Pace in a Story

The British short story is a strange kind of animal. Whereas you might think of a story as some kind of mongrel, pulling bits from elsewhere - fable, poem, novel - we have an obsession in Britain that is akin to the various categories you find at Crufts. On the one hand our "best in show" winning the BBC Short story award or the Sunday Times prize can often be an otter hound or similarly oversized dog, our magazines - and quite a few of our open entry prizes - inside that only a bichon frisé might apply, with 2000 or 2500 word limits as standards.

The American short story on the other hand doesn't think of a short story as a particular breed of little literary dog, it understands that it is a genre in itself which though sometimes tiny, is more often quite long. 

I'm writing a story at the moment and its definitely a story - not a novel or anything so grand. Yet there are a cast of six or seven characters, a definite setting, a complex time sequencing that includes flashbacks to tell the story. I've written 2000 words this morning without pausing and I realise the story will be lucky to come in under 6000. In other words, I'm again writing something that's pretty unpublishable or unplaceable - though as its a ghost/horror story "after a fashion" it might have a life. 

Yet I'm not writing it at some length out of some misguided belief that very short stories are always wrong - like the bichon frisé they can be fine if a little precious - but because this is the length that the story wants to be. It has its own pace, and its own need for a certain accumulating of detail to enable the ghostly bit of the story to creep up on the reader. Its not always the case, but for once, as soon as I'd had the idea ffor this one, I knew exactly how it should be told. Of course, when I get to the end I may have made a pig's ear of it, but for now at least, it feels I'm writing something with a little bit of heft, and moreover, which will reward the reader for the time it takes to read. That its 3 times as long as a 2000 word story shouldn't be in any way a bad thing.

Of course, writers know this, even if publishers and editors and judges don't.  I can understand competitions not to want to have stories of only 5000 words + yet the prestigious BBC Short Story Award seems to be geared (given the length of the radio slot allotted to the shortlisted stories) to prefer the longer story - yet here's the rub, the only authors who will regularly get longer stories published are the already well known - those with book deals. 

The last longer story I wrote sits stubbornly in my unpublished pile - and yes, I can see that it might have some of the characteristics of a scene from a novel, with its unhurriedness, its sense of place, person and detail, yet its exactly the length and pace that it should be.  I have no answer, and as a writer I'm abundantly clear that I should see a short story as being "without chaff", so I think my tendency has been to write shorter over the years (and yes, those three stories I talked about coming out this autumn are all sub 3000 words), but when you begin writing something and the pace is so obviously write for what you want to write, its hard to think about cutting it down to size - yet harder still, once you've finished it, to see it unloved and unread.