these miracles of construction, described using silversmithing analogies: burnished, filigree, finely honed. And didn’t it seem that people could spend the rest of their lives going to ‘art of the short story’ events or looking at geometrical drawings which pinpointed where characters needed to have epiphanies? So many diktats: don’t introduce a new character in the last quarter of the story; make sure you have a killer, bravura opening. It all sounded technically demanding and very exhausting, like Olympic pistol shooting or being incredible in bed. Plus, people who excelled at short stories were not just writers but ‘masters’.
Then, in 2015, I was given Monday afternoon off work each week. Rather than spend it mooching around, I wanted to do something defined, and so had thought about spending the time at a gym or studying economics at a basic level. I happened to see that Stinging Fly, the Dublin-based literary magazine and publisher, was running a six-month fiction workshop on a Monday. To be considered for the course, it was necessary to submit a 2,500-word story or part of a novel. I’d long thought I could perhaps be a good writer if I gave it a go. My weighty empirical evidence for this was a primary school exercise book I still possessed, of stories I had written in 1978. To appropriate an Austen character, I felt I could have been a great proficient, had I ever tried. But now was the moment and, because I was re-grouting a bathroom floor, reading a Toni Morrison novel with a scene where one woman waited for another outside a prison and thinking just generally about the limits of filial obligation, a concatenation of those particular ideas resulted in a story about prison, mothers and daughters, and symbolic DIY called ‘Locksmiths’.
Short stories are our natural mode. We have been reading and telling them our whole lives.
It got me onto the course. Although I had some initial thoughts of trying to write a novel over the six months, what struck me was how democratic and accessible the short story form is. If, say, you are a carer, if you have a full-time job, if you have kids, if you have obligations that occupy your time and attention it may be difficult for you to commit to the long-term project of writing a novel. (That’s not to say writing a novel is more challenging. In some ways it isn’t. You have the luxury of residing in the same fictive world for the duration. You can have ‘down time’, sections of writing that aren’t at the same pitch as the short story usually necessitates. You can stay with the same handful of characters for years.) However, what you are committing to, with the short story, is a form you can conceivably finish within a month. By no means is that a prescriptive approach to writing because people work in entirely different ways; I use it here solely for illustration of the short story’s do-ability. Weeks 1 and 2, spend one hour a day on a long first draft, aiming to write about 500 words a day. That’s 7,000 words. Spend the next two weeks, one hour a day, rewriting and revising. By the end of the month you have the satisfaction, the temporary euphoria, of a completed short story. You’ve created something from nothing. And if the story doesn’t particularly sing, what have you lost? Nothing. That hour a day you dedicated to your work could have been spent sitting having a coffee or looking at nonsense on your phone. And so I realised that, while I had a full-time job, another job on top of that, and two kids, writing short stories was the pragmatic choice.
What I also understood, fairly quickly, was that much of the short story arcana was irrelevant. It’s an enormously flexible form, capable of accommodating all kinds of ideas. Each story and how it operates just needs to be considered on its own terms. You can be experimental: narrative techniques that might pall over the course of a longer text can work wonderfully in a shorter form. You can deal, if you want, with an entire life – or a century – in the course of a story or you can expand a single minute within the same word count. No one needs to have an epiphany. You can run multiple temporal lines or move in a linear fashion. You can have stories where everything is freighted with meaning and implication, or others that feel looser and more spacious. And while it is lovely to come across a story where every sentence is a miracle of construction, there are also stories where each sentence, utterly unremarkable in and of itself, accumulates to produce an overall effect of great power. So, yes, it’s wide open. You can write a compelling fabula, like Aisha Phoenix, or a story spanning a year that presents a community, as Aoife Inman does so skilfully. You can produce a brilliant account of a chicken-eating livestream, like Danielle Giles.
When I started writing short stories in earnest, my mum said she wished I didn’t. They made her feel so stupid.
I suppose I also realised what I knew all along – that short stories are our natural mode. When we meet friends for a drink, to some degree we trade short stories and we all, consciously or unconsciously, employ our own little narrative strategies to make them engaging. They are perhaps the first literary form we encounter, in that children’s reading books are short stories. So there’s nothing intimidating about the short story. We have been reading and telling them our whole lives. It could be said that our sense of ourselves is a self-crafted set of short stories, experience made understandable by being tidied into narrative.
When I started writing short stories in earnest, my mum said she wished I didn’t. They made her feel so stupid. I knew what she meant. She was referring to the different relationship with a reader that this form often demands. Sometimes, an ending’s inconclusiveness or supposed opacity leads people to think they have misunderstood or missed something along the way. But short stories often offer something else. You as the reader might be co-opted into creating meaning in future time that extends beyond the final full stop of the story. And just generally there are gaps, lacunae, that the reader can fill. Although the enjoyment of fiction needn’t necessarily reside in the idea of character, for me that is often a key dimension of reading. Sometimes I feel that I know characters as well after reading a short story as I have an entire novel. Quite often that’s to do with the way in which I have supplied my own notions to fill those spaces. It’s a creative project involving the story and the reader.
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Since completing that course in 2015 and writing two collections of short stories, some other things have become apparent to me, one of which being that people’s responses to collections can be a little peculiar in the tendency to want to determine which story is the ‘best’. It is the rare review that does not proclaim one or other story in a collection the ‘best’. Probably it’s the one the reviewer most enjoyed, personal preference therefore masquerading as objective fact. This impetus to rank in order (and I do it too!) comes, possibly, from the short story’s association with competitions. But it is always worth remembering that in any literary competition, what we have are the preferences of a particular person or group at a particular time. That’s it.
Allowing that caveat, let’s not underestimate the huge significance of competitions. They illuminate and celebrate. There’s such valuable feeling of affirmation in being shortlisted or even placed. As a sometime judge, I think it is a tremendous privilege to read work that perhaps has been shared with very few – or any – other readers. It’s a responsibility too and needs serious engagement. Each story carries, I feel, some degree of hope, that its existence will be acknowledged, that it will make a connection. It was my great good fortune in 2021 to be asked to judge the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize, along with Kishani Widyaratna and Elise Dillsworth. At the time, I said that I didn’t need convincing of the special power of the form, but these entries confirmed it once more, emphatically. This wasn’t obligatory effusiveness. It was true. I think when you read the stories in this anthology you will see what I mean.
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Wendy Erskine is the prize-winning author of two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move. She edited the art anthology well I just kind of like it. She is a frequent broadcaster and interviewer, and works as a secondary school teacher in Belfast. Her debut novel, The Benefactors, is published in 2025.
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