I’d been trying to write short stories for a long time, failing, throwing them away, trying again, failing, throwing them away. I was driven by sheer bloody-mindedness more than anything else. After all, short stories are just strings of well-chosen words. I’d written a novel, I’d written for radio and TV, I’d written books for children. How hard could it be to tell a satisfying story in a few thousand words? The puzzle infuriated me.
I’d started to wonder if the prevailing wisdom was correct, that there is a profound, near-mystical difference between novels and short stories, that the latter is a form that demands more skill and involves higher risks and whose success depends on giving readers something far more intangible and refined than the joy of reading well-constructed prose, the seductive pull of imaginary lives and the desire to know what is going to happen next.
It couldn’t be true, surely, for isn’t one of the fundamental rules of fiction that it has no rules? Laurence Sterne, Kathy Acker, James Joyce, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Lydia Davis, BS Johnson … There are numberless ways of telling stories (and one of the main excitements of reading, for me at least, is finding a writer who has fashioned a new one). The idea that if you stopped before you got to 20,000 words you had to write in one way and if you carried on past 50,000 you had to write in another seemed preposterous.
It took me years to realise that my failure to write a halfway decent short story had nothing to do with the secret mechanics of fiction and everything to do with my own motivation. The problem was that I was trying to write stories like most of the stories I was reading, stories in the Chekhov/Joyce/ Mansfield/Carver idiom, an idiom that has become a kind of ruling orthodoxy on both sides of the Atlantic over the last 30 years: modest, melancholic stories, not arcs with beginnings, middles and ends, so much as moments and turning points, stories often about things not happening and people being absent, not really stories at all according to the everyday meaning of the word, but passages snipped from longer, unwritten narratives that lie outside the frame. I could read “The Dead”, for example, the final story in Joyce’s Dubliners, and both see that it was a masterpiece and feel that it was missing something. And trying to write anything that you wouldn’t want to read is a recipe for disaster.
There are other traditions, of course. Contemporary fable, magical realism, surrealism, the story of ideas, crime stories, science fiction stories, ghost stories … There’s Borges and Calvino, there’s Angela Carter and George Saunders. And while I’ve tried to write about murder cases and hauntings and people blessed with superhuman powers, it never quite works. For better or worse, my subject is life lived here and now, families, houses, minds. I can manage the odd flight of fancy but I’m stuck with naturalism for the foreseeable future.
And then I stumbled on two very different stories that utterly bewitched me and became talismans that sit somewhere at the back of my mind whenever I’m trying to write.
The first was the title story of Wells Tower’s 2009 collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. The first eight stories in the volume are very good examples of a genre you might call Modern American Men in Trouble. Alcohol, isolation, temporary jobs, failed relationships … The final story, however, is something completely different.
It is said that Tower was inspired by hearing someone pondering what would have happened if Raymond Carver had written about Vikings. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is about Vikings, but it is very much not the story Carver would have written. Its protagonist Harald is approaching middle age, enjoying long summer evenings drinking potato wine with his wife Pila as the sun goes down over the wide blue fjord in front of their wattle-and-daub house. Autumn comes, however, and his friend Gnut persuades him to join the psychopathic Djarf Fairhair on a revenge mission to Northumbria.
Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea. A turncoat Norwegian monk named Naddod had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to bring heavy ordnance for whoever could lay out some silver.
The language is ridiculously inauthentic yet completely believable. Parts of the story are very funny (I particularly like Djarf doing “a few deep knee bends” on the beach in Northumbria as a warm-up before they start some serious pillaging). Parts of the story are very beautiful (Lindisfarne is “wild with fields of purple thistles and, when the wind blew, it twitched and rolled, like the hide of some fantastic animal”). And parts of the story are very dark indeed. In the middle of their raid Gnut falls for a local girl called Mary whose arm was cut off during a previous raid, and she seems to fall for him. Gnut takes her back home on the boat. “This a voluntary thing or an abduction-type deal?” asks her despairing father. We never know because Mary says nothing. Is she in love or merely choosing the least bad option?
Back at home, however, Gnut is learning “the awful fear that comes with getting hold of something you can’t afford to lose”. Far from taking life easy, everyone seems to be heading into the deeper waters of old age and vulnerability. “I got to understand how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself … you wake up at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars.”
“Everything Ravaged” is not a short story. It is a huge story compressed magically into 20 pages. It convinced me that authenticity had nothing to do with the facts, and it convinced me that the last thing you should do when sitting down to write a short story is to think small.
The second story was “Werner” by Jo Ann Beard, which appeared in the 2007 edition of The Best American Essays, edited by David Foster Wallace. It is about a young man, Werner Hoeflich, an artist by calling and a caterer by trade, who finds himself trapped by a raging fire on the third floor of his New York tenement building. Drawing on the dormant skills he learned when diving and doing gymnastics in high school, he somehow manages to leap out of his apartment window, across the gap and in through a window in the adjacent building, injuring himself terribly but saving his life. The story shuttles between Werner’s childhood in Oregon, his college years in Iowa and what threaten to be the last few seconds of his life, and it remains one of the most gripping stories I have ever read. I assumed at first that it was fiction (despite the title of the collection) because Werner’s New York had the densely wrought texture of an imagined world.
The trees on his block were scrawny and impervious, like invalid aunts … a sprig of cloth-wrapped wire sizzled and then opened like a blossom … he could see smoke curling up through the floorboards, black specks inside the tendrils like a flock of birds banking and moving together …
It was, in fact, reportage. I still don’t know the exact process by means of which it was written. I’m guessing some combination of long interviews, editing and embellishment. I knew only that I had never read anything quite like it. Nor have I subsequently except for another “story” by Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter”, which describes a mass murder in the physics department at the University of Iowa where she was working at the time.
I have always been attracted to two very different kinds of narrative: fictional stories in which nothing happens and real-life stories in which everything happens. On the one hand, Proust and Woolf, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End series, novels that push action and event to one side so that they can focus on the second-by-second experience of being human. On the other hand, stories about being kidnapped or living with schizophrenia, stories about gender-transition or surviving plane crashes, stories about factory fires or abattoirs or hunting in the Siberian taiga.
“Werner” and “The Fourth State of Matter” remain the only short stories I have ever read that combine the techniques and pleasures of both kinds of narrative.
I have read too many beige short stories in my life, too many short stories that feel like five-finger exercises. There are limits to what can happen in the real world. In fiction there are no limits: anything is possible on paper. It seems to me that if you are writing a short story and it is not more entertaining than the stories in that morning’s newspaper or that evening’s TV news, then you need to throw it away and start again, or open a cycle repair shop.