Q. Michael, we consider ourselves very fortunate to have you as this year’s City of Derby short story judge. We’re hoping that you might be so kind as to share some personal thoughts about the subject of short stories.
There seem to be a multitude of definitions as to what exactly a short story is. Recently, for example, I spoke to a lady who insisted with some sense of authority that 5,000 words were much too many for a work to be considered as a short story. How would you sum up the genre?
A. That lady can’t have known very much about short stories, because one of the first things that will strike any reader who picks up Poe or Joyce or Carver, Maupassant or Somerset Maugham or Alice Munro, is that a story can be whatever length the writer needs it to be. Poe can tell a story with tremendous economy (‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is about 2,500 words, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ about the same) but he will also take longer if he needs to (‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is close to 15,000 words). Maugham’s ‘Rain’, Maupassant’s ‘Boule de Suif’ or Munro’s ‘Baptizing’ all tip the scales around the 20,000 mark, but that is because their stories need that space to unfold, and the lengths of those pieces shouldn’t be made into an argument either for or against brevity. Frank Sargeson, with Katherine Mansfield one of the great New Zealand masters, put some of his greatest Depression era insights into stories barely more than a single page in length. If we think of Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan as a kind of short story, one dramatic fact about the narrative as given by Luke is its extraordinary economy. Writers of the early modern era such as Boccaccio or Marguerite de Navarre, who are widely considered the originators of the form, tended to prefer brevity, but as the short story has evolved over time it has tacitly insisted on its right to decide the length issue for itself. A short story competition has to set a limit for logistical reasons, but whenever a writer is free to decide, the material will normally determine the length. In brief, the debate on what constitutes “short” is a red herring, and the same is true for debates about the subject matter of stories, whether they should focus on plot or character, etcetera. The short story can be whatever it pleases. That is its strength.
Q. As we all know, there are many sources, in terms of books and websites, which seek to give expert tips and advice on the writing of a good short story. What value is there, would you say, in following such advice?
A. There certainly are endless counsellors out there, eager to impart their wisdom. And a great deal of what they have to say is helpful, so there’s really only one thing to be said when it comes to following their advice: use your common sense. If an “expert” says a story can’t be more than 5,000 words, say, your common sense should tell you that this rule is worthless because so many great stories have broken it. If an “expert” advises you to build in a twist ending to surprise the reader, your common sense should tell you that this worked for O. Henry but would have been the undoing of Chekhov. In other words, any generalisation you are offered needs to be examined in the light of your own experience of reading short stories. And that in turn implies the most important advice of all: read, read, read. There is no such thing as a good writer who isn’t a good reader. If you want to write short stories, the only advice that finally matters is to read as much short fiction as you possibly can.
Q. Is it a question of a writer concentrating on plot, or character, or both, or would you say that the essence of an effective short story is more complex and difficult to pin down than that?
A. I have edited volumes of stories by Poe, Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson and others, and these three writers, for all their differences, were agreed at heart that the short story, whatever else it is, must be a story. But Chekhov, Mansfield and Joyce were far more interested in exploring their characters. Mansfield’s ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ allows us to reconstruct, largely from asides in the conversation or thoughts of the two sisters, the main events prior to the story’s opening, but the author’s interest clearly lies in grasping the nature of these people, and the essence of bereavement, loss and unworldliness. At heart this is a different understanding of what we mean by a “story”. In O. Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’, the wife sells her magnificent hair to buy a watch-fob for her husband’s treasured watch, while he at the same time sells his watch to buy his wife a precious tortoiseshell comb for her hair. The gift of the title, we understand as readers, is nothing so banal as a Christmas present: it is the priceless gift of love. O. Henry’s story contains a beautiful truth, and is impeccably written, and in the economy with which it moves toward its implied message it bears a family resemblance to Christ’s story of the Good Samaritan—that is, it has something of the moral compactness of a parable about it. But there is something in its very flawlessness, and in the contrived symmetry of its plotting, that leaves many readers feeling that life can never fully be articulated in quite so pat a manner. In quite different stories such as Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’, or ‘Recording Angel’ by the contemporary Australian writer Helen Garner (in her collection Cosmo Cosmolino), or ‘Rock Springs’ by the American Richard Ford (in his collection of the same title), we learn as much about the elusive truths of life, but the manner in which we are offered it is less artificial and programmatic. These writers think of a “story” as something that is happening in people’s lives, something that may be every bit as shapeless and imbalanced as the happenings in our lives often seem to be, and they place less emphasis on tidy, symmetrical structures and neat messages than on psychological and social verisimilitude. Now, as readers we are in the glorious position of being able to enjoy any kind of short story on its merits, and as a competition judge I’ll expect to enjoy the same privilege. The only thing that matters is that a story does well the thing that it sets out to do. Just as there’s no point in scolding a Richard Ford for not writing like Poe, so too the only thing that makes sense for a competition judge is to grasp what kind of story this or that one is, and then try to assess how well it’s done what it set out to do.
