The short story is dead! Long live the short story.

 

Many people in mainstream publishing will tell you that no one reads short stories anymore. But I know they do, which is one of the reasons why I work in the short form. My stories are bonsai pieces designed to be read in a single sitting. And this is what is so appealing about short stories: their brevity, their digestibility. In a world where quantity seems to matter more than quality, the short story can lay that fallacy to rest, if it’s done well, which is a rare accomplishment. In other words, it isn’t always the biggest tome on the shelf that’s worth reading.   

 

Short story writers have to use words the way a sniper uses bullets: every round, every word has to count. The reader’s interest has to be captured with the very first sentence, not with the first few thousand words. And a short story can take almost as long as a novel to write; I work on my short stories, on and off, for anything up to a year. Like writing a novel, writing a short story is a process of accretion, thoughts forming into words, words into sentences and so on. The final product is a distillation of the imagination in exactly the same way that a novel is. In geological terms, it may be more of a rock pool than an ocean but it is still worth exploring these fascinating literary microcosms.  

 

I didn’t consciously choose to work in the short form. It chose me. My stories begin and end of their own accord and are often complete in less than three thousand words. Pocket sized tales, perfect for audiences that want to receive their fiction in a condensed burst, that prefers the extravagance of the supernova to the slow burn of an average sun.      

 

Now more than ever the short form exerts a real appeal, especially to the heads-down generation of modern book lovers, who want their literary fix via their mobiles or Kindles. So I say, long live the short story. The rumours of its demise are premature and exaggerated. Perhaps it’s the novel that should be looking over its shoulder, worried by the prospect of impending extinction.