Short Stories and Magic Tricks by Savita Kalhan

I’ve been reading short stories for years. I fell in love with them when I discovered Italo Calvino when I was a student, but I think my love for short stories started much earlier, from when I was a child reading fairy tales, folk tales, and myths and legends from around the world.

I’ve been writing short stories for several years too. Aladdin’s Lamp is published in Stories from The Edge, a collection of short stories for teens.

Recently I decided to embark on a short story writing course. It’s something I’ve never done, but I’m hoping it will be fun as well as developing my writing, opening my mind to new ways of thinking and approaching short story writing.

Not every writer is interested in short story writing. Cormac McCarthy once said: “I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” Not surprisingly, he only ever wrote two short stories, whilst at college, before turning to writing novels.

For Neil Gaiman, a “short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.” That’s how I feel about short stories too. They can be as poignant and resonate with a reader as much as a novel, and in a far more accessible form. The impact of a short story does not differ from that of a novel; its brevity is only in its length, not in the emotional response it might elicit from the reader. “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” – Kurt Vonnegut. It’s good advice when every word counts.

But a short story should be as long or as short as it needs to be. F Scott Fitzgerald refused to cut The Women in the House down to fit the remit of magazines and newspapers, and only very reluctantly revised it a little after it had been rejected many times. Most submissions for short story anthologies will specify a maximum word count, and keeping within it can be tough. When a story I’ve written just won’t fit the specs, I’ve often had to sit down and write another story instead. Easier said than done. 

Unlike a novel, where there is time and space to explore themes, short stories necessarily have a different arc. "All is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail," in the words of Alice Munro.

Two of the short story anthologies I’m really looking forward to reading are – A Change is Gonna Come, written by a collection of BAME, teen, and YA authors, and published by Stripes on 10th August.

The second is A Spot of Folly by Ruth Rendell, which is a collection of nine short stories published in magazines dating back to the 1970s. (There may be a Barbara Vine story in there too). There is a page still missing from one of her short stories – Digby Lives – I really hope the editor manages to find it!

“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row,” Ray Bradbury once said. I have never been brave enough to attempt to write one short story a week, but it does pose a real challenge! It may not have been possible for Rad Bradbury to write 52 bad short stories in a row, so it’s easy for him to say that it’s not possible for other people to achieve it! Still, it is a challenge...

Over the next month I hope to be working some magic with short stories and if I manage to write four, I'll be happy!

Savita's Website

BOOKSELLER SUNDAYS: Born that way, Ornella Tarantola at The Italian Bookshop, London

The fourth in a new series of guest blogs by booksellers who work with children’s authors in different ways. These Sunday guest blogs are designed to show life behind the scenes of a crucial but neglected relationship – the one between a writer and a bookseller.

Booksellers are like writers. You can learn to be one, but in reality you’re born that way.

I was absolutely born a bookseller. Even now, I feel the joy of belonging as soon as I put my nose inside a bookshop. And my bookshop is like me. Like me, it is, well, a bit of a mess sometimes. Sometimes it seems that the books skip around the shelves of their own accord, because it’s also too much effort for them to stay in strict alphabetical order. I always find Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo among the cookbooks. If you ever read it (and you should, my friends) you will understand why. I take it and put it back among the ‘C’s where it should be.

I forgot to say that I sell Italian books …

You’d think it would be difficult to sell Italian books here; a losing bet, even. In fact, English people love Italian books! Those who read Italian books come to our shop to find them in translation and in the original language. Above all, the English love to learn our language. And we Italian booksellers are ready to help them with advice and encouragement.

What do you read when you first come up against Italian literature? My clients cover a big range. They don’t have any qualms about variety … moving from the classics to the latest ‘giallo’ (detective story) because now Italian writers know how to create a great thriller – by dint of being jealous of the Anglo-Saxon writers, we have become pretty good thriller-writers ourselves!

Among my most passionate clients I have many children. They are not discouraged by a foreign or a strange word. They open books, full of courage. They chant the nursery rhymes of Gianni Rodari, even when they don’t understand every word. But the beauty of poetry is that you don’t understand it all straightaway, is it not?

I always offer advice, whether to the grown-ups or to the smallest children. But I also like to leave them the total freedom to fall in love with a cover or an alluring beginning, or a fleeting phrase they find when they open the book somewhere in the middle.

Books should be touched, creased, caressed. I fear a time when they will all be contained inside little electronic devices. But by that time I shall be a lovely little old lady seated on a terrace surrounded by books. I shall reread for the umpteenth time about how Marcovaldo found mushrooms in the city.

My bookshop hasjust transferred to a new address. Now we are combined as The European Bookshop and Young Europeans Bookstore and The Italian Bookshop in Warwick Street W1. When I first heard this would happen, I was desperately sad, but now I have come to the conclusion that walls don’t matter much. What matters is the writers who are folded away inside the books and all the people who are curious enough to open them.

And now I am happy again …

Ornella Tarantola, The Italian Bookshop

The European Bookshop and Young Europeans Bookstore and The Italian Bookshops' website

Watch out for Independent Booksellers Week, a campaign celebrating independents on the high street, which this year takes place between 30th June and 7th July.