Of Stories — Long, Short and Tall
Stories long
I live in the land of legendary prolix – Wales may well be the
land of song, but it is also the land of garrulity. The
Welsh can talk and talk and talk, on the street, in the rugby
stadium, by the chapel steps, or at the home. Yet, as they
say, chwarae teg (fair play), some Welshmen have been supreme
orators. Consider the statesman and the preacher, David
Lloyd George and Martyn Lloyd-Jones, for their eloquent
content. Or Richard Burton for his lush diction. Yet
others, such as that parliamentary pair, James Callaghan and Neil
Kinnock, achieved long-winded boredom in both substance and
delivery. Orate? Yes, occasionally. The Welsh
can also occasionally write. Think of that poetic twosome,
Dylan Thomas and R S Thomas. Yet talking and writing are the
cousins of communication, both express the thoughts of the brain –
the tongue of the former often becomes the pen of the latter.
Herein is my little thesis: do the citizens of a particular
country display a national characteristic? And if so, is
Wales’, verbosity? In other words, are the Welsh really all
nationalised chatterboxes? Richard Burton claimed that, ‘The
Welsh are all actors. It’s only the bad ones who become
professionals.’ Or as A A Gill described the Welsh in his
infamous 1998 article for The Sunday Times, as
‘loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark,
ugly, pugnacious little trolls.’ That is a portrayal too far
and too vulgar. Martyn Lloyd-Jones took a different angle,
‘The Englishman looks upon the Welshman as a rebel, an awkward
individualist, as a man who always wants his own way and is
perpetually creating totally uncalled for difficulties.’
Hmmm. At the more reprehensible end of the moral spectrum is
that beloved son of the Principality, Dylan Thomas, whom Paul
Ferris, his English biographer, described as a chronic liar who
made begging into a cottage industry, adding that he was a thief,
a cheat, a drunk and an adulterer – as well as a dutiful son and
good with children. Righto, that is enough, but my little
thesis has not exactly been disproved. But hey who
cares? Wales is not the land of my fathers!
Yet some of my best friends are ….
Stories short
OK, so blethering and rambling are probably not exclusively Welsh
characteristics, nor is fine prose. Beautiful, concise
writing is a rare talent and its outcome is to be desired and
fostered. But it is not simple. Somewhat
counterintuitively, it is far easier to talk for 45 minutes or
write three pages rather than 15 minutes or one page.
Permitting just five minutes or one paragraph is akin to
malice. Blaise Pascal knew this. In December 1656, he
sent a diatribe to a group of Jesuits about the lack of practical
morals in the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, he wrote [in
his Provincial Letters, no. 16], ‘Je n'ai fait celle-ci
plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire
plus courte.’ It translates as, ‘I would have written a
shorter letter, but I did not have the time.’
Yes indeed, less is so often more, whether written or
spoken. I have heard (far too many) sermons that could have
been cut, even slashed, without detriment. Now do not get me
started on students’ essays. The fact is, every piece of
writing (or speaking) can be improved by editing, despite
grumblings from the wordsmith. Long stories are often
inferior stories. Witness the growing number of publishers
who no longer employ copy editors with their blue pens and savage
scissors. The upshot – more loose-knit books of sub-standard
prose and style.
Thus editing mostly means shortening. So, how about not just
shortening, but crafting the ultimate and creating an entire story
in a few words? In the truncated world of Twitter’s
280-character limit (incidentally, the exact stretch of this
paragraph) that ought to be a breeze.
You think so? Consider this fabled example, often ascribed
to Ernest Hemingway, which he produced allegedly to win a
bet. Here it is: ‘For sale, baby shoes, never worn.’
Beat that curt little masterpiece! See, already there is a
story going through your head, perhaps even the rough outline of a
book, a play, or a film. Others have also tried their
hand. Joseph Conrad maintained that he too could write a
novel in a sentence: ‘He was born, he suffered, he died.’ G
K Chesterton could also be brief. When asked by The
Times to write an article on ‘What’s Wrong with the World’,
he apparently wrote back: ‘Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely Yours,
G. K. Chesterton.’ And, of course there is that tersest
verse of the Bible in John 11:35: ‘Jesus wept.’ Now there
really is a story and a half.
Stories tall
Stories come in two grand divisions – they are either non-fiction
or fiction. For some 50 years of my life I have been engaged
with the former, namely science, truth, fact, data, information,
statistics. That is what experimental science is all about –
if you cannot describe it sufficiently to replicate it, it’s not
real science. And when scientists write their rigorous
science stories they are generating non-fiction. And I would
contend that good and proper bioethics should also be
non-fictional.
Fiction is something else. Whereas non-fiction is bound by
reality, fiction has wings. Truth is hardly its primary
concern. Imagination is its principal driver. Fiction
is stories tall. Reading it can be fascinating,
mind-stretching and liberating, but, oh dear, it can be so, so
wordy. I have never tried to tackle the blockbuster that is
James Joyce’s 1,000-pager, Ulysses, nor am I a fan of the
loquacious Charles Dickens. Give me a 300-page book to read
and I am happy. Give me 10 pages and I might be even
happier. And while I am unlikely to face again the trauma of
writing, editing and publishing another chunky non-fiction book –
though I do have two or three already half-written on my desk – I
do fancy writing a short, fictional story or two. I even
have a few ideas. After all, can it be that hard?
