short stories - essentially unsatisfying or little gems of a writer's craft?

I’ve been thinking about short stories. What set me off was that Elspeth has been practicing her creative writing because she has exams. They have a paper with 20 topics on it and an hour and a quarter to do it. That really means you only get about 50 minutes of actual writing, by the time you’ve read through the paper to choose a topic, made some kind of plan and allowed yourself time to read it through at the end. The paper has what used to be called ‘discursive’ topics back in the day, which E’s teacher has told them to avoid as they’re difficult to do well, ‘personal writing’ which they’ve practised quite a bit, and strikes me as easiest anyway, and narrative writing, i.e. ‘write a story about/set in/on the theme of/inspired by…’ Anyway, Elspeth is an avid writer and I think she may think the personal writing is too easy; she’s determined that narrative writing is the choice for her. So she’s decided to practise regularly, with me providing topics for her, and that I have to do it too. We gave ourselves an hour to write, but only one topic, so no choosing had to be done. And it was so hard! Firstly, because to be on a level playing field we decided that I too had to write by hand (which was a challenge for E to read!) to slow me down, and also so that I would be forced to write forwards, instead of constantly adding and editing, as I normally would; but secondly because I am (as you will no doubt have realised) a witterer, and to write a narrative with some sort of progression in 50 minutes is very nearly impossible for me.

And the thing is, I don’t even like short stories. My heart sinks when someone gives me a book of short stories to read. When I come across one sometimes in a newspaper or magazine, even when it is written by an author I love, I just turn the page. I know that many great short stories have been written, and I understand that many fellow obsessive readers will be unable to understand how I can spurn these little gems of the writer’s craft, but I just don’t see the appeal. I suspect it is at least partly to do with what one is used to from reading. A novel has a gradual progression, characters develop though their behaviour and interactions, building from page to page, plot and setting unfold, the narrative has time to expand and usually time to reach some kind of satisfying conclusion. But, for me, short stories are essentially unsatisfying as they must needs portmanteau these elements into a shorter framework. For me, this usually leads to one of two results: either I have become interested in the characters and feel cheated when the story ends and I still feel there are things to find out; or the story wraps itself up in some sort of tricksy ending, a twist that seems too clever, and leaves me irritated (and yes, top of the list is Maupassant’s La Parure a story I loathe for its manipulativeness but cannot help admiring).

I will admit to a couple of exceptions. I love Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber which I first read after seeing the movie The Company of Wolves (yes, loved that too). These though might as well be fairy tales and they work the same way, little snippets of narrative with the weight of half-remembered folk symbolism behind them which gives their insubstantialness a peculiar and marvellous depth. I must have read Ian McEwan’s In Between the Sheets and First Love, Last Rites at about the same time. These two collections I have read and reread and for some reason they just really do it for me. I saw a one-man show based on The Cupboard Man at Edinburgh one year and it struck me then that McEwan had managed to capture the essence of this character and his story here, that it worked as a short story (and a short play) because there was nothing else to be said. I loved these stories so much that for years I bought each new Ian McEwan novel, but never found any of them struck me as deeply until I read Enduring Love (which is so short as to be almost a novella). The extraordinary and unsettling, so prevalent in all his books, struck me once again as perfectly realised in this little book. At the moment, Solar is lying in the pile next to my bed. Will it do it for me again?

Do you reread?

Do you reread? I do, but not often; certainly not as often as I did when I was a child. Then, certain favourites would be sure to call to me again and again. I read both Alices on a regular basis (I preferred Looking Glass then, I think because it was more structured, but now I prefer Wonderland, perfect evocation of the wild variety in dreams). I read all the Enid Blyton boarding school books many times over. I read the entire Lord of the Rings about once a year from the time I first read it at 13 until the time before last, in some university holidays, and then again a few years ago, when the films came out and I wanted to see if I could find in it what I had found then (and I did, which was such a relief). I reread Elizabeth Goodge, Barbara Willard, KM Peyton, E Nesbit; if a book was really worth reading once, it was certainly worth another go.

I suppose then, the comfort of familiarity, and the knowledge that the book would be good before I started to read were factors making me want to reread. Also, of course, the fact that all these books were there on my shelves, I didn’t have to go to the effort of discovering something new. It didn’t seem to bother me that I already knew what was going to happen. In fact, the anticipation seemed to add to the pleasure.

