On Monday 18 March 2024, in the third instalment of the MK Lit Fest series The Long and Short of It, acclaimed writer Emily Bullock was in conversation with OU Associate Lecturer and PhD student Sarah Bower discussing the novella, sometimes dubbed literature’s ‘awkward middle child’.
Emily BullockSarah Bower
The novella is for some a bit of a puzzle; too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel. For many mainstream publishers it is a headache to be avoided. For some readers the novella represents poor value for money, for others, it is the most perfect literary form. Although shorter than novel in terms of word count, a novella is not necessarily easier to write, and to write well requires the intense control and refinement perhaps more often associated with poetry.
Interviewing Emily Bullock about her forthcoming publication For Always Only and the form of the novella, Sarah Bower (herself the author of a novella) asked questions that got right to the heart of the matter.
For Always and Only is about the process of reading James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, or at least it is partly about that because a novella is no one-trick pony and is never only about just one thing. There is a degree of irony, noted Bower, in using Joyce’s sprawling and notoriously difficult work as the organising principle for a short, tightly controlled novella. To explain how this works, Bullock gave an account of her own process of reading Joyce, not entirely for meaning, but as a kind of readerly ‘beach combing’, and how she makes Finnegan’s Wake her own by frequently interrupting Joyce with her own lines of thought. Roland Barthes also remarked on this aspect of reading in The Rustle of Language:
Has it never happened, as you were reading a book, that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren’t interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven’t you ever happened to read while looking up from your book? (1986, p29).
In the light of these descriptive accounts of reading and reading while looking up, the connection with Joyce begins to make perfect sense as the backbone of writing that is very much ‘about’ reading.
The process of writing this novella was notable for the amount of cutting Bullock found she was willing to do, such as cutting out her character’s backstory, cutting flashbacks, stripping back description, and ending chapters abruptly. All this cutting, she explained, leaves the remaining gaps to do more work and leaves space for the reader who must invest in the reading process. The reader needs to be particularly alert to what is not on the page. Writers often talk about the balance between showing and telling, but in the case of the novella, according to Bullock, what the writer is not showing and not telling become highly significant.
Bullock’s forthcoming novella is set in a claustrophobic bedsit in Bloomsbury, a location that gives a wry nod to Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and which is also perfectly sized to provide a counterpoint to Joyce’s Dublin. And yet, the setting offers a similar intensity to Dublin but, of course, achieved in far fewer words. In the reading Bullock gave, her use of lists of items economically created a whole world whilst leaving scope within the tight frame of narrative to express bigger ideas.
In answer to Bower’s question about how a writer might know that the novella is the literary form that would best serve the story they want to tell, Bullock explained that whilst a short story is very often the synthesis of two ideas, and a novel gives ample room for complexities of character chronology, and worldbuilding, stories that are of an experimental nature, stories with strong ideas and those requiring considerable reader engagement might find their ideal form in the pithy perfection of the novella.
In a lively Q&A session Bullock fielded questions on For Always Only (to be published later this year by Reflex Press) and on the form of novella more generally. Enthusiastic audience involvement would suggest that despite the lacklustre support from mainstream publishers, there is an enduring appetite for the intriguing form of novella, and many of the questions and comments raised could have kept us all talking long into the night.
The series will conclude with the novel form on Monday 25 March.
Gwyneth Jones
Gwyneth Jones is a writer of short and flash fictions under the pen name Jupiter Jones, and her work has been widely anthologised. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Open University researching (dis)connectivity in the literary hybrid form of the novella-in-flash. Her supervisors are Dr Jane Yeh and Dr Emma Claire Sweeney.
On Monday 12 March 2024, we had the privilege to hear the writer RattawutLapcharoensap in conversation with OU Associate Lecturer Dr. Alistair Daniel. In this second instalment of the MK Lit Fest series The Long and Short of It, they explored the unique challenges and pleasures, and possibly also pains, of short story writing.
PhD student, Anne Wetherilt, offers here a summary of the event for those of you who couldn’t make it.
Alistair DanielRattawut Lapcharoensap
Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Alastair Daniel wrote earlier this month burst onto the literary scene in 2005 with his debut story collection, Sightseeing. It won the Asian American Literary Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award.
Short stories, Edgar Allan Poe famously wrote, need to be read in one setting. But this, Lapcharoensap argues, short-sells the short story. An avid reader of the form – he quotes James Joyce, Frank O’Connor, Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Katherine Anne Porter and Junot Diaz amongst others – Lapcharoensap is drawn to the short story because of its ability to capture the individual and the collective experience, and its intense awareness of human loneliness.
His short stories have a strong sense of place. ‘I want to write the truth about the communities I felt part of’, he tells us. Indeed, in Sightseeing, he gives us a richly detailed picture of Bangkok in the 1980s and 1990s. The stories are rooted in experiences he witnessed as a young person and carried with him as an adult. And whilst they touch on topical political issues, his main aim is always to tell the truth about his characters’ lives.
