Short Stories

When I was at university for my undergraduate degree in English, Creative Writing & Practice (a fancy way of saying “no exams, just vibes”), we were essentially brainwashed into writing 2000 word short stories.

This was because for the Creative Writing portion of the degree, we had to produce 2000 new words each week, submit them to an online learning environment & then critique each others’ work. Every week. A new set of words.

Admittedly, some brave souls wrote poems which was probably a good option for, you know, the poets among us, but for most of us it was going to be the short story. It didn’t really make sense to submit something from a larger work because it was too disjointed to get good feedback anyway.

Anyway, what this led to was, in my own practice at least, a habit of writing super short, tight, 2000-words-or-fewer stories. That’s still really my go-to length. I can’t write convincing narratives in 100 word flash style, and anything over 3000 words starts to make my skin itch as I’m writing it.

Brainwashed, I tell you.

I am, however, much more generous when reading short stories - and I’ll tell you something: I adore short story collections. They’re wonderful! I like being able to pick something up, read a full narrative and then realise it’s only been fifteen minutes. Or, exploring a bunch of different writers’ takes on a topic or genre without having to buy sixteen novels. Or, getting a sense of a writer’s style in bite size chunks.

It’s also great when I’m writing myself. I find it really difficult to extricate myself from whichever world I’m intent on building, you see, but sometimes writing a new draft or editing something can start to slowly drive me up the wall, in which case reading something helps. But a whole novel can be too much, and that’s where a short story saves me.

perhaps unsurprisingly then, given that I’m about to embark on a new novel, when I hit Waterstones this week with my birthday gift vouchers I ended up buying four collections of short stories.