How to read short stories

With a bit of why and where thrown in

Chances are if you read short stories as a kid you didn’t think of them as short stories. They were ghost stories. And I’m not being glib: for the longest time anthologies were the last haven for short stories, and genre ones at that.

The stories from that time which stuck out for me did so because of their high concepts, scary or mind-blowing in a way just as easy to convey verbally as they were read; I didn’t recommend them to others so much as recap their concepts in miniature. There was Stephen King’s ‘The Jaunt’ in which a boy is trapped with no senses and only his thoughts for a second less than infinity; or Stephen Baxter’s ‘Touching Centauri’, about a leap in technology that lets humans bounce a laser off our nearest star only to expose the universe as a sham when it crashes from lacking the power to keep up with such a huge expansion in required faked reality. Short stories were a delivery device for such concepts and their attendant thrills and chills; and at most, at school, they were photocopied sheets headed with unpleasantly old-fashioned names - Saki, Maupassant - for us to bluff our way through.

Till Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Before its famous snowy ending, its point-of-view character Gabriel misreads his wife’s tenderness of an evening as the romantic and not pained kind. As his passion peaks, and wavers from her not backing it up, he finds out she’s still in love with someone else, her youthful, long-dead sweetheart. Now, since a little while before reading the story in class I’d kissed a girl at a sleepover and been left giddy and hopeful for days after, only to have it passed on to me that the kiss had been a pity-snog, grimly received, Gabriel’s own wrong-end-of-the-stick hummed in me like rung metal. Before I even knew the word epiphany I’d had one, and a short story had captured it: how wrong you could misread things.

That wasn’t the only transitional experience ‘The Dead’ marked. For I don’t mean to fetishise the emotional resonance of stories like it. (If anything, the above goes to show that seeking validation from art is an adolescent self-indulgence.) The pang, the knowing wince did have me dwell over the story, but while there I started poking at it. I’d read short stories and novels before, maybe even good ones, and been engrossed by them too; but only now did I stop to learn what a story was made of, how it worked, why it’d worked on me so well.

Later, trying out my ‘new’ hand-me-down bedroom, I found in a purloined school copy of Chekhov his ‘Ward No. 6’, my first story by him of the dozens I’d go on to read. It was in the top-floor café at Foyles (old version) where I read in one sitting ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’, which story disproved Martin Amis’s claim that no one but Tolstoy could make happiness swing on the page; here was Nabokov, so often accused of rarefied pleasures, not only making it swing (before it’s crushed by malevolent curiosity) but making it synonymous with aesthetic finish. Having been nonplussed in 6th form by ‘The Aleph’ I reattempted Borges with his story ‘The Immortal’ one sunny morning on the top bunk after a house party, and I’ve basked in his sun ever since. My first David Foster Wallace story I didn’t read but listened to, on headphones during one of my first jobs, pretending it was music while I pretended to work (‘Forever Overhead’—a favourite of Zadie Smith, juvenilia to Patricia Lockwood.) It’s telling that with all of these I can remember where I was, how old I was, when I first read them.

Maybe what makes them so memorable is that a short story can not only be read in one go but grasped as a whole in your mind: at its end, you remember how it started; throughout you keep on track with its rhythms and patterns. This is all a function of the short in short stories, and so pointing out their size isn’t truistic. Neither, though, am I selling you on their convenience—all that perennial blah about how our uniquely shortened attention spans can brave them much better than big ol’ novels. Nor is memorability an artistic quality. Whenever somebody in criticising an artwork says, “I can’t remember much of it,” they’re likely telling you more about their forgetfulness than a forgettable artwork.

That you can grasp a short story as a whole, keep track of its parts, that its size lends itself better to re-reading and so truly appreciating it, in fact is what makes the short story so well suited - maybe the ideal vehicle - for the art in literary art.

Imagine a million-page novel; in principle it could be a work of intricate, architectonic genius. But not even its author could assay it properly because you just can’t hold that much design in a mind at once. A millennium-long album might well be the greatest of all ages including the one coterminous with it - but it’d be unhearably great. Because how can an artwork be good if what ostensibly makes it so is indiscernible? Values need to be evaluable by others.

