Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story

Short Circuit is a unique and indispensable guide to writing the short story. A collection of 24 specially commissioned essays from well-published short story writers, many of them prize winners in some of the toughest short story competitions in the English language. The writers are also experienced and successful teachers of their craft. Each essay picks up on one or more craft or process issues and explores them in context, within the creative practice of the writer. Each writer has given of themselves very generously, exploring what it is that helps them produce strong short fiction, looking at their sources of inspiration, revealing more than a little of what goes on `behind the scenes’. They share favourite writing exercises, and suggest lists of published stories they find inspirational. Much of the guidance can equally be applied to writing longer fiction. Contributions include five essays from winners of The Bridport Prize. There are interviews with Clare Wigfall – winner of The National Short Story Award – and with Tobias Hill whose short story collection won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. Other prize-winning writers in this book include winners of The Asham Award for New Women Writers, The Fish Histories Prize, The Fish Short Story Prize, The BBC Short Story Prize, The Commonwealth Award, Writers Inc. Writer of the Year, The Willesden Herald Prize, NAWG Millennium Award for Radio Short Story and the Per Contra Prize.

Table of Contents:
Vanessa Gebbie Introduction Graham Mort Finding Form in Short Fiction Clare Wigfall `I Hear Voices’ – Narrative voice, creating a fictive world, characterisation, openings and leaving room for the reader: An interview Alison Macleod Writing and Risk-Taking Nuala Ni Chonchuir Language and Style for short story writers and poets Chika Unigwe Setting Alex Keegan `24’: The Importance of Theme Lane Ashfeldt Building a world Catherine Smith Myth and magic: beyond `realism’ in the short story Adam Marek What my gland wants – originality in the short story Tobias Hill Character, characterisation, dialogue and language: An interview Sarah Salway Stealing Stories Elizabeth Baines True story – real story – good Fiction? Tania Hershman Art Breathes from Containment: The Delights of the Shortest Fiction or The Very Short Story That Could David Gaffney Get shorty: the micro-fiction of Etgar Keret Marian Garvey On Intuition: writing into the void Elaine Chiew Endings Paul Magrs Thoughts about writing fiction, at the end of term Vanessa Gebbie Leaving the door ajar on short story openings ... Vanessa Gebbie Short story competitions: Hard work, persistence, luck and a bowl of fruit Linda Cracknell Balancing Act Jay Merill Supercharged Words Carys Davies `... before it disappears ...’ David Grubb Dancing on glass Zoe King But what if your character won’t talk to you? Matthew Licht Iceberg Lettuce: Why I write, and a little bit of `how’ Contributors’ notes

