Stuart Evers: Smoking Hot Writer

Stuart Evers is a self-confessed book-obsessive. Hearing him talk passionately about everything from crime to short stories to football memoirs, you get a sense of how well read this man is, and not in a smug highbrow way - his tastes are varied. He has been a bookseller, editor, critic and now he is a writer.

A regular reader of stories on the live literature scene, Stuart has carved out an impressive reputation as a writer of short stories that are wry, sad and full of people trying their hardest to achieve small things, clouded by self-delusion.

He has recently released a book of short stories entitled Ten Stories About Smoking, and much as the act of lighting up represents pivotal moments in these characters' lives, it is about everything else that goes unsaid and unheard around them. A beautifully-packaged book it is too, a riposte to the invasion of digital.

Here, Stuart talks about everything from OULIPO to P J Harvey to Raymond Carver's strengths and everything in between.

> So, Stuart Evers, what is currently smoking hot and what is but a cold ember in your world right now?

I am really loving the new P J Harvey album right now, which is amazing. I think she is a true genius and one of the only artists who grows every time you hear something new from her and this album is perhaps a masterpiece, even though it is ostensibly a war record, though not as portentous as that might sound.

As for a cold ember: there’s nothing particularly that’s riling me at the moment apart from…oh yes, I haven’t seen The Killing yet and I’d like to.

> Should the packaging for your book Ten Stories About Smoking carry a health warning, because it certainly made me want to light one up!?

A lot of people have said that. They feel it’s got that illicit feeling, unwrapping it, flipping open the box, taking the cigarette-covered book out. I like that. It’s a nice way of replicating that feeling without giving someone cancer.

> In an era of digital publishing, how does it feel to have such a beautifully packaged book, one that constitutes an object as well as being a book?

I see all books like that. I never really had, once vinyl stopped being prevalent, that same feeling about CDs or cassettes. I’ve always had that about books. There’s a holistic grandeur about books. The whole way they smell, they look, the way it feels picking up one book you’ve read several times and finding old hairs or sun-tan lotion-stained pages or KFC grease from a late night. That’s what books are about for me. I don’t see myself being able to replicate that experience by looking at a digital screen. I think there are a lot of advantages in that but the splendour of holding a book and looking at your shelves, taking down a beautifully-designed book and opening it – you can’t replicate that. That’s beyond digital comprehension.

> Every year there’s a new article about short stories being BACK, as it were, and yet there are so few short story collections being put out by British authors, certainly debut ones. Why did you choose the short story to announce your arrival?

It initially happened by accident. I was working on a novel and I got horribly stuck on it. I was so frustrated, I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I went to Book Club Boutique one night and saw all these people performing and writing and enjoying being part of a loose culture of wanting to be creative but not expecting to be paid out of it. I remember asking Salena [Godden] if I could read a story and saw everyone with their pamphlets and books and thought I wanted to do something like that. I went home that night and came up with the idea of a collection of stories with a theme. I needed a discipline. I liked the idea of imposing strictures on yourself like George Perec, one of the OULIPO writers. They gave themselves ridiculous or harsh strictures – famously Perec wrote a novel without the letter ‘e’. He wrote a novel called Life: A User’s Manual where the characters’ motions follow that of a chess piece. I found that interesting and wanted to do something similar. From then on, the stories followed easily and slotted in to a recognised structure I could use. The short story was perfect for what I wanted because it was finished. There was a start, middle and end and it finished.

> What do you love about that particular art and who stands out as a master in ‘finished’ short stories?

