A couple of years ago I enrolled in an editing course. I was working full time in a job where I did heaps of proof reading and editing publicity and educational material. I thought the course might help brush up on my editing skills, I’d learn some of those cool mark-ups you see scribbled all over manuscripts and I could use my skills to do freelance work when I quit the public service.
To get the piece of paper I had to enroll in a couple of writing units as well as the editing ones.
I was a bit ambivalent about the writing part of the course. I hadn’t written a story since primary school. I’d written a masters thesis, various articles and had an inconsistent crack at blogging – but making up actual stories out of my imagination was daunting. I had used fictional strategies in my academic writing, I’d done live performance and I work with narrative in my visual art. For some reason though, writing a story scared me.
As a beginner fiction writer I was a very critical reader. I’ve been a keen reader all my life – I’ve always got a book on the go, often two or three. I read broadly: literature, fantasy, romance, detective fiction – anything – good writing, crappy writing and everything in between. How could I set aside all my opinions, likes, dislikes and just write? What would I write – what genre? How would I create convincing characters?
Being a visual artist, I tend to go for descriptive writing, I like to convey how things look and feel. But writing about people – inventing characters – writing from the perspective of an imaginary someone – where do you start?
In the classes we started in the conventional way – writing exercises, idea generation exercises – things I was familiar with teaching in a visual art context translated into the writing one. Being a student in these courses turned out to be fun – I could let go of all the stuff I’d read and indulge in writing nonsense, write in response to a song or a picture, write about the imaginary secret lives of my classmates. I can honestly say if I had not attended these courses I would not have started writing fiction. I also would perhaps not have rediscovered reading short stories.
My feelings about reading short stories were similar to those about writing fiction – ambivalent at best. Being a reader of novels, short stories were just too – well – short. I love becoming completely immersed in a book – reading for hours – all night – getting lost in the world of the story – short stories just don’t do that. Also, so many stories I read were boring – I would get to the end and think – why did I read that? I didn’t feel like they took me anywhere – they were fragments or beginnings, not entire things in their own right.
Being obliged to read short stories in the course I was studying, and also receiving a couple of anthologies as gifts, completely changed my opinions. I still find some short stories tedious and dull – but the same goes for art, music and film – some works just don’t appeal – for many and varied reasons – and some really are crap.
One of the great things about reading short stories is that they are not novels. I don’t have to commit days or weeks to them – I can read an entire story in one sitting before bed no matter how busy or tired I am. I don’t loose track of the story and have to start again because I’ve left it for too long. Short stories can pursue just one idea, they can be fragments, beginnings, moments. They can make you stop and think about something, they can turn my day upside down or give me a different perspective. They CAN take me on a journey, create new worlds and absorb me in their language, their colour, their rhythm.
Authors whose work I find inspiring include (in no particular order): David Foster-Wallace, Cate Kennedy, Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Franz Kafka, Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Roald Dahl, Robert Drewe, Isabelle Allende, Edgar Allen Poe, Tom Cho and many more.
I’ve started reading journals like the Griffith Review fiction editions, Going Down Swinging and various other compilations of contemporary writing to seek out writers I’m not familiar with.
The stories I’m drawn to vary widely. Writing with an absurd and surreal bent definitely appeals, but sometimes it is something very ordinary, simply rendered; an acute observation or a piece of writing that colours my day in a certain way. Sometimes it is the poetry of the writing itself, the way the story draws me into its world or the sounds and smells it evokes that stay with me long after I read it.
A few stories that have really stuck with me include:
David Foster Wallace – Incarnations of Burned Children – reading this for the first time gave me a stomach churning sensation of horror that stayed with me for days.
Ursula Le Guinn – Sur – a story of a group of female explorers who beat Amundsen to the South Pole
Cate Kennedy – Cold Snap
F Scott Fitzgerald – Diamond as big as the Ritz
Anthologies
Haruki Murakami – The Elephant Vanishes
Neil Gaiman – Fragile Things
Novellas
Charlotte Perkins Gillman – The Yellow Wallpaper
Patrick Suskind – The Pigeon
There are loads more, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