It’s different now. I reread far less and when my children ask me ‘what’s your favourite book?’ or even ‘who’s your favourite author?’ I couldn’t possibly answer them, although I certainly could have at any moment of my childhood. Of course, I can’t answer them; I’ve read too many books to make a decision like this, and who knows, the next one I pick up may be my favourite. But also, I no longer get that pure joy, that certainty that feeling that what I am reading is absolutely perfect in every way. I suppose my critical faculties get in the way, so that as well as letting the story into my brain, I am aware of the structure, the vocabulary, the places where the author could have done one thing but chose to do another. That’s not to say that I never reread, and generally I will only keep books that I think I am likely to want to pick up again some day (about 70% of those I buy or am given).

So having said all this, I had a truly perfect rereading experience lately. I was stuck for something to read, and though most of my fiction is STILL in the attic, I do have a couple of shelves of books by my bed that have somehow escaped being boxed up and put away. I picked up The Time-Traveler’s Wife, a book I loved when it first came out. I was slightly dubious about it this time, as a couple of people had told me since that they thought it was trite, so I did wonder if it would stand rereading. Sometimes books are enjoyable the first time but you can’t see it at all when you reread (Captain Correlli’s Mandolin, for example). At first I just opened it randomly and read a few different parts. I was trying to remember how the chronology worked. But in no time, it hooked me, and I started again from the beginning, and then devoured it in a few sittings. It didn’t matter that I knew what was going to happen. Actually the book makes it quite clear from early on that it’s not going to end well. I found myself enjoying it as much as the first time I read it, and maybe even more, because the anticipation added spice to the narrative. The best part was that Robert was out the evening I finished it, so I read the last 50 pages or so, all alone, with tears running down my face. Bliss!

Library reading frenzy

I went to the library twice this week. Which is remarkable really in that I haven't been at all in about a year. When I was a child we seemed to go all the time. It would have been once a week, I suppose, to keep my mother in books, but it seemed like both a habit and a treat. The times I remember best were after I was at boarding school, so those library visits were for reading fodder to fill in the lovely freedom of holiday hours. My mother always went straight to the returned books rack (why? because books other people had read might be more appealing? or newer?) usually followed by the crime section. I could have spent hours browsing, but clearly I needed a system too so I could keep up with her speed selection.So I would always pick one book of fairy tales (I favoured those Ruth Manning-Sanders ones, A Book of Trolls, A Book of Princesses as well as the Fairytales from... one place or another), plus something by an author I already knew and liked, then I'd select two more fairly randomly, trying to beat my speedy mother (and if he were there, my brother, who sought out dull books about space or fishing, as far as I can remember). One time when Mum beat me to it, she pulled from the shelf an Elizabeth Gouge to add to my pile; I forget which one but it was the first, and a revelation. Maybe she did this often, opening my eyes to undiscovered writers.

Anyway, this week I took the girls because it's their holidays, and even though we have enough books in the house to entertain them for several years, more and different books are always welcome. Besides, the choosing in a library is such fun. You can have lots ( I actually don't know how many) and you can experiment. It doesn't matter if you don't like them. And the books in a library are so different from those in a bookshop. Certainly, you'll find a few by all the currently popular authors, and if you ask, you can  probably get all their stuff. But it's not all sitting there, taking up shelf space to the exclusion of all else. In between one or two blockbusters, there'll be something by someone you've never heard of, or something that came out several years ago that you missed, or something ancient that you've always meant to read. Book heaven!

So, why did we have to go twice? Well, Livia (7), unused to the 'grab as may as you can' ethos of holiday library visits, only took out two books, which she read in two days; Elspeth (13) read until her eyes ached, finishing four books in three days; and Marianne (10), who wasn't with us on the first visits, but for whom I'd taken out the next Harry P, thinking it would take her all week, finished that in two days. And as for me, I'd only gone to pick up a couple of books about keeping chickens, but I was so enthused by the girls' reading frenzy, that when I went back I took four for myself. True to form, I picked something newish I'd never heard of, one I'd not read by a familiar author, one by a columnist I like though I didn't know he wrote fiction, and a classic that had passed me by. They don't have much of a fairy tale selection though...

