(#) Our Writing World is today

Just a quick updated blog entry for this little experiment of ours...


...And a reminder, that on the 5th July, those of us who are #amwriting can tweet the latest 100 characters of their work under the hashtag #ourwritingworld for all of Twitterdom to read. 
But as there's also quite a few writers out there who don't use Twitter, you can still post the last 100 chars here as a comment to this post, or you can e-mail me at mfwcurran@talktalk.net.


My deal to you all, is that I will copy and paste these entries into a blog post along with your twitter names. It will be a very fractured narrative, possibly poetic, possibly chaotic, but if it works - if it gets enough publicity and enough people do it - we could have ourselves a world snapshot of writers doing what they love and telling everyone about it.


We've had a few writers publicly (and privately) saying they're up for this so it should be fun.

(Oh yeah, PLS RT!)

Celebrating short stories Part 3:Why Short Stories Aren’t Green by Aliya Whiteley

About the guest blogger:

Aliya Whiteley is the author of numerous short stories and the books, Three Things About Me, Light Reading and Mean, Mode, Median. Her most recent short stories will appear in The First Book of Classical Horror Stories, and a collection of short speculative fiction to be published by Dog Horn Publishing later this year.
 

What’s your favourite colour? 

Whenever I’m asked that question, I say green. Green is a beautiful colour. Green is the colour of leaves and grass and kiwi fruits. Telling everyone that green is my favourite colour says something about me as a person. I’m a natural kind of person. You would like to go hiking with me, and maybe you’d make the assumption that I’d cook you a great meal that involves really fresh salad. 

But it’s a lie. I do like the outdoors and fruit and healthy stuff occasionally, but would I choose it over a roaring fire and a packet of barley sugars on a winter’s day? Maybe I should say my favourite colour is orange. I’m also a sucker for clear skies and lakes; and blue does suit my complexion. For the sake of argument, I’ll tell you green is my favourite colour but the truth is that there’s no such thing as my favourite colour. It changes from season to season, from hour to hour. 

My writing is no different.

When I first started writing, if you’d asked me what kind of writer I was, I would have told you that I wrote romance. This is true. I wrote terrible romances and I’m glad none of them survive today. I discovered I couldn’t fit in the box of the romantic storyline; I got the urge to write long paragraphs about politics or to present an entire chapter in a long column. So I decided I should be a literary novelist instead. 

Literary novelist sounds like quite a forgiving term. Can’t you write about anything in literary terms, as long as the quality of the writing is up to it? Anything but aliens, apparently. Add some robots and a planet or two along with a fast-moving plot and you have to get your cloak, move out of the literary shed and hang about at the playpark of fantasy and science fiction instead.

So that’s what came next.

And then I went and wrote a comic novel. A novel with no robots or aliens in it. And after that I wrote a comic novel with death and crime in it, and I became a darkly comic crime writer. At that point my writing CV was beginning to look messy. So I decided to throw away all the monikers and just write whatever I was going to write. It turns out what I was going to write, what I’d always get the most pleasure out of writing, was short stories.

I think it’s because I’m a changeable person. Today I like green, and I like aliens. Tomorrow it’ll be black daggers and a protagonist with a heart of evil, who also happens to be a children’s entertainer with a crush on somebody’s mother. If I was attempting to fit all this into one novel, it would be barely readable, let alone marketable. But short stories free me to create all of this and more.

And I refuse to believe that all the readers out there only like one flavour either. If asked, you may say pink is absolutely your favourite colour, but do you really mean it? Is there no time when, just for a moment, you fancy a bright yellow sunshiney experience instead? Or maybe you’d like to just try on a purple jumper for a change.

If so, please come and dig in to some short stories. The only thing I can promise is that it won’t be the same old storyline with the same old characters. Short stories don’t work that way. When you only have a few pages as a writer to make an impression, you don’t do it by painting the wall grey. 

Celebrating Short Stories Part 2: Many Words Make Hard Work by Ian Hocking

About Ian Hocking:
Ian is the author of the bestselling e-books, the SF novels Deja Vu and Flashback. He describes himself as an "accidental bestselling author" and has written two non-science fiction novels, Proper Job and now a short story collection A Moment in Berlin. Ian blogs extensively over on This Writing Life.

My first proper novel, called Whirlwind, had too many words. Not that it was overlong. The entire manuscript came to no more than 110,000 words. Its problem was pace. The book was meant to be a horror-scifi-thriller extravaganza but the prose was the equivalent of slow motion. I was yet to learn that each word is a jab, and you need to knock out your opponent in the fewest rounds.


Then I started writing short stories.


They weren't terrible; they weren't very good. Besides the pressure for space, which heightens the need for exact, precise, no-pussy-footing-about-it wordage, I felt there was a greater role for each word to play. A short story can conjure an impression that persists in the reader longer than that of novel. It's not a protracted swordfight. It's a cheeky pistol shot from the hip.


Of these dozens, I selected four and put them in a collection called 'A Moment in Berlin'.


