There’s an interview with me over on The Bath Short Story Award site.
It’s a slightly updated version of an interview we did last year. We talk about short stories – titles, beginnings, and endings. I hope you like it.
You might consider entering this year’s competition yourself.
A new short story by George Saunders is a big deal! Click the title above and read for free in The New Yorker.
You can read my interview with George Saunders here.
I’ve been invited to Turkey in February to represent the UK in the field of short stories. Last year I was lucky enough to travel to Mexico thanks to the British Council. I read at events, went on TV and radio and met Mexican authors like Monica Lavin (we did an interview for The Irish Times).
Monica Lavin
I also wrote an article for The British Council’s Voices blog “Is it better to be a short story writer or a novelist?”.
I’m a big lover of the short story and set up a blog a few years ago sharing articles, interviews and submission opportunities. I joined the wonderful Word Factory which has become the UK’s leading short story salon and am now the Associate Director. I went on to be the co-founder of the London Short Story Festival with Spread the Word in 2014.
Me, Deborah Levy, SJ Naude, Marina Warner and Cathy Galvin at London Short Story Festival
I love meeting other writers and working with authors from different countries. I’ve always wanted to go the Istanbul too – I hope I get to visit there on my trip. A great piece of news to start the year. Hope yours is starting well too!
George Saunders Explains How to Tell a Good Story. Click to hear the short story master sharing his unique insights into creating a great story for The Atlantic. It’s fantastic. And if you’ve never read his work I urge to you give it a go.
George Saunders (c) Paul McVeigh
I was lucky enough to interview George, in London, on the day he won The Folio Prize. You can read that interview here – he is rather fantastic.
A little snippet…
P: You described your job in Sumatra as – you drilled deep down then put in dynamite and exploded it. Isn’t that a little like the writing process?
G: Well it is actually! I never thought… You’re kind of looking to see where the energy goes, that’s the same thing – you put some energy in and see how it sorts itself out.
‘That Killer First page’ continues its sold out run as the last place went yesterday for this Saturday at Waterstones Piccadilly. My special guest is Lucy Caldwell winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize whose debut collection comes out with Faber next year. Lucy has also won… hold on to your seats… The George Devine Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Irish Playwrights’ and Screenwriters’ Guild Award, Richard Imison Award, Rooney Prize for Irish Literature & Dylan Thomas Prize. You are in for a treat.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p033yt4m/player
Watch Lucy talk about short stories at The Small Wonder Festival this year.
I met Monica Lavin on a trip to Mexico recently with The British Council. A huge star over there she is also a beautiful person. It was a pleasure to do this Q&A with her.
(Here’s just a little snippet…. head over to The Irish Times to read more.)
Why the love for short story writing?
Because I read wonderful stories as a teenager: Chekhov, Bradbury, Hemingway, Cortazar, Borges, Rulfo. Latin American writers’ books were fresh, the writers were alive. That gave another dimension to what I had read before. When I was a child I thought all writers were dead people. Maybe that is one of the reasons I could not picture myself as one, even though I had been writing stories since I was 13 years old. I did not how to become a writer.
Does your writing have anything to do with your scientific background?
I think science and writing have to do with the desire to know. Science deals with objective truth, literature with relative truth. El Quijote taught us that. The short story aesthetic has more to do with mathematical equations – they have to be balanced: nothing extra, nothing missing. I love the silence of the short story.
Why did you started writing novels?
I always felt there was a question behind each short story – what if…? Now I know it is more than that, and what I thought would be a short story commanded several questions. I was dealing with multidimensional characters, several situations. I was in the grounds of the novel, and I plunged in. Now I write both. Short story writing is a way of thinking, so I always write them. I love the risk of both.
Don’t forget to check out the rest…. here.
It’s here!
The monthly writing news and submission opportunities for you writers out there. Compiled for my blog for Word Factory every month just for you.
Good luck!
Recently, I travelled to Mexico with The British Council to read my short stories and talk about the state of the short story in the UK. I was asked to do a blog post for their ‘Voices Magazine’ based on questions the editor sent me.
A brief snip…
‘You could perhaps draw the following analogy to compare the two: a short story would be like producing a photograph, while a novel would be more like making a film. A photographer will be thinking about every tiny detail in the frame and how it conveys meaning. It can be a character portrait or a moment captured in time. The novel, like a film, can take us on a journey, capture many lives, cover lifetimes/generations, discuss a society or the history of a culture. For example, when I wanted to capture what it was like for a whole generation of children to grow up in Northern Ireland knowing nothing else but The Troubles, I knew that this had to be done in a novel. To describe the day-to-day life and the cumulative effect of living in fear, on one boy, his family and the community at large, the reader needed to spend time with that boy, in that community.’
Read more here. Find out about my short story class in London on Novemeber 7th here.
I’m Associate Director at the wonderful Word Factory. If you love short stories you should come along to the monthly event to hear the best short story writers in the world read their work and discuss the form.
Each month Word Factory produces a list of short story submission opportunities for writers and there’s also links to interesting resources. These are taken from my blog for writers which you find and have a look here.
Get writing! Get submitting! Get published!
‘That Killer First Page’, my class on the short story, has now sold out in Bath on Oct 17. It’s been quite a run… sold out in Belfast, Cork, Waterstones Piccadilly and Writers Victoria, Melbourne, where it broke records by selling out in 20 minutes!
If you missed your chance in Bath you could always try Brighton. I’ll be teaching the class for New Writing South writer development agency on October 10. Click here to find out more.
Don’t forget I’m judging the Penny Dreadful Novella Prize alongside Sarah Baume and Colin Barrett and am the sole judge of the Bare Fiction Short Story Prize.
Paul McVeigh 