About the Author :
Vanessa Gebbie is a novelist and award-winning short story writer. Author of two collections: Words from a Glass Bubble and Storm Warning (Salt), her novel The Coward’s Tale (Bloomsbury UK/US) was selected as a UK Financial Times Book of the Year and Guardian readers’ book of the year. Her stories have been commissioned by literary journals, the British Council, for BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4, and are widely anthologised. www.vanessagebbie.com Elizabeth Baines was born in South Wales and lives in Manchester. She has been a teacher and is an occasional actor as well as the prize-winning author of plays for radio and stage, and of two novels, The Birth Machine and Body Cuts. Her award-winning short stories have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Her first story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, was published by Salt in 2007. A novel, Too Many Magpies, will come from Salt in November 2009. Linda Cracknell has been a teacher of English in Zanzibar, worked for environmental charity WWF, and was writer-in-residence at Hugh MacDiarmid’s last home near Biggar. She now lives in Highland Perthshire. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines and journals, been broadcast on BBC Radio, and was previously collected in Life Drawing, published in 2000. She writes drama for BBC Radio Four and is now writing essays about walks which follow human stories in `wild’ places. Carys Davies was the winner of the the 2010 Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Short Story Award, the 2011 Royal Society of Literature’s V S Pritchett Memorial Prize, and a 2013 Northern Writers’ Award. She has been shortlisted and longlisted for many other prizes including the Calvino Prize, the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Roland Mathias Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Wales Book of the Year and the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen Prize. Born in Wales, she now lives in Lancaster. David Gaffney lives in Manchester. He is the author of several books including Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), Never Never (2008), The Half-Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). He has written articles for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect, and his new novel, All The Places I’ve Ever Lived, is due out in spring 2017. See www.davidgaffney.org. David Grubb writes novels, short stories and poems. His most recent poetry collection, Box, was published by Like This Press in 2012. Previous poetry collections have been published by Salt, Shearsman, and Stride. He was a winner in the 2012/13 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition with a sequence, `Ways of Looking’. Tania Hershman was born in London in 1970 and in 1994 moved to Jerusalem, Israel, where she worked as a science journalist. She now lives in Bristol with her partner. Her award-winning short stories combine her two loves: fiction and science. Many of Tania Hershman’s stories, which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in print and online, are inspired by articles from popular science magazines. In November 2007, she founded The Short Review, a unique online journal dedicated to reviewing short story collections. Concerned about the environmental impact of her book, Tania is partnering with Eco-Libris, who will plant a tree for every copy. For further information, visit Tania’s websites: www.taniahershman.com and www.thewhiteroadandotherstories.com. Selected as one of the country’s Next Generation poets, shortlisted for the 2004 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and named by the TLS as one of the best young writers in the country, Tobias Hill is one of the leading British writers of his generation. His award-winning collections of poetry are Year of the Dog, Midnight in the City of Clocks, and Zoo. His fiction has been published to acclaim in many countries. AS Byatt has observed that “There is no other voice today quite like this.” Alex Keegan began writing seriously in 1992, publishing 5 mystery novels before switching to serious short fiction. He has been published widely in print and on the web and been awarded more than a dozen first prizes for his fiction as well as three Bridport Prizes. Born in Wales with an Irish mother, he now lives and writes in Newbury, England where he lives with his second wife and two teenage children. He runs a tough internet writing school, "Boot Camp Keegan". Matthew Licht learned to write before two extremely tough audiences: the readership of a magazine popular among the incarcerated and/or mentally handicapped, and the 4th and 5th grades of a New York Public School. Alison Macleod is the author of two novels, The Changeling and The Wave Theory of Angels, and a short story collection, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. She lives in Brighton and teaches creative writing at the University of Chichester. Paul Magrs was born in 1969 in the North East of England. He has published fiction for adults, teens and children. He lectures in Creative Writing at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Adam Marek won the 2011 Arts Foundation Fellowship in short story writing. His collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing, was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Prize, and in 2010 he was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. He lives in Bedfordshire with his wife and sons. Jay has just moved to a tree house in the centre of the centre and she has the feeling this will lead to a lot of creative output, because before, she was at the side of the centre and that's when she wrote the stories in this collection whereas before that, when she was in the outer crust, she went out compulsively every night and hardly wrote a thing. Graham Mort, poet and short fiction writer, is Professor of Creative Writing and Transcultural Literature at Lancaster University. He specialises in literature development work and recent projects have taken him to South Africa, Kurdistan, Vietnam and China. His first book of stories, Touch (Seren), won the Edge Hill Prize in 2011 and his latest book of stories, Terroir (Seren), is currently long-listed for the same prize. A new book of poems, Black Shiver Moss, will appear from Seren in 2017. Nuala Ní Chonchúir is an Irish short fiction writer and poet, born Dublin 1970. Her short fiction collections The Wind Across the Grass (2004) and To the World of Men, Welcome (2005) were published by Arlen House. Her poetry collections Tattoo:Tatú (2007) and Molly’s Daughter (2003) appeared from the same publisher. She has won many literary prizes, including RTÉ Radio’s Francis MacManus Award and the Cecil Day-Lewis Award. Nuala lives in Galway with her partner and children.