The long and the short of it

TOMORROW night at the Hexham Book Festival I am giving a talk about The Long and The Short of It. I will read from my novel Sandie Shaw and The Millionth Marvell Cooker, and from my short story collection, Knives, to illustrate the differing challenges of writing long and writing short.

In the main, the focus in my writing has been towards long fiction, (sometimes very long fiction). I love writing my novels, but I have always written – and from time to time published – short stories.

Among serious and aspiring writers the short story is now very fashionable.

As well as being a distinguished, discrete literary form in itself, the short story can be a showcase for writing talent.

Up until a year ago I was co-director, with Gillian Wales, of a national writing competition which ran for ten years. Our first winner was North Yorkshire writer Jonathan Tulloch, whose clever story Season Ticket later exploded into a novel and was then made into a film called Purely Belter.

Such showcasing of talent is surely one reason for the increasing popularity of short story competitions.

However, I have found that in the competition stakes, the novel surely loses out. In our national competition we alternated each year between short stories and three-chapter novel samples. It was always extremely difficult to judge a novel with so little access to its essential architecture and true outcomes. In the light of such difficulty, judging a short story was a gem of a task: a short story is a whole thing in itself, its language, architecture and outcomes were visible to the judges.

Herein lies the charm of the short story. Like a poem, it is a prime example of economy – the right word in the right place implying multiple layers of meaning. A short story may present a whole life in a coherent slice of it; or it may present an encounter which defines two lives and their intersecting energies; or it may present us with bright fragments that we readers must make into our own whole thing. A short story can bring people and places to life with a few strokes of a pen. It can show us tragedy, comedy, misery or irony with a single allusion or a clever metaphor.

It may reflect our lives back to us or take us into strange new interior or exterior worlds.

Short stories are like those scrunched up Japanese paper flowers I loved as a child. Tight, rolled up nuggets when dry, when you put them into liquid, they would open up into technicolour glory. For me, the reader’s imagination is that liquid. We writers give the readers our tight flowers and they open up and blossom in unexpected and unique ways to deliver the story.

Perhaps, word for word, the short story has more screwed-up power than the novel. A novel demands of the reader diligence, and a certain indulgence so that our story can unfold and take a proper shape. We invite our readers to live with us through time and space. We make them wait for our explanations, our outcomes, our illuminations.

With them we celebrate our resolutions, our epiphanies.

READERS, of course, are quite capable of enjoying and responding to both our long and short writing. I only hope they don’t just prejudge these two distinct forms as a fast read or a slow read. Each form brings with it, its own literary enjoyment.

As a writer and a fan of both literary forms I have more usually leaned towards the luxuriant expanse of the novel. I love playing with the multilayers, inventing a large cast of players, and relishing the sheer literary manipulation of a large idea. But an equally pleasurable challenge is the encapsulation of a hot idea in the short story form. For certain inspirational notions the pure form of the short story is the only way to tell it.

So here you have it: The Long and the Short of It, two different but – I trust – equally exciting reading experiences.

■ Knives (Iron Press, £8) is newly published this week, while Sandie Shaw and The Millionth Marvell Cooker (Headline, £6.99), based on the Smart and Brown factory in Spennymoor, is just out in paperback. Wendy’s talk will be at Hexham library tomorrow, 7-8pm.