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Cutting it Short


The short form has hit the big time. Over the last month, two major literary prizes have been awarded to authors of short form fiction. Lydia Davis won the Man Booker International, for her body of short form work, and Maxine Beneba Clark won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for her collection of short stories. Personally, I have fallen in love with ‘flash fiction’ like Josephine Rowe’s gorgeous collection, Tarcutta Wake. Some of these stories are less than a page long.

This panel, Cutting it Short, explored the short stuff. Why do we read it, why do writers work with this form, will people buy it, will publishers take a punt on it?
Chi Vu, Miles Vertigan, Ryan O'Neill and Jennifer Mills
Cutting it Short, Emerging Writers' Festival, 2013

The panel addressed a packed room at the Town Hall last Saturday. The lighting was dim, but the chandeliers shone. Host Johannes Jakob, fiction editor at The Lifted Brow, started off by saying that literary magazines are receiving many short story submissions, yet short stories are hard to sell to readers. He asked us to consider: is it easier to sell a novella? It has the benefits of short story, being an opportunity for writers to find their feet, yet being a standalone product, publishers can sell it, both commercially and in a literary sense. 

Each of the panel spoke about what appeals to them about shorter forms of fiction.

Miles Vertigan started with a bang. 'I know bugger all about the publishing industry, but I know what I like. I like the short stuff.’ Miles thinks he is not alone in feeling the available space in our minds is shrinking. He reckons ‘If you wanna get stuff in there it better be small. A song. A tweet. Ultra micro blogs, and reality TV.’

He can read blurbs, tweets, Facebook posts, ‘but not a big old chunk of book.' 'The short stuff is just better,’ he says. What does a short story offer? Brevity, impact, intensity. 'There’s variety (and) the beauty of crisp, quick, short exposure.' Phew, his short, sharp address was kind of exhausting. 

Jennifer Mills is the fiction editor at Overland. ‘My idea of happiness is an afternoon with a novel.’ I got the immediate feeling that Jennifer felt much more at home with the big chunk of book than Miles did. She says she started writing short stories because she was trying to write novels. She thought of them as a training ground to hone skills. Then, she 'fell in love with the form.' 

However, as a writer, Jennifer still prefers the technical challenges of writing a novel. Being interested in structure, she finds that the novel offers more opportunities. Short story is much more about image for her, and is closer to a poetic practice. 

From a publishing point of view, she describes the single author short story collection as commercial suicide. Oh no! But it is through anthologies and journals that we get access to short stories, she says. Oh, yey! I think. (Writers should love their literary magazines. One word: subscribe.)

The short story, says Chi Vu, has ‘one central moment, one character. It is pure, intense, focused.’ Chi Vu wants to explore the gaps within stories. ‘There needs to be enough space around things so (the reader) can fill in the gaps with their own experience.’ As she said, it’s not about stuffing too much in, like ‘dots per inch’ (dpi), or ‘ideas per inch’ (ipi.) Her advice to writers: 'Honour the idea that wants to be born.'

Ryan O’Neill sees the short story as a great opportunity for experimentation. He has played with graphs, charts and pictures to make stories. These experiments might work, or not work, but Ryan says ‘they are not failures as the writer has learned something from each of them. The reader will follow short stories to strange places, and stay with them til the end.’

As an editor, Ryan has read a lot of submissions. He might see 200-300 submissions, and only 10-12 of those get published. The thing that makes the good stories stand out are that they are ‘carried by the strength of story and strong dialogue. You can tell they have been revised and revised, and that the author has read a lot.’

This is something I keep hearing at Emerging Writers’ Festival panels: read, read, read! and revise, revise, revise!

Ryan’s approach to short story was 'get in, do your stuff, then get out!' ‘Like a swot team!’ said Jennifer Mills.

Both Chi Vu and Jennifer Mills felt optimistic about the opportunities out there now for writers. 'It’s the best possible time right now to define your own form. It's open season' says Jennifer. 

So, get cracking. Time to turn the lights up and focus on some short stuff. Do it for practice, do it for fun, do it as an experiment. Just don’t try to put too much into it. Its intensity needs to shine. 
Town Hall roof and chandelier
© Anna Sublet 2013
Originally published for Emerging Writers' Festival, VU Blog Squad:

"The VU Blog Squad is an official team of reporters who cover the Emerging Writers’ Festival, every year, on our blog. They are writers and students from Victoria University. They also tweet at @VUBlogSquad."

http://www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au/2013/06/cutting-it-short/

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