An RSL/Booker Prize Foundation Masterclass with Tessa Hadley on writing short stories at Cardiff Central Library.

Top Tips

Here are some tips for writing short stories:

• Know – or half know – what you are writing towards before you begin.
• Struggle to find fresh words to do justice to the scene in your imagination. Language is lazy, will try to seduce you into writing a less true, more commonplace, version of your story.
• Find the right door into your story, and the right door out of it.
• Your ending is very important – in a way, because stories are so short in the reading experience, it functions almost as the ‘point’ of what you’ve done. But its turn mustn’t be too obvious or noisy. A sideways step, a quiet move onto something new, a new revelation.
• Find some strong central motif or movement in your story, and don’t overcomplicate.
• Keep everything in the foreground, leave out as much of the back story as you can.
• (But: in writing there are exceptions to every rule – you are always free to break them.)

Reading List

Some favourite stories:

Anton Chekhov	‘Lady with a Lapdog’, ‘Ward Six’, ‘A Boring Story’, ‘Three Years’
Elizabeth Bowen	‘A Summer Night’, ‘Mysterious Kôr’, ‘A Day in the Dark’, ‘The Jungle’
James Joyce	‘Dubliners’
Rudyard Kipling	‘Plain Tales from the Hills’
John McGahern	‘Lavin’, ‘Gold Watch’, ‘The Love of the World’, ‘The Country Funeral’
Jorge Luis Borges	‘The Immortal’, ‘Funes the Memorious’, ‘The Witness, ‘Borges and I’
D.H. Lawrence	The Odour of Chrysanthemums’, ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter’
Katherine Mansfield	‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’, ‘The Dolls’ House’
Ellen Gilchrist	The Age of Miracles
Nadine Gordimer	A Soldier’s Embrace and other stories
John Updike	The Afterlife and other stories
Alice Munro	The Love of a Good Woman
Colm Tóibín	The Empty Family
Claire Keegan	Walk the Blue Fields

Recorded on: November 10, 2012
Sponsored by: Booker Prize Foundation