The Short Story and Me

After happily giving feedback to a good friend’s piece of writing, I felt inspired to finally pick up the digital pen and get to writing fiction again. I needed some time to recover after university picked me up like some sort of creative lemon and squeezed me dry, but as creative lemons are wont to do, I soon ditched this nonsensical metaphor and got down to writing a good old fashioned short story.

When I first started writing, as a child, I didn’t really consider the idea of short stories at all. I’m not sure I knew they existed. I was, after all, a child, and thought that three or four pages in my literacy book might have amounted to much more in the format of a paperback. But the reality is, I started out with short stories, as I’m sure many people do. Our Year 2 literacy teacher asked us to write a story of whatever length, about whatever we could think up, and all I can really remember was that it had something to do with a magical flying island and a woman who’d found it by diving into a well. My teacher thought it was excellent, and showed other teachers, got me to record an audio reading of it, the whole shebang, and to this day I believe that this is what really kickstarted my ambition to become a writer, which is somewhat amusing considering the likely less than publishable nature of my childhood magnum opus. In fact, it was simultaneously as damaging as it was uplifting, for it planted a seed of arrogance that survived until university put me straight. But hey, each to their own hubris.

Well anyway, I did some writing on and off, but it wasn’t until I was around eleven or so that I really began to write more. At the age of twelve I started writing New Recruit (or: The Life and Times of Reluctant Teenage Vampire Jack Chimcholi) as we saw in last week’s blog post. This was, of course, more of an attempt at a novel, being split into chapters and updated over the course of about a year. And, as mentioned in last week’s blog post, I thought that it was quite the successful story at the time. But even then, I was aware of the lack of plot and structure from not thinking ahead, and would therefore resort back to the short story as a mode for storytelling, more from laziness than from anything else. One short story I remember writing was about a man who was chased down by an evil, self-driving bus in the dead of night… and now that I come to think of it, my Year 2 story probably made a lot more sense than whatever that was. Regardless, I brought it into school, and my tutor told me it was brilliant, further solidifying my sense that I was something special, maybe even a prodigy when it came to writing.

As I grew over the next few years, my writing turned to poetry, the like which many developing writers probably have somewhere hidden under their floorboards, if they haven’t burned it already. Much of this poetry will never see the light of day, and the light of day will thank me for it. (Picture an insecure 15 year old with a dark past who was convinced he was stuck in the ‘friendzone’, and you can cringe even without the source material.) Despite the mounting horror I feel whenever I turn my mind towards these works, they were still integral to my development as a writer, and even helped shape the way I would approach short stories when I later returned to them.

I chose English Literature as an A-Level because, hey, study what you know, right? And eventually our teacher (let’s call him Mr. Howard) asked us to write a short story about a subject of our choice, so long as it adhered to the genre of Gothic that we’d been studying. Much like that fabled Year 2 task a decade earlier, but uh, more Gothic, obviously. By this point, however, I’d grown an appreciation of the darker side of storytelling, and proceeded to write a short story which is possibly the first one I’m not ashamed to discuss in this blog post, though it does still show a hint of the immature, overactive, nonsensical teenage mind that brought us Jack Chimcholi. This short story, scrawled quickly in the space of an hour, was named Human Harvest, and followed the flight of our stereotypical Gothic damsel in distress and she attempted to flee from the hands of her lifelong tormenter, the owner of this stereotypical Gothic castle who forced her to eat human flesh for her meals. I won’t reveal the entire narrative, but there was a nice grisly twist at the end and it almost even made sense. To my great relief, Mr. Howard was impressed with it, though he argued against the name, which wasn’t originally Human Harvest but instead something else that I don’t quite remember. (Also, I just looked up the title Human Harvest, and it’s a movie that was released in 2014. I wrote my story in 2012. I was the original, damn you!) And the reason I mention all of this was because it was the next great step as a writer, coercing me to return to the short story as my preferred choice of narrative.

I wrote many short stories thereafter, publishing many of them on my personal Facebook page for want of a better place. Many more of them stayed on my PC, and have since been lost to time, for I was a non-Dropbox using fool. There was some good stuff in there, though. Well, maybe not good, bur some salvageable concepts at the very least. These short stories, typically first drafts that would be abandoned to the mercy of my terrible attention span, acted most simply and most effectively as experience. There’s a theory that it takes 1,000 hours to perfect your craft, and that if you want to get good at something, you’ve got to spend hundreds of hours being awful at it first. Whilst there’s no perfecting writing, I’m very glad that I spent much of my time creating these works, even if they are lost to time or are otherwise rubbish.

And then I started my BA in Creative Writing, and finally began to realise that I wasn’t the only person in the world to write half-decent stories. Good job, Kristian.

I learned some of my most valuable lessons about short stories in my first semester. Mainly that they were not, as I had previously considered, simply short novels that could be used as a platform to practice writing. In fact, all that short stories really have in common with novels is that they’re both pieces of prose. Some people believe that short stories are closer to poetry that they are novels, and I’m inclined to agree. The more I look back on my time as an emo teenage poet (oh god), the more I’ve come to realise that I never put my fictional narrative development on hold during those years; I merely explored it from another perspective. I came to understand that short stories have to be short stories for a reason, and that many of my previous (and future) faults were (and would be) writing a short story that would prefer to be a novel. I mean, sure, people can still enjoy a short story about a man who has an imaginary friend that follows him everywhere he goes, ruining his relationship with his parents and girlfriend and driving him to the point of insanity, but when you try to squish that into anything less than 4,000 words it begins to feel very crammed. And that example was from a piece of coursework that I handed in last year, because simply knowing how to write a short story isn’t good enough. You have to stop your imagination getting away from you.

So I’m going to continue writing short stories. I’m going to write them until I have tons of the things, and publish them into some sort of collection that you can do a nifty little read of on Amazon and hopefully enjoy. That’s the plan for the next few years. But I also need to practice my novel writing separately, and that’s something that I have precious little experience in. So I’m gonna go suck at it by myself for a little bit. Maybe turn 4,000 words into 40,000, more, who knows. And if my short story collection or this fabled novel ever sees the light of day, I’ll be sure to let you know right here.