As a short story publisher and prize administrator of Leicester Writes Short Story Prize, the highlight of my year is reading entries for this prize. It's always a privilege to read new writing and discover exciting new voices. The prize champions surprising and delightful short fiction and is particularly keen to read work from first time writers. The form can be evasive, as if pulling off a magic trick. It is technically challenging too. For this blog, I've asked 2023 judge and last year's winner Joe Bedford to share his thoughts on the craft of writing short stories.
The Tell-Tale Heart by Joe Bedford
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart, in which a murderer is haunted by the sound of their victim’s heart beating beneath the floorboards, starts with a one-word sentence: ‘True’. While much of Poe’s work is concerned with the difference between truth and fantasy – and the lines between reality and nightmare – the central image of The Tell-Tale Heart is for me one of the most powerful metaphors for the function and process of the short story form. It is a perfect image for one of the main challenges we face not just as writers but as human beings.
As writers, it is healthy to acknowledge that our material is borrowed. That isn’t to say it is stolen, only that it is a mixed-up composite of all kinds of stimuli re-ordered by the imagination, much like a nightmare. And unless you’re at the very arrow-tip of the avantgarde, the tools you use to re-order those stimuli are borrowed from the stories you read. Sentences and paragraphs, yes, but also rhythms, structures, archetypes, etc. These are the things we borrow, our ‘literary material’, and we borrow because it’s necessary to borrow. They are not always helpful, however, in encouraging us to tell the truth.
Children are especially bad at copying and getting away with it. When I was twelve years old, I wrote a short story called ‘The Reindeer Strike’, about an industrial dispute arising from Santa’s reindeer refusing to work Christmas Day. It was the first short story I ever wrote, and it was probably when I peaked. Reading it back now, its main components are obviously, unashamedly nicked. There are talking animals, elves, an orphan boy from ‘old London Town’ and fairy dust. There is also evidence of the world I grew up in: references to the Falklands War and the introduction of the Euro. Even the strike itself reveals the influence of my family history and the stories of the Miners’ Strike which were passed down to me via my mother. (It is perhaps not a point of personal pride that Santa solves the dispute by outsourcing the reindeer’s work to animals from all over the world.)
The whole thing is such an obvious piece of mimicry that I feel as though my young self is barely present. But that is not true either. The orphan boy is vulnerable after having being uprooted from his birthplace to a new town. There is an idiosyncratic specificity to the style in which I see my clever-clogsness. Knowing who I was allows me to see the truth of myself buried beneath the literary material of the story. It is a perspective uniquely accessible to me and those who know me. These are the truths buried within the structure. One of the keys to writing naturally, as I have since found out, is to be able to tune in to those truths when they begin to beat quietly beneath the floorboards.
My debut novel, A Bad Decade for Good People (Parthian Books, 2023), began with borrowed material. It was 2019 and I was saturated with news stories about Brexit and the so-called culture wars. I was frustrated by the reductiveness and partisanship I saw on all sides. I wanted to write into those debates, and so I took that language and began to speak with it. It was a disaster. My first draft was bitter, sarcastic and detached. The words which I was using, borrowed from a public discourse already half-poisoned, did not fit in my mouth. The reason for this, I think now, was that I had not attuned myself to my own perspective, and so prevented myself from allowing that perspective to flourish within the story. A similar problem occurred when writing my short story On Tuesdays I Clean the House, which went on to win the Leicester Writes Prize 2022. My early drafts were glib, hackneyed and purple. The truth of my own experiences of grief and intimacy was buried beneath the basic literary material that is always drawn upon to describe these things. In its most common form, falling into this mode of writing is to furnish your story with cliché – one of the natural markers of the first draft. In less common forms, and especially where a lot of time has been spent piling literary material onto a narrative, the eventual story can be passable. In fact, some writers, readers and editors might take that story and be untroubled by the total lack of authentic personhood behind it. But that can only produce one kind of writing. In time, the beating of the hidden heart becomes too loud for us all.
In order for us to write into that ubiquitous writerly motto, ‘Write what you know’, we must first know who we are. Of course, that is an impossibility in the strictest terms, but learning about yourself will help you to distinguish the literary material from the true material that is buried underneath. ‘What is important to me? What do I believe? How do I feel?’ These questions are as crucial if not more so than ‘What genre is my story? Who is my audience? Have I shown or told?’ Because without a sense of self, there can be no interrogation of the truth beyond technical ability.
In The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe’s narrator attempts to bury the truth and fails. As writers, and pertinently as rewriters, if we are eager to write work which works beyond the level of its literary material, we put ourselves in a position to write stories in which the heart beats loudly enough for everybody to hear. In order to do that, it is useful to look at our work and be able to determine what of this is me and what is borrowed. And to do that, we may need to begin at the beginning with that most difficult of human questions: who am I? The question does not need a definite answer. It only needs an attentive ear.
Joe Bedford is a writer from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely, including in Litro, Structo and the Mechanics’ Institute Review, and have won numerous prizes including the Leicester Writes Prize 2022. His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People will be published by Parthian Books in June 2023.
The Leicester Writes Short Story Prize is now inviting short stories of up to 3,500 words on any theme or subject by the deadline 2 July 2023.
Image credit: Deborah Thwaites
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