"Short stories, unlike novels, can be consumed in a few hours, or even less, they are full of mood and show a precision of language more akin to poetry than lengthier kinds of prose. They are closely related to memories or daydreams - they flit through, there and gone. But how intensely they are felt. Fast, potent hits.
A novel, which can take weeks or months to read, does not mimic, in quite the same way, that pleasurable, involuntary falling away from the noise and action of our lives, very briefly, in the middle of whatever's going on. That hijacking of the "right now" so the tumult of reflection takes over. The plot of a short story is like a snag in a nylon stocking: quick, crawling ruination that runs the length of the whole garment - life - as fast as one can cross her legs.
A short story tends to move through the day like a weather system, like those time-lapse films of clouds on the prairies, uplifting blasts of light and shadow.
That's the way it is with short stories. Lesser writers don't attempt them."
I am a novel reader when it comes down to it, have been since I started reading. And, in fact, I have always looked to novels for just that feeling she describes: the "pleasurable, involuntary falling away" from real life, and have found it many times over, in novels good and bad. (In fact, sometimes it's easier to find in bad books. I've had to learn to also love those books you really have to work at, where the sentences are dense - or jarring, or cacophonous, or old-fashioned, or obscure - where it's just not that easy to lose yourself.)
I started writing short stories because I was too scared to attempt a novel. How could you ever - especially if you're lazy and self-critical like me - start writing something so...big...and then just keep going on and on and on?
So I started with short stories, and I realized that Lisa's right: they're hard. Hard to do well. Hard to be spare and not too obvious and yet hold someone fast to each sentence, and then to find an ending that fits, that's meaningful and perfect and mysterious and just right. I'm not sure I'm there yet, but the process has taught me to really appreciate and respect other short story writers and their work.
Last month I started a novel. I tried to do the NaNoWriMo, and I did fail, but I wrote 50 pages, and I found it really freeing. It gives you room to breathe, writing like that, trying not to self-edit, and letting the story go where it wants rather than wrestling with it. I think I might even keep at it. We'll see.
And here's a photo I took in Helsinki, the lovely copper ceiling of the Temppeliaukio Kirkko (rock church):
By the way. I got to work with Lisa Moore the first time I went to the Banff Centre. She was inspirational to me, for her energy and big laugh and great skirts and boots and how excited she was about writing and how she really listened when I read one of my stories aloud to her. She said some things about writing that meant a lot to me at the time and still do. Also she read aloud from Alligator - then a work in progress - and blew everyone away.
