Like everyone else, I first heard of short stories as a child. But it was the spoken word of this form that appealed to me before the written word could. There’s a unique charm to short fiction, a quick allure, because there is no time to waste. Not a second more or less — the words were always in a hurry to attract, and they succeeded. I was fascinated that authors knew exactly how many words to put in — just the right number.
And the world these stories conjured up was not small either. They gave flight to my imagination as novels would later. The characters were well-rounded too. I learnt about them as the author described them, and from what they said to each other. I also learnt about where they were, from what they touched. The short story, I realised, takes a hands-on approach to storytelling, but one that does not compromise on the world it creates.
As I grew up, I read about how little economic sense there is for an author to publish short fiction, a problem faced by short films too. But market compulsions did not succeed in changing my mind about them.
“I grew up loving and respecting short stories,” says Neil Gaiman in the first chapter of Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances . “They seemed to me to be the perfect and the purest things people could make: not a word wasted, in the best of them.”
In the same chapter, Gaiman concedes that there is little wisdom in terms of the economics of publishing short fictions, and counts himself lucky that he has managed to publish many books in this form.
But what struck me most about Gaiman was that he went on to write something that I had never read before: he spelt out how each story was born in his collection — where he was when the idea struck him, in whose house, what went through his mind. “Some days the words won’t come. On those days, I normally try to revise something that already exists. On that day, I made a chair,” he says in his introduction to the first story in the collection, ‘Making A Chair’. Suddenly, the world of the short story just got bigger and more beautiful because here I was reading not just the story but the story behind the story too.
Gaiman also says he is more interested in stories when authors talk of how they were born. Employing this tactic, he introduces and then absorbs one into 20-odd stories, some poems, even a questionnaire.
Another luxury that short fictions can afford, that Gaiman highlights in his collection, is the freedom to experiment, to flit from one genre to another within the collection.
But despite this, here we are, still talking about whether it makes sense to publish short stories.
archana.n@thehindu.co.in
