A Writers View Wigfall

Clare Wigfall on the short story

I have known that junkie craving one can feel as you work your way through a brilliant collection, aching for the next fifteen minute/half hour slot of time when you can sit down and read a story through in one sitting

A Writer's View

I fell in to writing short stories by accident. I was only twenty-one when Faber asked me to write them a book. It was a totally unexpected request, made on the strength of three stories they had chanced to read, not one of them more than seven pages long. I was still an undergraduate, and certainly didn't feel I'd lived enough or knew enough to be able to write a book anyone would want to read. No matter, my new editor consoled; this book they wanted of me, it could take any form, be on any subject, and I should take as long as I needed to write it.

The decision to create a collection of short stories wasn't a premeditated one. With a request as open-ended as Faber's was, I wrote stories simply because they seemed less daunting than a novel; because I still felt like an apprentice writer who needed to experiment with style; because I'd written a few and people seemed to like them; and also because I am fickle and indecisive.

For instance, some days I wake up and I want to go to a small Outer Hebridean island. On others I feel like heading to the whirlwind that is contemporary New York City. On yet another I think Paris of the Franco-Prussian war era could be interesting. So it goes. While I wrote my book I would often have three or four stories on the go at once, so that I could hop back and forth between them as the fancy took me.

For me, writing has always been a means of escape, a mode of transporting myself to other worlds and times. It's a way to satisfy my wanderlust - I've written about many places I've never seen in real life. It's the way I make sense of the world and do my best to understand things - many things, requiring many different characters and stories. To put it succinctly, short stories suited me. By the end of my twenties, my editor and I together decided that the book was finally complete.

And that was when I first began to wonder if perhaps I'd made a mistake. As more and more people started to warn me that short story collections struggle to gain attention, that reviewers often overlook them, that competitions are rarely open to them, that booksellers aren't sure how to market them, that festivals don't invite their authors, that international publishers are hesitant to translate them, and that they achieve low sales because the general book-buying public just isn't interested to read them…well, I couldn't help asking myself the question: should I have written a novel?

I've pondered over this question, and in the end have decided the answer is no. Regardless of the harsh realities facing the short story writer, I think I made the right choice, unwitting as it may have been. As the work that will launch my career, this collection, with its seventeen stories flitting between time and place, works to demonstrate the range of my writing skills, the breadth of my imagination, and for this reason I believe it marks a stronger debut than a novel might have done.

As an apprenticeship, it's certainly served me well. I have learnt so much about the craft of writing over the course of finishing the book. If I had chosen not to write these stories simply because I knew they wouldn't achieve sales or recognition, I wouldn't have been true to myself.

I love short stories. I love to read them. I love to write them. I have known that junkie craving one can feel as you work your way through a brilliant collection, aching for the next fifteen minute/half hour slot of time when you can sit down and read a story through in one sitting, hitting the high with its conclusion and feeling the effects long after you've left the story behind.

I do honestly believe that short stories, in their small, compact way, make the world a more beautiful place. Imagine a world without the perfectly-crafted gems of Truman Capote, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Claire Keegan, or J D Salinger, for example. Short stories might be an endangered species, but I've been extremely fortunate to find a publisher with enough faith to publish mine, and I'm proud to have done my bit towards their survival in adding one more collection to the shelves.

And what will I write next? Now that I'm older and wiser and more experienced? I can't yet answer with any certainty. I still have ideas for stories every day or so, but I also have grander ideas that might work better in a novel. And there's the first draft of a novella sitting in my cupboard waiting to be reworked - I swear I'm not being wilful in choosing the industry's most unmarketable literary forms, in truth it was just a short story that grew too long.

I suppose I shall take the advice of my editor at Faber, a man for whom I've always had enormous respect, who isn't, as one might imagine, of the opinion that having indulged me with a book of stories a novel is now due. On the contrary. 'Don't feel pressure now to write a novel,' he surprised me by saying recently, as we sat in the sun outside a pub on Queen Square, 'write what needs to be written.'

I've already done one book that way, writing the stories that I felt I needed to write, and regardless of how much attention it may or may not receive, I am proud of it. I always maintained that my writing was never autobiographical, but now that I hold the collection in my hands I see that it's the book of my twenties. As I look over the titles in the contents list, I can remember where I was living as I wrote each story, the music I was listening to, the books I was reading, the friends I was hanging out with, the thoughts that were preoccupying me. Would my memories be as specific if those were chapter titles?

All I hope now, as I send my book off alone into the world, is that the world will be kind to it, that they won't judge or reject it without giving it a fair chance, and that maybe they'll come to love it as I do.

Clare Wigfall

(July 2007)