The Long Art of the Short Story
“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter,” apologized Mark Twain, “so I wrote you a long one.”
Actually it’s not known whether he ever really said this. There is a lot of misinformation surrounding the great American writer. He was even mistakenly pronounced dead in 1897, leading to another famous quotation, “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
(The Questions That Drive a Novel vs. Short Story.)
But, whether Twain said it or not, there’s a lot of truth in the sentiment. It takes time to write satisfying short prose.
When I wrote my short story collection, The Man in Black, I was excited to create new characters but also to see existing characters in different times and places. As writer and essayist Lorrie Moore says, “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage.”
I feel as if I’ve been in a long marriage with Dr. Ruth Galloway, the protagonist of my 15-book mystery series. For the most part, it’s been a happy union. It’s been wonderful to get to know Ruth so well and to describe her home in North Norfolk. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t sometimes tempted to be unfaithful.
Short stories allow a bit of dalliance without the need for divorce. I could take Ruth to different places and see her life from different angles. In “The Valley of the Queens,” Ruth and Nelson go to Egypt. In “Ruth’s First Christmas Tree,” we see Ruth over the festive season, something that never happens in the books. In “Flint’s Fireside Tale,” I finally get to tell the story from the point of view of the cat.
Other characters appear at different stages in their lives. In “Max Mephisto and The Disappearing Act,” a young Max learns how to make a woman vanish on stage, only to have his landlady perform the same trick in real life. “Justice Jones and the Etherphone” tells us what happens to Justice, the schoolgirl heroine of my children’s books, when she grows up. “Harbinger” is the story of Harbinder Kaur’s first day at Shoreham CID. In “Ruth Galloway and the Ghost of Max Mephisto,” three of my series intersect on one London day.
The collection also includes a story based around fossilized human footprints. There’s a murder witnessed from a ski lift and an homage to Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. Writers have always used short stories to experiment, perhaps to try new ideas that can’t be sustained for a whole novel. “One Small Step,” by British crime writer Reginald Hill, is set in outer space. It’s a long way from the usual Yorkshire setting of the Dalziel and Pascoe books, where the location is as important as the characters. The format allows Hill to explore brave new worlds, to have a multinational cast and to present a solution that is as quirky as it is clever.
There’s only one PG Wodehouse story told from the point of view of Jeeves. In “Bertie Changes His Mind,” the normally inscrutable valet describes how he convinces his employer to change his mind about adopting a daughter. A lot of the fun is in observing Bertie Wooster from a different perspective: “Mr Wooster is a young gentleman with practically every desirable quality except one. I do not mean brains, for in an employer brains are not desirable. The quality to which I allude is hard to define, but perhaps I might call it the gift of dealing with the Unusual Situation.” Jeeves conspires to maroon Bertie at a girls’ school, where he is required to deliver a speech. Wodehouse apparently asked his stepdaughter, Leonora, for advice on creating a particularly awful school song. “It was an unusual performance, and I, personally, found it extremely exhilarating. It seemed to smite Mr. Wooster, however, like a blow.” Needless to say, Bertie decides not to abandon his child-free bachelor existence.
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So what makes a good short story? For a start, it’s important that the narrative voice is an arresting one. In “The Signal Man,” Charles Dickens’ famous ghost story, the first words are “Halloa! Below there!” The significance of this phrase is only revealed at the end but our attention is grasped from the outset. The narrator is also an ambiguous figure, which works well in a short story, where the author is not required to explain every nuance.
“The Signal Man” also employs the classic short story structure of events happening in threes. Think of “The Monkey’s Paw,” by WW Jacobs, where the mummified paw allows three wishes. Each action has more terrible consequences than the one before, and the ending has an awful logic that chills the blood.
A satisfying ending is, of course, vital. Many short stories incorporate a twist but this doesn’t need to be as terrifying as the last scene in “The Monkey’s Paw.” “The Gifts of the Magi,” by O. Henry, ends with a twist that is both ironic and heart-warming. A devoted couple wish to buy each other Christmas presents but, having very little money, they sell their most prized possessions only to find that their respective gifts are useful only when connected to those specific things. The story concludes with the narrator declaring that those who make sacrifices for the people they love are as wise as the Magi.
There’s a darker ending to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s brilliant short story “Three Miles Up.” Two men on a boating holiday encounter a woman called Sharon. They invite her on board and, from that moment, a light-hearted adventure moves, by almost imperceptible degrees, towards sheer horror. As with the best mysteries, some details only make sense in hindsight.
Reading a full-length novel requires stamina and patience. Sometimes that commitment pays off. Many complex narratives, like Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, provide great rewards. But, at other times, we remember little of the thousands of words we have read. Yet who can forget the creature knocking on the door in “The Monkey’s Paw?” The claustrophobia and isolation of the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, have remained with me for life.
You don’t always need to write an epic. Sometimes one unforgettable image is enough. The films The Shawshank Redemption and The Children of the Corn are both based on brief novellas by Stephen King. The best short stories stay in the mind for a very long time.
Check out Elly Griffiths’ The Man in Black here:
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