To read is to own

'When a person we like gives us a book, we look for them first between the lines - for their tastes, for the reasons they thrust into our hands, for a sign of the bond between us.'
From The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac.

How is it that we feel we own the words we read? Is it to do with the fact that we have to think them as they pass through our brains en route from black marks to imagined scenes? Is it that here on the page is exactly what we've been trying to say? How can it be that when we share a book with another person, we feel we are giving them something of ourselves or showing that we recognise something in them?

Last week I heard author Mark Haddon talking about how his book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (or 'Curious' as he called it, which amused me) was one of the free books to be distributed by volunteers for World Book Day. He was asked how he felt about people choosing his book as a book they wanted to give to others. He replied that he didn't really feel that he owned the book any more, that it had gone out into the world and become its own thing, like a child leaving home. How odd, I thought. Would you not always feel that a book you had written belonged to you utterly? But then, authors do say that their books grow beyond them, with people reading far more in them than the author originally intended. And perhaps, once you have finished the creative process, the out-pouring, the honing, perhaps your mind is changed by the completion of the work, so you are not the same person you were when you were writing, you could never write it again, and so the book is no longer your own.

Disenchanted reader

I've just finished reading Enchanted Hunters: the power of stories in childhood by Maria Tatar and I'm feeling frustrated. The quotations and the blurb promise me that she will pin down, analyse and explain the magic of storytelling and the power of reading in children's lives. Hurray! I thought. Therein lies some questions I'd like answered. But it revealed nothing at all but rather repeated the purely obvious: stories allow children to explore situations and other emotions beyond their own experience and allow them to indulge their imaginations by plunging them into fantasy. Perhaps I have not read carefully enough and there's more substance to this than I'm seeing. She has interesting things to say about various books (especially about the child-centredness of Lewis Carroll and Dr Seuss), and I enjoyed the part about how story-telling morphed into bed-time reading over the ages. There's also an entertaining appendix of quotations from different authors about how they first experienced reading. But on the whole, a disappointment, and I didn't follow Maria Tatar's explanation of why she used a quotation from Lolita for the title at all.

I come away with unanswered questions:

Why does the fantastic appeal to children? Why do they love magic and other worlds, time slips and aliens?

Why do many adults lose the taste for the fantastic? Do they gain something else? Is it to do with the fact that the whole world is less mysterious to them? Is it to do with the fact that they have learned to be critical and can no longer suspend disbelief?

Why do I still like to read children's books? Is this childish? Do I read them the same way as I did when I was a child?

Why do some children become so involved in stories? Or perhaps how? Do they feel part of the action? Or is observing enough? Why do reading children seem to get this all-encompassing involvement often, whereas I only occasionally reach this point with a book (I suspect there is a time-to-spare factor here!).

So here's my plan. I'm going to search out some books about reading, about how we read and why we read, and some books about children's books (or I could reread the dozen on my shelves whose contents I seem to have forgotten). And I'm going to think about it. Maybe the reason Maria Tatar didn't come up with any revelation is because there isn't any. So, more on this at a later date, but if you have any answers or can suggest any promising leads in my quest, let me know.

Narrative gluttony

I badly want to like reading aloud. I like the idea of it. I think I should like it. I'm pretty good at it: clear, expressive, entertaining, not too given to doing funny voices (though I'm a sucker for a roars and cracks and whispers and shouts). My children are beyond the picture book stage now, but I never really had a problem with those, apart from the really bad ones that for some reason they insisted I read again and again... and again. Tinky Winky's Bag was one such, and how I rejoiced when it fell apart. Other books have been lovingly taped together, but Tinky Winky's Bag went straight in the fire (an act Robert will not allow me to forget: 'You BURNT a book!'). Clearly, picture books are short, so one does not have to invest much time in reading them, and they have pictures, so there's something to look at other than the words, and something to talk about too. It doesn't feel like an interuption of the story to discuss what is happening in the pictures, it feels like you're adding to it. I don't think it's about the shortness though. I've sat and read piles of picture books, one after another, and not found it arduous.

