Kevin Wignall, our very first contributor from the Other Side of the Pond, is the author of three highly acclaimed novels and a half dozen exceptional short stories for Ellery Queen and a handful of anthologies. You can read his first story for EQMM, “The Window”, here. You can read a review of his story, “Hal Checks Out”, by our own Robe Lopresti in the De Novo Review section accessible from the right sidebar. His next novel, Who Is Conrad Hirst? will be released on November 13, 2007, by Simon & Schuster.

Angela Zeman is on a temporary leave of absence.

SHORT CHANGED

by Kevin Wignall

It’s a typical irony of the age we live in — we’re all time-poor but books are getting fatter and the short story is in decline. You’d have thought people might jump at the chance to enjoy a perfectly formed story in under half an hour, but collections and anthologies sell poorly and the magazine market (with a few excellent exceptions, notably the Dell Magazines) is dwindling.

There are plenty of arguments for why people are less inclined to read short stories but I wonder if the bottom line is that not enough top writers value it as a medium anymore. I was recently talking to a fellow author about a short I was writing. She loved the sound of it but said she wouldn’t be able to waste such a great idea on a short story — she’d have to open it out into a novel.

This is a common attitude among writers — they don’t value short stories themselves and so they approach them as an assignment or a PR opportunity. I’ve been included in anthologies to which writers I admire have contributed stories which show all the signs of someone going through the motions. It’s hardly surprising then, that readers have come to associate short stories as providing less value for money, as being akin to the deleted scenes that appear on the DVD but never made it into the final picture.

This is a shame because the short story, at its best, is the pinnacle of the prose art form. I think it was Mark Twain who famously joked that a short story took longer to write than a novel, and he had a point. Far from being a sketch, the best short stories contain a novel’s worth of depth and character but distilled down to its very essence. They can subvert our view of the world, they can eschew plot twists and move us with the brute force of the inevitable or they can take flight and leave us where we least expected to be thirty pages earlier.

“The Dead” by James Joyce does the latter. It’s a perfectly enjoyable domestic rumination on death and loss, elevated to another level by the sudden remembrance of a woman’s long-dead childhood sweetheart, and then rendered magical as Gabriel’s imagination soars across a snow-covered nocturnal Ireland to the grave of Michael Furey. Or take “The Open Boat” by
Stephen Crane, one of the finest pieces of prose in the English language. Crane never allows us to escape, he has us down there with the men in the boat, in amongst the waves, and delivers the simple random tragedy of the conclusion with understated power and beauty.

These are writers who have never forgotten the vital fact of the short story — that it’s a STORY. It’s something I tell aspiring writers — never forget you’re telling a story — and it applies more so when you’re writing a short. You have to imagine yourself around that campfire, telling a ghost story like you did when you were kids, knowing that you can’t let the spell be broken, knowing that you have to transport your audience and make them believe all of this is true.

If you think about it, some of those ghost stories you heard as a kid stay with you longer than the books you read back then. And that’s what I try to do with my short stories — I try to create a world inhabited by characters who hold on in the imagination of the reader, I want to take thirty minutes of someone’s time and change their view of the world. How any writer could consider that a waste of an idea is beyond me.