Q. I suspect that many people who have become aware of our competition know of your reputation in relation to poetry. I know that you’ve previously made it known to me that you were particularly pleased to take on the role of a short story judge. Could you remind me why you feel that way?
A. I’ve spent an enormous amount of my life deeply involved with short stories in one way or another. At the literary magazines I’ve edited, I had the great pleasure of publishing superb stories by emerging contemporary writers such as Bill Broady or Brian Howell. As well as editing books of classic short stories, I’ve also taught short fiction—one of the first university literature classes I ever taught, twenty-five years ago, was on the American short story from Washington Irving to Bernard Malamud. In my current position in the creative writing programme at Warwick University, I am constantly helping students as they work on short as well as long pieces of fiction. Also, I’ve translated a lot of German and Austrian short stories, and, finally, have also written and published two or three myself, in small magazines in New Zealand and Canada. It goes without saying that I’ve been devoted to reading short stories as long as I can remember. To be a competition judge puts you in a very happy position: not only do you get to read lots of completely new, unpublished stories, and perhaps to make real and exciting discoveries, but you also get to award the recognition that a prize signifies. And that recognition, that encouragement, can be the making of a new talent.
Q. It looks as though some writers interested in entering our competition do not necessarily have English as a first language. In your experience both as an international judge and translator, do you feel that themes and ideas are easily converted from one language to another in terms of culture and meaning?
A. The ability to make an imaginative leap, and engage with other cultures, is a test of the reader, certainly, but its difficulty is easy to overstate. The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges could often be enigmatic and baffling, but that lay in the nature of his imagination rather than in his Argentinian background. When Heinrich Böll wrote of the experience of a defeated German nation amid the post-War rubble, there was nothing in those stories that was forbiddingly inaccessible, either in linguistic or in cultural terms, and readers who had no experience of a fascist dictatorship or of the destruction of entire cities still had no problem relating to his writing. Within the English language too, it is often the case that cultural differences are exaggerated into mountains when they’re little more than molehills. A reader in the UK is unlikely to have difficulty with, say, the stories in Naipaul’s Miguel Street—even if we’ve never been to Trinidad, there is so much information available nowadays, from so many sources, that the experience of Hindus and Moslems in a Caribbean setting is hardly likely to be prohibitively strange to anyone. One truth about short stories is that the best of them are strong because they can put down roots into any reader’s soil.
Q. Now a very difficult question. If you were to be Robinson Crusoe for the rest of your life and had to make a ‘Desert Island Discs’ selection of three short stories to take with you, what would they be, and why?
A. This really is tough, but I take comfort in the thought that I’ll never need to limit myself to these three stories in reality. One of my three must be Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, a story of matchless subtlety, feeling and insight, exquisitely written. Another, entirely different in character, is Saki’s ‘The Lumber-Room’, a sly, brisk, waspish piece of writing full of more twists, side-swipes and irony than you’d think it was possible to pack into fifteen hundred words. And my third, resisting the temptation to take a long and involved story by Henry James that would yield a new understanding at every reading, will be Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ (if I have the title correctly—I don’t have the book to hand), which I choose as someone who can’t generally be bothered with science fiction. But this story of Clarke’s is sheer poetry, or philosophy, or wisdom, and quite unforgettable. On another day I’ll doubtless make an entirely different selection, but this threesome at least has the merit of suggesting my preferences don’t run on only one set of tram-tracks.
Q. Finally, although our competition is open to entries from any part of the world, it is very much based in Derbyshire, and in particular, Derby. Do you have any particular thoughts about this part of the world that you would care to make known?
A. I grew up nearby, in Staffordshire, and after living abroad for many years have come in middle age to the view that all places can serve as microcosms of the whole world. To understand Derbyshire in that way may involve sharing the kind of understanding that Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple had of her village, St. Mary Mead, which furnished her with models of every kind of human behaviour the wider world could come up with. To grasp the local is to know the world (that is the secret of Joyce’s Dubliners, say). Equally, if I recall the account the late Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri gave of his visit to Chatsworth House, when he noted tiles that were the identical fellows of others in a maharajah’s palace in India, then I think that Derbyshire has served in many ways as a meeting-ground for the world. I don’t say it’s unique in this, of course, but it’s an excellent quality to have, and I hope this competition serves as a similar meeting-ground.
The City of Derby Short Story and Poetry Competition would like to thank Michael for giving us the opportunity to make known these thoughts on our website.