What I like is that there’s a curious freedom to a short story that a novel can’t have. The novel can do all kinds of things but the idea of the short story developed in the nineteenth century with the advent of magazines that needed content to fill them, so you had Poe and Dickens and the definitions of what a story meant changed, giving them different strictures, yet they still were recognisably a short story. So, the ability to do absolutely anything with a short story is what appeals to me. It’s also the ability to glimpse small parts of people’s lives, ordinary people’s lives. Novels tend to centre on the bigger characters, characters can take you through 300 pages. Short stories can contain a character and a situation that is appealing and can reveal something. My favourite short story writers, Raymond Carver, Richard Yates, Grace Paley – do this magnificently. They tell stories in a way you wouldn’t think about. One of my favourite stories, ‘Fat’ by Raymond Carver, starts with a woman describing to another woman a fat man who came into her restaurant. By the end, though, it’s not about any of those things. The more I read that story I think Carver’s doing incredible things under the surface. That’s an amazing talent to have and it’s only applicable in a short story context. Then you have Lydia Davis, who can have a three line short story and it has all the resonance of a 400 page novel. It’s that freedom of form and knowing you can stop whenever you like.

> What is satisfying about your collection is you work very carefully to go through a beginning, middle and end, yet most of the stories leave you with a sense of unfinished business, a tension between what has and hasn’t been said. Is that something you set out to do?

Absolutely. I’m not very artful in that sense. I wrote the stories as they came. In terms of construction of story, I’m always aware that these characters should feel like they’re living elsewhere. That there are other stories attendant with them. Carver does that brilliantly in ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ in which these guys go fishing and discover a dead body. In anyone else’s hand, the discovery of the dead body leads to tensions within the group, whodunits… What Carver does is he has the central character go home after three days of fishing, to talk to his wife. And suddenly the story is about him and his wife and how he let this dead woman stay because he wanted to fish with his friends. What I love about those types of stories is you have characters who drift in and out, and they should feel like they exist, they have their own stories, but you don’t have to explain them, you don’t have to go over and iterate them. They’re just walk-on parts in the story you ARE telling. One of my stories is ‘The Best Place in Town’ which is about a doomed stag do. There’s a part where the story bifurcates. On the one strand, you have all the guys going off to a Vegas whorehouse, while another goes off on his one. If I’d told their story, it would have been very different. I was more interested in that other guy. When they converge at the end, you get the sense that there’s a whole other story that hasn’t been told. But I haven’t told you that story. It’s not the road I need to take…

> A successful short story should, I think, make you think life will carry on after it’s finished. Whereas a novel will give you an arc where the story told is almost the life and death of a character…

One of the first people who read the collection, I sent her a copy and she emailed me, saying ‘What happens at the end of “Things Seem So Far Away here”?’ I said that’s what happens. She said she wanted to know what happens next, that the character was going to be okay and the point is, I know where that story ends, but wasn’t interested in telling the next part. It’s down to what anyone makes of the next part. The ‘Eclipse’ story is a good example of that. You get caught in this moment with a woman convinced her husband is having an affair when in fact there’s no evidence of it. It’s interesting that some of the reviews I’ve had have definitely said yes he’s definitely having an affair or he’s definitely not. I love that tension of not spelling everything out and giving people the life that people actually have.

> Having worked on novel-length material as well, how different have you found that to working on a short story?

The thing with this collection is they’ve started from something and they’ve snowballed and snowballed. By the end of it, I can’t remember what started the process. A novel’s very different in that respect. There is still that element of foraging around and finding out where you’re going in the novel. But you have to have that over-arching structure, an idea of where it’s going and even if you don’t know all the intricacies, the ins and outs of it, and it surprises you when you go through, you still need to know where it’s going to start and where it’s going to end and vaguely what happens in the middle. With a short story, you can get to a point and think that it ends there. There are stories where I’ve cut the last 1000 words and pared it back. It’s got freedom but not that longevity that a novel has. It’s that marathon you have to go through, that endurance. A lot of it’s about belief. If you spend two weeks writing a short story and you hate it, that’s fine. You spend five years writing a novel and it’s rubbish, that’s five years you’re not getting back.

> Themes in the book encompass a lot of sadness, a lot of the distances and divides between people, but talking to you, you’re nothing if not compassionate and seemingly happy. Where does this come from within Stuart Evers?

