short fiction

As I discover more and more short fiction, creative, experimental, classical, brilliant, bold, honest, two things strike me: If I had read much of this before I ventured into exploring writing, I doubt I would have had the courage to start. And now that I’ve started, will I ever reach a comparable level of craft or inventiveness or emotional depth.

I am driven to use lighting, transitions between tungsten and neon and natural light to set tone. In Stretch, Open Up, Stretch, the solitary shadow and neon light hint at the cold, aseptic world the protagonist is in. In another story, Rosy, a prime suspect in one of the Sonali Naag detective series, is a paying guest in a room lit by ‘grim neon lighting’ that she attempts to turn into a home. The ‘signs flashing across the street’ in Where’s my Baby Gone ‘make patterns’ whose jaggedness signals what is to come. But then, I read, ‘In place of its (the moon’s) luminosity there were only the streetlights, shrill and small, and the irritating flicker of the neons...’1. I am humbled.

Similarly, I recognise that I fail the grimy, gritty reality of the city because I do not have the courage to say something like, ‘under the city’s icy winter, there is a street where the trash builds up and drunks vomit, where the fight dogs shit and everything freezes fast.’2.

One of the themes that fascinates me, that I return to periodically is that of conception, birth and the relationships across generations. The profound single-mindedness of purpose that drive humanity to procreate, and love are beautifully dealt with in Procreate, Generate 3, a lesson in story-telling.

I close this stream of thought with the lasting imagery of the mobile, cohesive ‘rubbish island’ – ‘The whole sad flotilla, a peculiar combination of the once cared-for and the utterly irrelevant’ 4.

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1. Paul Bower, Big Head, Cadenza 19, September 2008, pp: 27
2. Antonio Ungar, Hypothetically, Zoetrope: All Story 13 (1), Spring 2009, pp: 54
3. Anthony Doerr, Procreate, Generate, Granta 97, Spring 2007, pp: 71
4. Rebecca Lloyd, The River, Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, 2008, pp: 13