Craft
In Defence of the Short Story
People often ask me why I wrote a short story collection before a novel. The implication, usually unstated, is that the collection was a warm-up — a proving ground before the real work began.
I find this baffling. The short story is not a lesser form. It is a different form, with its own demands and its own rewards, and in some ways it is the more difficult of the two.
A novel can afford to be patient. It can take its time establishing character, building world, accumulating meaning through repetition and variation. A short story has none of this luxury. Every sentence must earn its place. Every image must do double or triple duty. The ending must feel both surprising and inevitable — and it must arrive before the reader has had time to settle in.
The writers I most admire in the form — Alice Munro, William Trevor, Mavis Gallant, Lucia Berlin — achieve something that I think is genuinely miraculous: they make you feel, in twenty pages, that you have lived a whole life alongside their characters. That you know them, and will miss them when the story ends.
The Cartography of Small Things was my attempt to understand how they do it. I am still learning.