I’ve always been attracted to sad stories, even as a kid. That attraction to sadness and loneliness… I’m not a lonely person per se, but I do have those moments where I’m happiest in my own company. I spend a lot of time wondering what would happen if I wasn’t happy in a particular situation. I’m attracted to those people who don’t have their dreams come true. There’s an introduction to a collection of Richard Yates’ short stories that Richard Russo wrote, which gets the crux of what Yates was about: his characters have small dreams that don’t come true. Which is tragic. In a white western world, having a child or having good friends or earning enough money to not worry about things, fitting in – a lot of that stems from my own sense of not belonging, not fitting in with any one group. That comes out in the stories. That feeling of never quite belonging to one thing. And if I did belong, would I want to belong… you know, that old Groucho Marx quote… I’m not a depressive person, but I have depressive tendencies… like most people.

> Having been an editor and critic, and now you finally have your first book out, what changes in the landscape of publishing have you seen in all your years?

One of the changes – In 2000, when I was a bookseller, an American customer had told me about Google and it sounded exciting. Three months later, I went to Macmillan. Amazon had only just launched in the UK. There was no broadband. People emailed each other but that was about it. 11 years later, things have changed so much, especially in the way, people interact with books. Particularly, content media has changed. I’m as guilty as anyone. If I’m alone for two minutes, I’m on my phone looking at web pages or Twitter or the Guardian. Suddenly, you’ve got all these massive things that are changed. Publishing, notoriously, is slow, especially given the time cycles it takes for books to come out. At this moment in time, they’re not embracing the opportunities that digital are giving them. The processes have changed too. Sales people have always been important, but now they’re even more important. It scares me to say so, but necessarily so, because publishing needs to make money. Publishers aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their heart – yes, they do want to publish great works and writers but there’s no point in them doing it, if it’s not going to make them enough money to stay afloat. That’s the biggest change since I joined – the dominance of the editors has been taken over by the end product. What goes into the shops, what goes on Amazon, on to Kindle or iPad.

> Do you think that means more masterpieces will be overlooked as they just won’t sell, despite their literary worthiness?

I think it’s very difficult to quantify. In my years as an editor, I think I read one book that didn’t get published that I thought the world would have been a better place if it’d been published. For the most part, books do find a publisher eventually. It may just take a long time. There’s more publishers now. There’s more opportunities to get the work out there. There are publishers willing to take risks and not just pump out the same old rubbish. The problem is, though, those books will be reviewed nicely, but they’ll sit in the bookshop and because they’re different and can’t be compared to Twilight or whatever, they won’t sell. So a salesperson will go to an editor and say, ‘You have asked to publish these five books – we all know they’re amazing but not one of them has won us the Booker, they cost us £20,000 all in with printing and they sold 400 copies. You can’t buy a quiet novel about farming in Wyoming!’

> Part of the problem is, unlike films or music it seems, there isn’t a mathematical algorithm to recommend literary fiction based on what you’ve liked previously…

No, absolutely. You can tell you’re likely to like something but there’s no guarantee you will. Also, we often get confused, especially in the digital environment about the ‘iPod moment for books.’ Except music is incredibly different. I can listen to one song by an artist and think, I love that, that is fantastic. I’ll get everything they’ve ever done. You can’t do that with books, not even with short stories! You can’t just say, I like that one story so I’ll get the collected works of Eudora Welty and think, wow these are nothing like the one story I read! There are lots of opportunities out there and I’m positive about the future and there’s a lot of incredibly good writers out there. Most of them are getting published. When I first went to Book Club Boutique, a lot of those writers hadn’t been published, except maybe occasionally on small presses, but no one was down on the industry because it was about doing something. One of the problems, especially with the internet, is there’s lots of avenues and forums for you to spend all your time writing about how awful the industry is rather than writing something people might be able to sell. I do feel for some writers who do write uncommercially but as I say, if they are genuinely that great, I imagine someone somewhere will publish them, however small.