To emphasise what indiscernible means: a painting in UV or a piece of subsonic music doesn’t count; they’re hidden but it’s still possible for people other than the artist to figure out how to discern them. No, the indiscernible is what goes beyond our capacity. That can be a matter of scale, or a matter of privacy: a friend of mine once saw an art exhibition of hay bales; the caption revealed the bales symbolised resource extraction from the Americas. Without that tip-off, there’d be no way but luck to reveal the artist’s design. If there’s no such thing as a private language then there’s no such thing as only privately artful art.

Short stories aren’t better literary art for being short. Their form is just what best suits them - or at least as well as poems - for discerning and evaluating what makes a literary artwork good. ‘Zagrowsky tells’ by Grace Paley might seem like a classic, well-crafted fiction-as-empathy story; but reading it you realise it’s also a story about how those kind of stories work on us. Short stories are also where experimental writing is most appreciable and least wearisome. Take Jen George’s ‘Guidance / The Party’, hilarious and/because so inventive; or John Barth’s ‘Click’, one of the earliest post-internet stories and still the best, as well as an ambassador for the value, and fun, of postmodernism. Tone works better with short stories too. Wallace Shawn’s potent socialist pedagogy in ‘The Fever’ would’ve hectored if longer than it is. While the jokiness of Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to become a writer’ wouldn’t be funny any more; instead it’s—well, I won’t say funny because nothing fastens lips more than telling people you literally lolled at a story, and I don’t mean side-to-side. Even the relationship between short stories offers their more intrepid authors rich veins. Without giving it away, there’s a trick Alasdair Gray used in his collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly (and which Gray-fan Will Self nicked for his collection Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys) that could only be done with a short story collection. (For what it is, see→¹)

Often the case made in preference of novels cites qualities that aren’t strictly speaking aesthetic ones—that you can get more involved with the characters in a novel, that a novel prolongs your desire to know what happens next, that novels bring more news. These are in fact emotional appeals. There’s little a great novel can do well artistically that a short story can’t.

If that’s the case, does that explain the vogue for short stories? News articles like this and this would have you believe in the return maybe not of their golden but at least silver age. Making a career out of writing short stories for magazines might never again be feasible, but there’s big money to be made yet from advances and prizes. And having a story collection out is as respectable nowadays as releasing a novel, where once it’d been a publisher no-no or at best a sophomore sampler or more one for the die-hard fans.

But are these collections actually well read? A couple of years ago The Onion went with the headline:²

And are they read well? In the case of the second question, try resist the urge to blast through them; read the stories slowly, and, at some point, more than once. And as for the first question, what can you do but sift for the best?³

Since art is in the details, in their arrangement, structure, style - the only means, incidentally, through which fiction can be narratively engrossing or emotionally moving or intellectually-expansive - and since, as we’ve seen, the short story is far from a junior art, then it’s the form where a writer proves themselves. Not in the sense of training wheels for an up-and-coming writer which they shed as they move on to the real deal, AKA novels. Short stories are what show you the most whether a writer is just a hot-topic-reheater, an axe-grinder, a garrulous naif. Because there’s less place to hide. They’re where you really see whether a writer is an artist.

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1. The trick is to feature a seemingly whole story then later down the collection surprise the reader with its second part. Not just for the sake of splitting up a very long story for fear of the testing the reader’s patience. It has a positive value as well: one of suspense - wait, why are we not done with this story? - and of delayed counterpoint: i.e. maybe we need to have read the intervening stories to properly appreciate the second part.

2. Although seeing as they dunked on

Matt Bell

for the gag, which I’m now re-disseminating, this would be a good time to plug his book Refuse to Be Done, the most rigorously useful book about revising prose fiction I’ve read, and also A Tree or a Person or a Wall, which I can assure you was read and rated by many more than its blurbers.

3. Granted a lot of short stories aren’t much more than ‘I was a child, I had some feelings’ or ‘Let me tell you about a sucky date-night’ (though admittedly the latter could work as a subtitle for Joyce’s ‘The Dead’); but they also can give you this and this.