When Sightseeing came out, William Sutcliffe, writing in The Guardian praised its ‘novelistic richness’. Lapcharoensap aims to achieve this richness through his characters. Even though a short story gives the reader only a glimpse of the character’s life, you can present the whole person: where they came from; what they have done earlier in their life; how they have lived their life. You can write beautifully and with great emotional clarity, he asserts, a short story need not be short in terms of descriptive power.
In Sightseeing, these stories typically narrate the experiences of young boys or adolescent men. But they are brought to us by older first-person narrators, who calmly observe and report their own earlier encounters with life. This older first-person narrator, Lapcharoensap reflects, brings an interesting perspective to the story. They may have greater articulacy, but often continue to be bewildered.
Given the centrality of place and character in his stories, it is perhaps no surprise to learn that Lapcharoensap usually starts the writing process with a scene or a character. Asking ‘who is speaking’, he expands on a notion, a feeling, a telling detail or bird’s eye view. The story line may emerge later – although sometimes it doesn’t. This early composition is like playing in the dark, he explains, and proceeds without a plan. But planning comes in when he starts revising and here we get a glimpse of the personal discipline Lapcharoensap applies to his writing. Revision is about looking for opportunities to exercise the imagination, he believes. The creative act is not just the initial inspiration – the artist struck by the imagination in his study. Rather, such moments occur in the sequence of drafts, when ‘something beautiful emerges from the lumps of despair’.
For all their promise, short stories can be prone to clichés and pitfalls. Lapcharoensap is particularly wary of the emphasis on epiphany. The Joycean epiphany can be beautiful, he argues, but as a narrative habit it can also be limiting. Not every character needs to act, stumble and learn from their mistakes. Weak epiphanies or false epiphanies abound in short stories, and as a genre requirement, it can limit a young writer in their development and imagination. Another pitfall, he admits, is to create characters like yourself, which you don’t allow to fail or behave foolishly. Invariably, this reduces the richness of the story, and the fictional narration becomes wishful fulfilment.
Part of the joy of being a short story writer, Lapcharoensap notes, is in seeing them published as part of a collection. Each story is written on its own and should stand on its own feet. But they are enriched by their neighbours, as the writer organises them in a particular way to achieve formal and thematic dignity.
Sightseeing closes with ‘Cockfighter’, which at 90 pages is closer to a novella.This particular one did not end, Lapcharoensap explains. ‘It just wouldn’t stop and I continued to be interested in it’. As a reader, he loves the novella – it has the expansiveness of the novel yet requires the rigour and economy of the short story. To this reader of Sightseeing, Lapcharoensap moves effortlessly across the two forms, offering us ‘novelistic richness’, as well as sheer reading pleasure.
The series will delve into the novella form on Monday 18 March and conclude with the novel on Monday 25 March.
Anne Wetherilt
Anne Wetherilt is a part-time PhD student in the Department of English, funded by the Open Oxford Cambridge (OOC) Doctoral Training Partnership. Her thesis – ‘Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow: Politics, Economics and the Novel’ – studies the work of women writers, who witnessed the end of the British empire. Her supervisors are Prof. Alex Tickell and Prof. David Johnson.
Ed Hogan is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. His first novel, Blackmoor, won the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Other novels include The Hunger Trace, and Daylight Saving, which was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award. His next book, The Electric, is published by John Murray, in 2020. He is now writing short stories, has recently been longlisted for the Costa Short Story Prize and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story prize. Here he discusses his approach to writing short stories with Sally O’Reilly, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing.
Sally: How would you define a short story? And what are its limitations? I’ve read a number of contemporary short stories recently, and many of these cover long time periods, have multiple characters and are told from different points of view. What’s your take on this?
Ed: Last year, I made a commitment to read a short story every day. What struck me was the variety of the form. Yes, I read lots of oblique, Hemingway-ish stories. But, as you suggest, there were also many long stories with lots of narrative – the type Alice Munro specialises in. Some were like dramatic monologues, while others played with the conventions of sub-genres. I read epistolary stories, and stories that took the form of job inductions, or psychotherapy sessions.
Short stories allow you to travel very quickly in your reading. One particular week, I read stories by a writer from Korea (Kim Young-Ha), Argentina (Samanta Schweblin), Zimbabwe (Petina Gappah) and…Derbyshire (Hilary Mantel). In doing this, I realised that some of my earlier assumptions about the form were culture-bound.
I think short stories lend themselves to formal boldness, because they allow both readers and writers to walk the tightrope a bit more. A writer might try something unusual, because it won’t require 500 pages. And a reader might agree to suspend disbelief for 2000 words.
In terms of effects, I can think of many occasions when I’ve cried over short stories, and several times recently (James Salter’s ‘Last Night’, and Camille Bordas’ ‘The Presentation on Egypt’) when I have literally shouted out in shock.
I know you’ve turned to reading short stories recently, too. How did that come about?
Sally: I was partly inspired by your example! And also, because I am writing a novel, I feel freed up by reading short stories. I feel that the possibilities for writing at any length seem looser and more open after reading short stories. A lot of novels, my own included, include a certain amount of ‘business’, linking scenes, sections to establish character, sections which slow things down for a while. In short stories, there is so much precision and intensity.