I think the problem with reading a longer book aloud must be the reading speed. Aloud, each word and each space has to take up a its own moment, whereas in your head the black marks on the page translate themselves into a single stream of thought. I'm anxious for my fix of story and it doesn't come quick enough aloud. Of course if I'm reading aloud, I'm not reading for myself, and I'm not hurrying throught it, I'm knocking myself out to please my audience with dramatic pauses and varying tone, but in the back of my head there's this thrumming 'what happens next?' even though I've probably read it before. Remember how at school when you read a book round the class, and it was so slow, the book seemed to plod, even something gripping like Lord of the Rings or To Kill a Mockingbird. I longed for my turn to read so I could put my all into it, showing off wildly, showing up the other girls, forcing praise from the teacher, but even then the words dragged their feet on the page, so I had to sneakily read on by myself just to get the joy of the story, and oh, how much more plodding it was in class once I didn't even have the anticipation to keep me going.

So now Robert does most of the reading aloud, although I usually suggest the books. It does give me a pang to see them curled up, sharing the book, but I know if it were me reading I'd be thinking 'how many pages to the end of the chapter' and I'd never give in to the demands to read the first paragraph of the next chapter before I stop, as he does. When I do read aloud, it's for practical reasons: to pass time when we're stuck somewhere and everyone's bored; to help someone get back into a book that they've lost the plot of (Watership Down last week, and I'm not surprised she'd lost it, the language is so complex I was having to explain a word or two in every sentence); and often I read to smallest daughter when she's doing her chores to stop her complaining about them, because I can't actually help her or the others would break into a chorus of 'it's not fair'.

I don't think the reading aloud is going to stop any time soon in our hose. All the girls can read and yet they love to listen to stories, any sort of story. Perhaps you don't have to grow out of listening. Maybe the thing that puts you off is the school experience and that's because you're trying to read at the same time as listening. Maybe what you need is just to allow your ears to do the transfering of the story to your brain instead dechiphering those little black marks. Perhaps I should try listening to stories again. I do it sometimes, in the car on Radio 4, but never on purpose, only if the story happens to be there when I'm listening. Do I enjoy it? I don't know; mostly I don't hear a whole story, or I'm thinking about something else, or talking to someone in the car. Maybe if I learn to listen I can slow down my narrative gluttony and relish reading aloud.

are French people ever excited?

When I'm teaching French, sometimes a child will ask me for a word or a phrase that they haven't learned yet and my automatic response is 'just use the words you know'.  On occasion, this is because I can't think of the word, or have never learned it (my daughter had to teach me the French for mobile phone!) but often I do know and yet for some reason my automatic reaction is to be unwilling to tell them. Why? I tell them new words all the time, why should I be stopping myself from telling them one more. I did wonder if it was pure laziness on my part: if I start by answering this question, will I then be bombarded with vocabulary requests that I can't answer?

I don't think it is that. I think it has to do with learning how to use language, something that  becomes evident when you try to speak a foreign language (and perhaps in those brain conditions where one begins to lose words). In our native language, we don't use words we don't know. We pick up new words by reading them or hearing them, not by going up to someone and saying 'what's the word for an orangey brown animal with a long neck that lives on the plains of Africa?' The word and the concept that goes with it arrive together. Even using a thesaurus, the word you choose ought to be a word you already know, or how can you be sure the context is right?

So the difficulty with a foreign language is that there are concepts in your brain for which you have no words. The children's answer to this is 'provide me with the words', but in the real world, part of speaking a foreign language is gaining the ability to work around lack of vocabulary, learning how to make yourself understood using those words you do have. I remember in France once I took a phone call from a boiler supplier. He really needed to be talking to the builder working next door and as I attempted to rustle up the words to tell him so, I could hear the little-used synapses in my brain firing up. I managed to produce 'chef de construction' (building boss?) which did the trick, but certainly wasn't what a French person would have said!

Then there's the question of words and phrases that exist in one language but not in another. Take the word 'excited'. Children in my class are always wanting to tell me they are excited about things. French children too must get excited, but perhaps they just don't talk about it, because there is no obvious word or phrase that captures the essence of anticipation and enthusiasm. It's hard enough to explain to the concept of gender to British children, this idea of words not necessarily being translateable is an even bigger one to swallow.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that part of what they need to learn is to switch off their English-speaking brain and start using their French. I know this is very hard when you only know a very little, but I suspect that it's the best way to turn a bunch of random words and phrases into a vocabulary.