Sarah Hall: One of Britain's best releases a short story collection

One of the country's most cherished and lauded authors, Sarah Hall has recently released her debut collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference. Seven stories of female strength and sexuality, the collection is a powerful piece of work. We sat down with Sarah to talk about short stories, the advent of the digital and her own work.

> Your stories in this collection span both the city and the countryside in equally vivid description; do you always write about places that you know intimately or do you deliberately research them?

I think any writer writes about places they know and places they don't. I've lived in a number of different locations, all very different, but even if I hadn't I'd still hope to be able to write about locations I was not familiar with. Part of the job of the literary imagination is to construct a setting that seems real, that the reader will travel into and be convinced by. The trick to that is not just being able to draw on known intimate details but to discover what it is about a place that, once transferred to the page, will successfully evoke that place. Gaps in knowledge can be filled in by research, yes. But there needs to be an additional quality in order to create terrain, weather, structures and atmosphere. Landscaping requires sensuality. None of us has been to Mars. This should not preclude writing about Mars. I might not be able to nail the exact climate and composition of the planet, but can I create a version of it that moves the reader and seems real? 

> Are any of the female characters drawn from real people in your life?

There are versions and segments and shades of people I know in all of my writing. There's no straight portraiture, and I suspect straight portraiture doesn't exist, even in biographical and autobiographical writing. Physical attributes, personality traits, accents, experiences, opinions, proclivities; all of this gets put into the mixer, with invented drama, and characters are created out of the mixture. As with landscape, characters need to be dimensional and convincing. The way to do this is to try to create an individual who has an original persona, as people in life are original. In which case you are not simply bottling someone you know and decanting him or her onto the page. You are after some kind of unique DNA, autonomy, history, even if a character remains to a degree mysterious, fleeting or unknowable.

> What did you make of 'Butcher's Perfume' being shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2010? Did it have any influence on your writing of the rest of the collection?

The rest of the collection was already written when the story was short-listed. I was very pleased, of course, particularly as I have been working for ten years predominantly with the novel form. Nice to feel I might have got it right. That story is the longest and in a way the loosest in the collection, one of the earliest written. It has novelistic tendencies perhaps. I think in a way it divides readers, depending on their liking for the demotic and also their upbringing/schooling. It has a northern roughness that either chimes or doesn't. So in a way it was surprising that there was agreement enough for it to make the shortlist. My work seems very 'particular' so I always think that!

> How do your order your stories in the collection? Do you think of the reader's experience in linking one narrative to the next, or do you write them as very individual pieces and leave your editor to fit them together?

Intuitively, I suppose, but also using length variation, complimentary themes and thematic development, so that stories already read may echo and offer ways of experiencing stories currently being read. I did consider the reader's experience. But I also know that there are readers like me who may not read a story collection chronologically. You choose to read pieces out of order because of the appeal of their titles and length sometimes. Structure is something most writers would take jurisdiction over, I imagine, rather than leaving it to an editor, though it was one of the questions I asked mine when I submitted - does this run of stories work?

> How intentional was the dual theme running through the collection of women and animals?

Very difficult to know how intentional anything is during writing and I try not to be overly self aware while working. There are all kinds of subterranean and subliminal processes and areas of interest working through that don't constitute conscious decisions. If you look at the trajectory of my novels to the story collection, women's experiences and totemic animals are always there. But yes, the link between the two in this collection is clear. I'm interested in ethology. I'm interested in primal responses and actions, especially in relation to or set against, the civilized, the urban.

> Could you have written these stories or released a collection at any other time of your career do you think?

Isn't it assumed that once you've published one novel you can publish a story collection if you are interested in publishing story collections? These stories were written, among others, over 5/6 years. They are the best of that batch. I think I've grown more interested in form and narrative over the years and short stories demand such, so it could be that I was better able to craft this difficult form after practicing. In a way poetry demands the same discipline. But the collection hasn't been deliberately timed. It was just the right time to collect up what I had and present it. 

> There is much debate on the health of the short story. In the digital age, how healthy do you think it is?

Every time I open the pages of a culture section of a paper there seems to be a review of a new story collection. They are out there, and not few. When I ask people at readings to put their hands up if they have bought a story collection within the last few months hands do go up. The argument seems to be about the attractiveness and saleability of the form. And also where the outlets for it are. Do bookshops like selling them and do they believe they sell? We hear they do not. They probably would if Dan Brown wrote a collection. The same way that Mark Haddon's poetry sold well (for poetry). It's about the popularity of the writer, not expertise within the form. There are a couple of very lucrative short story prizes for already published writers, which are doing their bit to bring attention and prestige back to the form. I suspect though that these competitions should be open to entries from unpublished writers and that submissions should be anonymous if they are truly going to fight the cause of excellence within the form as well as generate publicity. I'd like to see a bigger circulation of stories. There are probably ways of changing the cultural diet. There's no way radio should be cutting short stories - I'm on that campaign. But it's hard to prognosticate what the digital age will mean for any form of literature. Let's see in ten years. 

> Who do you think is a master of the short story form and why?

James Salter. He haunts, unsettles, surprises, and satisfies with the short form. He is exacting, brave and always interesting.

> What is the best book you've read this year?

Burning the Days by James Salter. 

> When can we expect a new novel and any clues as to what it'll be about?

Next year or the year after. No clues, I'm afraid.