Do you think there are fashions in the short story, in terms of what is published, and what competition judges are looking for? Writing is always a conversation/argument/response to other writing, but is this sense of engaging with other stories stronger when you are writing at this length? Is it inhibiting to be aware of the zeitgeist, or do you find it useful to immerse yourself in short fiction when you are writing stories?
Ed: Recently, I read three short stories by well-known British writers (Jon McGregor, Sarah Hall, Cynan Jones), and each one was about a person gradually realising that they’re stranded in a large body of water. I found that very striking. Island anxiety, perhaps.
I read short stories every day, but they’re not always contemporary ones (Daphne Du Maurier, yesterday). In my writing, I’m much more interested in the moment of composition than the moment of publication.
In terms of competitions, I’m drawn to the anonymity – the fact that you don’t send a CV with it. Although I know that the anonymity of competitions can be problematic.
I guess a lot of novelists, in June 2020, are probably looking at their contemporary novels, and thinking, ‘Ah. Right. I may have to make a few changes, here.’ That makes assumptions about novels being ‘news’ or even mimetic, but what about you? I know you’re writing historical fiction, but has the pandemic, or the protests, made you look again at your work in progress?
Sally: Yes! The novel I am working on is set in 1899 and the ‘present’, and this has now morphed from 2020 to 2019 due to coronavirus. There is bound to be a weird thing in contemporary fiction where what we thought of as normal life (with all its abnormalities) ended in 2019 and then there is a sort of cliff edge. Having said this, some of the themes I’m writing about relate to nature and science, and the pandemic makes this aspect seem even more urgent and relevant. The zeitgeist has changed, and that will permeate fiction.
Sally: Can you tell me more about your Sunday Times Audible longlisted short story ‘Single Sit’, and how you came to write it? Did it come easily, or did you spend a long time writing and refining it? How did it compare to the process of producing other short stories that you have written?
Ed: ‘Single Sit’ is about a conservatory salesman on a call with a potential customer. My dad sold windows and conservatories for many years, alongside his successful semi-professional football career, so I knew some of the language from that business. (Although Frank, my character, is very different from my dad). I’m interested in work vocabularies. Kick-ins and blowouts and single sits.
It arose from a bit of dialogue between Frank and Mrs Cortez, the customer. Once I hit on a relationship – any kind of relationship – I feel like I might have a story. So, I wrote the first two thirds in a few days. But then it went somewhere unexpected, and I couldn’t finish it for ages. I’m in a writing group, and they helped me a lot with the ending. The whole process, start to finish, with editing and putting it away…it took two years.
The longlisting was a fluke, but this is a story about a salesman, and the first principle of sales is that you play the numbers. Knock on every door, enter every competition. ‘Double your failure rate’, as they say.
Sally: You have published several novels, with your latest, The Electric, coming out this summer. Is it possible to compare the process of novel writing to short story writing?
Ed: A while ago, I was asked to recommend some books for a friend. The list I wrote contained about six short story collections, and the others – things like Hawthorn and Child, Legend of a Suicide, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; Union Street, The Vegetarian – weren’treally ‘conventional’ novels, but collections of linked stories. In those books, much meaning came from the overlap of the stories, the repetition of themes, ‘the singular obsessions endlessly revised’ to steal a phrase from Thomas Lux. I thought I should investigate what those reading tendencies might mean for my writing practice. I’m still new to the short story as a writer, though, and most of the stories I write are terrible, but it’s a process.
There are practical considerations, too. I reckon there’s a moment in writing – and I’m certain this goes for writing in all research disciplines – where you become absolutely absorbed, completely compelled. It’s a physical thing. Currently, given busy personal and professional circumstances for which I am very grateful, the short story is the form which allows me to complete a draft of something while I am still in touch with that initial impulse. To finish before I forget why I started. Of course, then you have to spend two years revising it!
Sally: Do you like writing shorter pieces? Do you find them ‘easier’ in any way, or just different from novel writing? Do you envisage a short story in its entirety, or do you ever write not knowing the outcome, as novelists often do? And, final query in a multifaceted question, can you write short stories while you are working on a novel, or does the one exclude the other?
Ed: I definitely don’t find short stories easier. Writers often balk at the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ but that’s where I struggle. George Saunders says that when he finishes a story, he’s convinced he’ll never have another idea again. I feel like that, too. Unfortunately for me, that’s where my similarities with George Saunders end.
One thing about producing several stories over a year or so is that you see your unconscious preoccupations delineated quite sharply. Much of my recent short fiction has taken place in or around cars, despite the fact that I don’t really like them. When you see those connections, you can decide whether to resist or explore them.
The editing process is very different with a short story, isn’t it? For a start, you can re-read your story in one sitting. I remember watching Sympathy for the Devil, the film which shows the Rolling Stones in the studio, developing the song of the title. I was so jealous. With a pop song, you try it one way, and three minutes later, you can – if you’re Mick Jagger – say, “Oh, not like that, Charlie, you mug!” and try it another way. It takes me three weeks to read my own novel.