Alexander McCall Smith, who has authored about 100 books of
fiction, including the best-selling series The No.1 Ladies’
Detective Agency, averages 1,000 words an hour! That’s
a book in a month – with even a few afternoons off. I
regularly write a 12,000 word Update of Life Issues for my
website. It takes me two whole weeks, not 12 hours.
Therein is the major difference between composing fiction and
non-fiction – I have to be scrupulously fact conscious, McCall
Smith can take wing.
The Penguin Book of the British Short
Story
But before I rush into my new enterprise, I thought I should first
study a few classics from the genre to get me in the mood and to
see how this art of concision is best practised. So I bought
a copy of The Penguin Book of the British Short Story – From
Daniel Defoe to John Buchan, edited by Philip Hensher
(2016). It was a Christmas read. If its 718 pages
could not spark some suggestions and share several scripting
secrets, then probably nothing else would.
Hensher introduces the book thus, ‘The British short story is
probably the richest, most varied and most historically extensive
national tradition anywhere in the world.’ He could be
right. The stories range in length from half a dozen to
thirty pages each, with perhaps twenty being the average.
Its typical short story therefore consists of about 10,000
words. But that is where any similarities within this
collection end. The book’s tales are so vastly different,
from the weird, to the moral, to the unimaginable. They are
written by well-known authors such as, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas
Hardy and H G Wells and lesser-known writers (at least, to me)
including Mary Lamb, T Baron Russell and Arthur Morrison. I
found their tales thoroughly engaging and hugely enjoyable,
mostly. The great advantage of this sort of collection, with
its multiple authors, is that any tedious tale is quickly
over. The next one will probably be better.
What were the stand-out stories? For the wrong reasons there
was Dickens’ Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings. It opens with
an 11-line sentence. What’s up with the man? He
suffers from writer’s windedness, an ailment with a simple and
speedy remedy called full stops – one to be taken every line or
two, until the entire discourse is finished. Similarly, a
difficult read was James Hogg’s John Gray o’ Middleholm
mainly because of its Scottish dialect. And there was the
overly prissiness of G K Chesterton’s The Honour of Israel Gow
with its creepy religious overtones. Surprisingly, Daughters
of the Vicar by D H Lawrence was not an easy read – its
language and dialogue were foggy, though it was gripping and more
fluid in places. There is, for instance, an almost comically
frightening, but also depressing, proposal of marriage – a lesson
in how not to do it – between the sickly, puny clergyman, Mr
Massy, and the rather sweet Miss Mary. He is ‘a small,
chétif man, scarcely larger than a boy of twelve, spectacled,
timid in the extreme, without a word to utter at first; yet with a
certain inhuman self-sureness.’ So much for vicars in
literature.
A more welcome contribution was Silver Blaze by Arthur
Conan Doyle, cheerleader for weirdo spiritualists, but also a fine
writer of crime stories. His was a horse mystery that I
remembered reading for the first time when I was about 12 years
old. Strangely, I could recall almost the entire plot and
denouement from 60 years ago. What a memory, I had
then! And there was more good stuff. The amusement of
A Little Dinner at Timmin’s by William Thackeray, the
unexpectedness of Six Weeks at Heppenheim by Elizabeth
Gaskell, the evocation of hot and smelly Egypt, and Cairo and
Cheops in particular, in Anthony Trollope’s An Unprotected
Female at the Pyramids, and the outrageous, yet believable,
story of Mrs Badgery by Wilkie Collins with its identical
opening and closing line, ‘Is there any law in England which will
protect me from Mrs Badgery?’
And there was Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband – how
twenty-first century. The weirdness of Enoch Soames
by Max Beerbohm with its memorable line, ‘Excuse me gentlemen, I
couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. I’m the
Devil.’ By contrast, there was the touching love story by
Evelyn Sharp entitled In Dull Brown. And there was
the wonderful restrained humour of Jonathan Swift in Directions
to the Footman with its no-nonsense advice, such as, how to
crack a crab – in the door by the hinges. And when no
shoe-boy is available, ‘clean your master’s shoes with the bottom
of the curtains …’
Another favourite was The Matador of the Five Towns by
Arnold Bennett, which at 32 pages is one of the longest short
stories in the collection. The hero of the title is Jos
Myatt, champion footballer, but in the concluding pages he becomes
a widower and a father of twins, all in one day. Bennett is
known as the Chronicler of the Potteries, which consist of six
towns –Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Longton and Fenton.
