I’m delighted to be taking part in a Collectedbooks event, with Anna Barker, on Monday 20th June 6pm, at St. Chad’s College, Durham. The event will be chaired by novelist and academic Naomi Booth, who has her own short story collection due out in June. Do join us if you can. It promises to be a great evening for readers and writers alike and in a beautiful venue. You can book your ticket here..
This week, though I’ve been buried deep in my asylum novel, as I call it, (my work in progress) A Little Madness in Spring, I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to when and why I choose to write a short story rather than a novel, or a poem rather than a short story. How do they differ? What are their challenges? What does it mean for the writer to write across three forms? Why is A Little Madness in Spring, a novel and not a series of short stories? If you’d like to explore these questions with me in a little more depth then please do read on…
When a writer decides to write a novel she knows she’s in it for the long haul, make no mistake, there will be hours ahead of reading, research, thinking and writing, not to speak of the editing of 70,00 plus words. It is a serious commitment and not to be embarked on lightly. For Stephen King it’s akin to, ‘crossing the Atlantic in a bath tub.’
George Saunders, novelist, short story writer and renowned teacher says in his latest Story Club offering from Substack – Arkansas Calling, ‘You cannot write 300 pages plus unless you’re being led by something, something you can’t resist.’
I agree. When there is a story to be told that requires a complexity and detail that goes beyond the ‘art of the glimpse,’ as William Trevor defines the short story, and when that story conjures fascination and sheer excitement at the prospect of its writing, then it is this that steers me in the direction of the novel. I am fascinated by the asylum as an institution – perhaps not surprising given my twenty-five years working in HMP Low Newton, women’s prison – by the idea of women wrongly incarcerated at the hands of men, by those that worked in these Victorian institutions, good and bad. I have a cast of characters including the institution itself, there is much to explore, and I need a long form. Though I should add there is nothing to prevent me from writing across forms within the novel, so far in this instance using some poetry and found text.
It is often only when I begin to write that I truly discover the work’s form, long, short or poetic. When I sat down to write my Costa winning story Millie and Bird, I set out to write a poem. At the time I was attending a poetry course and so the bulk of my writing was poetry. But after the first few lines I quickly realised that the poem wanted to be a short story. Sometimes the writer’s job is to listen to the work and see what it’s saying. To allow it to realise its form as well as its content. I am not a writer who plans much at all. I like my story to develop on the page.
Writing in whatever chosen form, comes more from curiosity, the unknown, more than certainty, ‘Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.’ Lucille Clifton. So much of the writer’s job in all three forms is to get out of the way and allow the words to do the work. Different though they are, novel, short story, poem all have this in common.
The short story thrives on brevity and space. Which is not to say that it cannot attain great power and resonance, often heightened by its brevity. In writing short stories, we are often managing the balance between what to put in and what to leave out. Between the the contradiction of transparent, distilled prose and layered meaning, a simplicity of language and an ambiguity. The short story’s strength lies in what it leaves as much as in what it puts in. Much the same can be said of poetry. Much of the challenge in these two forms lies here, whereas in the novel the challenge lies in depth, detail, length, complexity and logistics, the invention and management of a whole world with its raft of characters, plot and sub plots. Novel writing is a juggling act, with many plates to be kept spinning at once, until the novel becomes your world at least the world in your head. There are times when you almost become the characters you create. When I was writing Sometimes A River Song I found I would wander the house talking to myself in my protagonist Aiyana’s voice. This total immersion is something I love about novel writing and is perhaps why as a reader it is the novel as a form that I value most.
But the novel can be hard work, of course all writing is hard work in a sense, but there is a lot of ‘business,’ to be written in a novel, it’s what comes with moving a cast of characters through time and space. For me, this is the least enjoyable aspect of writing and why I sometimes relish the shorthand of poetry and short fiction and find it refreshing to go back to them.
I welcome the intensity, the brevity and balance, the poet’s attention to the language, which is not to say one should not be equally concerned with the best words in the right place in a novel. It’s just that there are so many words. Which is why of course, it is easier to experiment in short pieces than in novels. If something doesn’t come off, then you haven’t lost a whole year of your writing life.
Short stories sometimes persist and demand more. They have been springboards, for two of my novels, providing the opportunity to explore an original idea, a place, or character that has evolved into longer fiction. But this has been unintentional, short stories should be perfect, (or as perfect as possible) particular and complete in themselves.
Ideas for short stories rarely come to me when I am writing in other forms but when I’m concentrating on short fiction I find they come along like buses, several at once, and in the case of Millie and Bird they spawned a series of stories in a shared locality.
It is a mistake to believe because you can write in one form well you can manage all three. All three require the writer to immerse herself in the form, read, read, read and learn from the best. This was particularly true for me when it came to writing poetry. Even though I had always written poetry I knew there was so much I still needed to learn and read if I was to write a collection of poems, Going in With Flowers, about my life working at Low Newton. But I relished the challenge.
Why not a prison novel or short stories? I’d written one or two stories, I’d half attempted a novel but neither seemed to fit. I knew I wanted to reflect on this extraordinary experience, on the institution and in particular the women who were prisoners there. One day I happened to write a poem about an encounter with one of the women prisoners and it seemed to fit. It occurred to me then that poetry might be the form I was looking for. Poetry, combined with short prose essays, allowed me a new way in, a fresh perspective. A way to condense twenty-five years, a way of ‘telling it slant’ as Emily Dickinson famously advised. I first sent the poems out into the world, and I was only happy when established poets and poetry magazines endorsed the work. I would still hesitate to call myself a poet. But I love the poet’s craft, her gift of language, the way a poet weights the line, its rhythm, its musicality. No wonder Walter Mosley in This Year You Write Your Novel advises all novelists to take a poetry class each semester.
I think what all this says is, that for me, it’s the writing itself that matters. Not the chosen form. I discover form by focusing on the idea. I am in tune with Patricia Highsmith’s notion of ideas as birds -‘Ideas come to me like birds that I see in the corner of my eye…and I may try, or may not, to get a closer fix on those birds.’ Most often I am searching for the way to make them fly.