I tend not to write short fiction these days. Partly, I have my work cut out with novels. And the novel is an easier form. There's also a sense that fewer people will read a short story.


I think on my short fiction career with some nostalgia. However, that may not be the exact, precise word. A tweet from m'colleague Paul Graham Raven yesterday reminded me that nostalgia is a psychological condition in which the sufferer yearns a for place to which he can never return. I intend to return.

Ian's short story collection, A Moment in Berlin is available on the UK Kindle and US Kindle now. Please see here for more details.

Celebrating Short Stories Part 1: Why being short is a good thing

Last week one of the greatest short story writers - actually, one of the greatest writers period - went to the great bibliophile in the sky. Ray Bradbury's short stories have had an immeasurable impact on writers for three generations, and no doubt will have an influence in the decades to come, and yet while he'll be known for his novels Fahrenheit 451 and Dandelion Wine, it will be his short stories that will be remembered more.

Bradbury joins a list of writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Allan Poe, HP Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, Angela Carter etc, whose short fiction was always stronger than their more longer works. A list that arguably could include Stephen King, H.G. Wells, Clive Barker, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman, DH Lawrence and too many others to mention.

Yet with all this heritage and brilliance to pick from, why is that if you look at the bestsellers charts for the last fifteen years there is barely a mention of a short story collection from a specific author or a collection of authors?

Reading habits fluctuate. In years past, short stories and poetry were the popular pastime of readers. These days – and ironically in an age of laziness - readers gravitate mostly to novels, rarely short stories.

As for poetry - the decline of the latter has been extraordinary. Without school and higher education, it's debatable that poetry would exist at all. Could it be the same for short fiction in the future? Are we moving that far away from the short form that it's about to be confined to history as something of a relic of fiction?

If so, we as readers will be much poorer for it.

If the full-length novel is a main course, then short fiction is the equivalent of a starter, or in the case of anthologies, a smorgasbord of delights that sometimes a main course cannot beat. I am not averse to ordering several starters instead of a main course if there are so many appealing dishes to choose from – I choose my fiction in the same way. And if you don’t like what you’re reading, you don’t have to persevere for long – just flick ahead a few pages and start the next story. Your time is never wasted, compared to getting through two thirds of a 600 page book, only to be disappointed.

Yet in light of these practicalities, most readers choose not to read anthologies, even with so many of them out there. The likes of Granta, Interzone, Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, even People's Friend, are the places readers should go to, and bookshelves should have at least one anthology on them, be they genre or literary. And then there’s the internet – a veritable sea of short fiction.

And with so many brilliant writers – bestselling authors – writing this stuff, you’d think that there was money in short fiction, wouldn’t you?

The only writer I can think of who actually makes anything from their short stories and is a consistent seller of anthologies, is Stephen King. But then King has such a ravenous following that it would be surprising if that wasn't the case. His short stories have cemented his reputation as one of the best living exponents of the short art of fiction, but there are other equally, if not better writers who have dabbled with some literary success, but with little financial success. It just isn't commercial enough. And big publishers seem to treat short fiction with a patronising smile these days, hoping that you will return to something more commercial, like a novel perhaps?

From a writer's perspective, there is much to recommend in writing short fiction. Personally, I love the idea that a short story can be an instant in a person's life, or a microcosm of a much larger world. It can be an epic condensed into a fragment, or a fragment explored in minute detail. It can be experimental; it can be a stuttering narrative car-crash, or flow like a crazed river, as long as it's entertaining, as long as it has carried the reader along, then why not be as avant-garde as you want? You can get away with it in the short form, much more than in a novel.

And there is a certain discipline, a talent needed for writing good short fiction that you don't get in the longer form, the ability to trap an idea and exhaust it in a few thousand words, rather than an exhausting 150,000. It's what makes short fiction a good discipline for all writers: the economy of words. As a writer I'm drawn to short fiction as a challenge. It's the work-out all writers should try, to hone the craft and explore themes and philosophies.

~

But still we go around full circle to success, and whether short fiction is worthwhile. Ask a writer, who has to pay the bills and feed their family, whether short fiction is successful and they'll insist it isn't. Novel writing is where the money is.

But ask a writer whether short fiction writing is a worthwhile endeavour, and very few - unless they are motivated purely by the money - will say no. Especially those who have attempted it.

Which means, for the reader, you are getting the best out of the writer with short fiction because they are not writing the same old formulaic rubbish their publisher demands: they are writing from the heart and soul, because they have a story to tell whether you pay for it or not. In that respect, short stories are arguably more honest because the writers know they're not going to be paid particularly well for writing them, if at all.

~

In the following weeks, I've invited three other writers who share my passion for short stories, to blog here. Personally, I'm more of a reader than a writer of short fiction (I've just the one short story published), but we all come from the same page and want to persuade you, the reader, to pick up an anthology or two along the way. 

It doesn't have to be theirs either. Any anthology will do.

Trust me, it will be worth your while...