In 1910, they were merged to form the city of
Stoke-on-Trent. So why only five in this tale? Bennett
renamed his five imaginary towns as Turnhill, Bursley, Hanbridge,
Knype and Longshaw. Apparently, Bennett reckoned ‘The Five
Towns’ sounded more euphonious than ‘The Six Towns’ and so Fenton
was ditched. I have little affection for Staffordshire,
though my wife comes from the nearby and allegedly ‘posher’
Newcastle-under-Lyme. I find it all rather dismal, an
amalgam of greys and browns, with few trees or green fields but
unrelenting expanses of lacklustre hedgerows and muddy
verges. And Bennett seems to agree with me. Two lines
from The Matador are, ‘… like nearly everything in the
Five Towns, carelessly and scornfully ugly!’ And, ‘We saw a
snake of children winding out of a dark Sunday school into a dark
brown chapel.’ A short story that is evocative is a good
one.
Writing short, tall stories
Now that The Penguin Book has been read, the question
becomes, how to create that short piece of brilliant fictional
prose, that tall story? I used to (try to) teach biological
science students how to write succinctly, but also
interestingly. ‘How to make a cup of tea’ was one of their
written exercises. It was a largely dispiriting
experience. Nowadays, Google supplies shedloads of ‘how-to’
counsel. Evidently, the current go-to masters are Kurt
Vonnegut and George Orwell. Not forgetting the celebrated
‘iceberg theory’ according to that prince of brevity, Ernest
Hemingway. He maintained that a short story should reveal
only a fraction of its true meaning – its implicit significance
should remain in the 90% submerged. All budding writers are
free to pick and choose their mentors. Sometime, somewhere
(annoyingly I cannot remember the source), I found this set of
seemingly sensible ‘rules’:
1] Open with a catchy hook if not a
spellbinder.
2] Develop a character or two. Set
the setting. Grab that human interest.
3] Use nice words and a few unusual ones.
4] Keep the interest going, the word
count is mounting fast.
5] Surprise the reader every now and
again.
6] Close with closure or puzzling
openness.
7] Edit often, edit ruthlessly, of
course!
Over and above that set of guidelines is my tip-top directive –
write, write, write – put something on the screen, force
yourself. It is only a first draft and however clumsy and
embarrassing it may be, it will be edited later.
Writing a decent short tall story must be a satisfying experience,
and getting it published would be exhilarating – rejection is no
fun. But such opportunities for personal ego-boosting are
not the only available rewards. Cash is also
available. For example, there is The Sunday Times
annual Audible Short Story award, which is the world’s richest
prize for short fiction. The £30,000 prize is given to a
piece of under 6,000 words (a mere day’s work for McCall Smith)
written in English. Tasty! The downside, at least for
me, and I quote from the www.shortstoryaward.co.uk website, is
that ‘…the author MUST have previously have had works of prose
fiction, drama, or poetry published by an established publisher or
an established printed magazine in the UK or Ireland, or broadcast
by a national radio station in the UK or Ireland.’ By those
criteria, I am not yet a creative writer – bioethics is strictly
not fiction.
A short aside
I enjoy reading any challenging book that occasionally drives me
to the dictionary. Words are a joy. The Penguin
Book of the British Short Story certainly fulfilled its
promise by this measure. Here is a good example.
What do you think ‘fulsome’ means? ‘Generous and kind’, as
in ‘he gave a fulsome introduction’? You are wrong and are
probably confusing it with ‘wholesome’, or similar. What it
really means is quite the opposite, namely, ‘unpleasantly and
excessively suave or ingratiating in manner or speech.’ What
about ‘limpid’ and ‘noisome’, which do not mean ‘slow’ and ‘loud’
respectively, but rather ‘transparent’ and ‘evil-smelling’.
And there is febrile (feverish), insouciant (carefree), subfusc
(gloomy), and those twins, irenic (peaceful) and polemic
(controversial). And the book contained several examples not
even in my dictionary – chétif (sickly), skip-kennel (a lackey),
tawpie (a scamp) and haverel (a chatterer), equiponderate
(counterbalance) and clanjamphry (a mob). Incidentally, can
you spell 'caterwaul'? That is enough exposure of my
illiteracy. What a tricky language English can be.
Small wonder that most of us have an active vocabulary of only
about 20,000 somewhat dull and overused words.
A short conclusion
For me The Penguin Book was a splendid venture into the largely
unknown world of fiction. Moreover, it included refreshingly
little sarcasm, explicit sex, swearing or murder. And for
stories ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries,
there were the expected patches of evangelical Christian narrative
– a few sympathetic, others not so.
What I found most attractive was the range of writing styles and
topics. To zip through three short stories by three
different authors in an afternoon was a novel experience.
And the topics were entirely unpredictable. And instead of
the dogged logic of non-fictional writing, fiction can fly.
For instance, in
his Daughters of the Vicar, D H Lawrence springs
a surprise as one paragraph begins, ‘In six months’ time Miss Mary
had married Mr Massy.’ What? Why? How did that
happen? The imagination soars.
Perhaps my non-fictional liberation has already started because in
this current piece I notice that I have used parentheses, a device
previously reserved exclusively for mathematics. Am I
softening? Are my chains of pedantry slackening?
And finally, the big question. Have I now written my first
short story? Yes and no. ‘Yes’, I used to compose them
for Miss Wilson while at my primary school. And ‘No’, not
this decade. Yet. And anyway I have the second volume
of The Penguin Book of the British Short Story – From P G
Wodehouse to Zadie Smith sitting unread on my bookshelf.