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Secrets and short stories
The introduction for the Scotsman & Orange Short Story Collection, 2005.

The Scotsman & Orange Short Story Award is the richest prize for short story writing in the UK. It runs annually and applications, for aspiring writers, may be found at the Scotsman website from September. This is Janice's introduction to the 2005 volume. The winnder of the overall prize on 2005 was Christine Zhang for her story "The Enemy Within". Six winners are published in the book, alongside a selection of others, with three special commissions from Jackie Kay, Bernard McLaverty and Ali Smith.

"Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyed and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was cancelled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story.
John Steinbeck

"Writing isn't just telling stories. It's exactly the opposite. It's everything all at once. It's the telling of a story, the absence of a story. It's telling a story through its absence."
Marguerite Duras

Writing short stories is a terrifying business. Ask anyone who knows. I have quoted Duras and Steinbeck because I love them and what they have to say is so to-the-point, but really, you could take your pick. Alternatively, you could let me take it for you.

Franz Kafka, a man forever hoist with his own metaphor of a human being turned into a giant insect, suffered agonies of guilt about not working hard enough or long enough, and saw the business of writing his stories as "drawing words as if out of the empty air." "If I capture one", he confided to his diary, "then I have just this one alone, and all the toil must begin anew." The incomparable Virginia Woolf, who would today be harassed to call her stories novels for the greater good of her publisher's sales figures, spoke of drawing ideas up as from the bottom of a well, with great effort and no little anxiety before the meticulous business of applying craft to those 'fished out' ideas even begins. New Zealander Katherine Mansfield chimes clearly with these sentiments, and adds a little of her own on the subject of the relentless need to edit, revise, rework: "Tidied all my papers. Tore up and ruthlessly and destroyed much, which always gives the greatest satisfaction." Katherine Anne Porter, the Texan author who won a Pulitzer prize for her Collected Stories, spoke of the requirement to spend time 'simmering' with a story which could not, she asserted, be driven by craft or even by so-called 'writers' intuition': "I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always. There's no other way." In other words, the story comes, if it comes, when it comes; the author has no real control over the pace of events. Patience, it seems, is a primary requirement. And there's more. Here comes the relentless nature of the beast.

Evan Connell, quoted by Raymond Carver, said he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas, then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. "Thatís all we have, finally, the words," says Carver, "and they better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason, the reader's eye will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved."

Difficult, frustrating, demanding, elusive, painstaking, awkward, uncompromising - and we're not done yet. Even if you find the time and the persistence, even if you craft your hardest, shape your phrases into as robust and beautiful an arrangement as you know how; even if you manage to make the story resonate like crystal, there is no guarantee (how could there be?) that people will read it as you intend. "All my stories," said the incomparable Flannery O'Connor, "are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal." It's always a shock.

Duras, Mansfield, O'Connor, Porter, Steinbeck, Kafka, Woolf and Carver, mistresses and masters of the form, are an impressive enough roster of confidants. I could add Rudyard Kipling, Shirley Jackson, Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekov, Edgar Allan Poe and Alice Munro, James Joyce, James Kelman and Jackie Kay, Charles Dickens and Grace Paley, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jorge Luis Borges and Angela Carter and Gertude Stein and Oscar Wilde and Hogg and Spark and Hardy and Hemingway and - but I won't. The message is probably loud enough already.

It is also hard to ignore the fact that short stories are not cash-cows. Novels earn more in terms of advances and are more attractive to publishers - and here we're talking whole collections. In terms of individual stories, fewer magazines and periodicals publish them at all, and the demand on the writer to be impressive enough to capture the attention of those that do is consequently greater.

What, then, is the attraction? Why write the buggers at all? That, contrarily enough, is easy to answer. And since he started us off, Steinbeckís the man to do it. "After many years," he confesses, "to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium. I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances."

That's it. The wish to "take one's chances" with the "tantalising majesty of the medium" itself, challenges intact, is the draw.

It is traditional, when talking of the short story, to elaborate upon that notion of 'medium'; the usual assertions of less being more, the thrill of the smaller canvas, the requirement for characters to simply be without preamble or vast stretches of white page to go, but this is merely to elaborate upon the obvious, to restate that the thing about the short story is its shortness. Sure it is: impact, import and resolution in one sweep. More intriguing to expand upon is the 'majesty' part of the quotation. I suggest that majesty rests largely in a quality the short story shares with all literary art, but different types of writing, at least arguably, deliver that quality in different ways. Added to the story's particular demands and contours, this quality lends a particular piquancy and allure. And that quality is transcendence.

If a fine novel is a whole exhibition, a fine short story is a single picture. It is a picture, however, by Julia Margaret Cameron or Weegee, by Diane Arbus or Cartier-Bresson, a picture where the glimpse suggests what came before, what is yet to come, the wider landscape stretching out into infinite space.

