A writers view Hadley

Tessa Hadley

At the end of each story we're thrown out again, out of the containing sea of illusion, into the dry air of our own awareness outside the book.

A Writer's View

It's sometimes difficult to express what's wonderful about short stories without seeming to be negative about the novel form, but of course both are wonderful, miraculous.

Famously, publishers have a problem persuading readers to buy short stories. Many readers love them, but more readers avoid them, preferring to buy novels. I think this is because in our culture, if we're fiction readers at all, we're all so used to the novel habit that it seems like the very shape of our imagination, like the way our own lives unfold to us inside our heads. It seems like second nature. We love how the novel habit sustains our relationship with one book: we can pick a novel up and put it down, morning after morning, night after night, and it opens to contain us again, we re-enter its world intimately known to us, as if it was our own world.

There's something more discontinuous about our reading relationship with short stories: (not more strenuous, though, because reading good novels can be just as strenuous, demanding). At the end of each story we're thrown out again, out of the containing sea of illusion, into the dry air of our own awareness outside the book. We have to pick ourselves up and shake ourselves off and ready ourselves for another plunge, into a new story, a new place.

Some readers learn to love that discontinuity, how it makes the familiar become strange and then the strange become familiar, over and over. The best short story writers seem to share a sideways perspective on things: they favour irony, oddity, the coolness of surprise. The discerning reader finds completeness in these story-pieces broken out of their whole context, different to the complex broad cloth of a good novel.

(September 2007)

Tessa Hadley