And finding the viewpoint, the moment, as unarguably as is the case with the photographer, is above all a matter of waiting and of precision. It imposes a requirement to observe steadily, to catch what images and connections are already coming together beneath the ordinary appearance of things as you work. By this I do not mean that one must wait for the plot to unfold (though this may happen too - some writers report the oddest things happening as their characters 'take off' as if with minds of their own). I mean one must wait for enlightenment of a kind. The question here is not what's the story? but what is the story trying to tell me? What is it, after all, that I mean to say? This enlightenment is not a matter of craft, a matter of refining your characters or setting or the naturalness of your dialogue any other teachable thing: it is a matter of self-trust, of tiny tics of understanding. It is a slow apprehension of what this story means beyond the story itself. 

Of course, one must refine and apply a full measure of technical skill; one must attend to the detail of consistency and readability of the whole. But it is only when the writer can see a winder context that they offer something the reader can experience as theirs too. That is what Duras means when she argues that the story is "everything all at once". A complete world, convincingly peopled; something fresh made from the everyday of course of course. But more than this. "The telling of a story, the absence of a story. It's telling a story through its absence." That's all there is to it.

Competitions, of course, don't always help this process. In place of 'writing everything at once', for example, the competition invariably sets up a ìthemeî and, more understandably, a word-length. Instead of allowing the story to emerge as it must, the competition writer must drive the elements of their story towards a pre-set destination, which, if my earlier assertions about patient waiting are true, is tantamount to demanding the story be thought and written inside out. How easy is that likely to be?

This book, then, with its theme of 'secrets' set a very particular and tough series of tasks with a tender goal - to have that story do its work by being published and read by a wider public and the possibility, in a money-starved genre, of winning some money to keep writing. Over 1,200 people took their chances and they had their work cut out. The vast majority of those, of course, fell. The primary killer was endings. Some stories began splendidly but refused to keep going, as though the word-limit had disallowed the original ambition to keep pumping; some did not manage the hurdle of a satisfactory ending that meant more than the cessation of the plot; some reined themselves in so much they were too ìtightî for the reader to unlace the endingís meaning so the story died of asphyxia. A great many, alas, resorted to 'twists' or relied to heavily on hammering home the 'secret' contained within, so the reader had little to do but pick up the authorís punch-line at the close, which is about as deadly as it gets. Some came very close indeed, but just were not strong enough, at least in this editorial panel's opinion, at the last jump. The thirteen survivors you now hold in your hands and I trust you will be impressed by at least their tenacity. We hope they will speak clearly, cleanly and memorably to you. We believe all of those printed here have a something to say, and all at least strive to reach beyond themselves with what that something is. There is range and choice enough for at least one transcendental gem to fall into your lap.

You may glimpse it in one of the many stories we received about the hidden lives of children and adolescents. It may be set in Holland or Bali, in Soweto, Aberdeen or Baghdad. You may uncover it alongside the abandoned Burnhouse Estate baby or in the playful nips and tucks of one final conversation with God; on beaches, by rock pools; in the words of a slick-talking PI, the silence of a mermaid doll or in the sound of birdsong to a near-sightless child. From Derek Robertson's tightly-crafted 'A Softer Devil', where a lonely 15 year-old begins to find an account of himself to Nicolas McGregor's weary gumshoe on the psychiatrist's couch in 'The Martha Day Affair'; from Ewan Gault's 'The Beast', a raw-edged tale of abandonment and barely-acknowledged grief to sick-at-heart Mr Em's Christmas drink with the girls in Frances Wattís atmospheric 'Over the Counter'; from Anne Morrisonís beautifully-modulated tale of girls fishing and finding more than they can yet understand at 'Gorilla Rock' to the multi-layered depths of Kirstin Zhangís 'Enemy Within', where Akbar, cheating death, his wife and his neighbours, discovers he canít lie to himself; all are jewel-cased here.

In addition, there are a trio of commissions from three collection-scarred professionals, all struggling themselves against the same odds and coming through with the kind of grace, power and style that often merits the absurd adjective 'effortless' as its due praise. Ali Smith gives a finely pared-down warning in the uncomfortably resonant I know something you donít know; Bernard MacLaverty finely pares back layers of cultural and sexual mores to something darker, even, than grief in The Wedding Ring; and Jackie Kay tilts heart, head and the very windows to the wider world in a 65 carat fine-cut diamond of a story, Blinds.

All that waiting, you see, can have its rewards, for writer and reader alike. Even Kafka, that most fretful of a fretful breed, knew it.

"You do not need to leave your room," he wrote in a moment of rare joy. "Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

Now who wouldn't want to try their chances for that?