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Doing Creative Writing

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a guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students

Can creative writing actually be taught? Well – judging from the number of college and university courses devoted to the subject, and the number of books written about it, the answer appears to be ‘Why not?’ Steve May teaches at Bath Spa University , and Doing Creative Writing is an attempt to support students whilst they choose a suitable course, what to expect when they embark on it, how to organise themselves as writers, and what possibilities exist for a writer once the course has finished.

Doing Creative WritingApart from having the desire to write, not many students know what is involved in the process. His first two chapters argue the case for teaching creative writing against the advice of such lofty figures as Henry James, who believed that it could not be taught.

He uses music as an analogy: nobody would expect to pick up a clarinet (as they might a pen) and perform a Mozart concerto without learning how to play the instrument first.

The next section will be of vital interest to anyone planning to study creative writing in higher education. He looks at the way it is taught in the US and the UK; he explains the variety of reasons why such courses are offered; and he provides guidance for judging the calibre of the people teaching the subject. Not many people realise that some of the best ‘qualified’ (published writers) might well be employed on a part-time basis and paid at hourly rates.

When you’ve enrolled on your course, what can you expect to happen? You’ll have to get used to the idea of the seminar or workshop in which you’ll be expected to present your own work and have it discussed by fellow students. He gives advice on how to handle the feedback you will be given – and how to give your own when you in your turn become ‘the audience’.

He tackles head-on the often vexed issue of assessment in creative work. Be warned! These workshops might form part of your assessment – so don’t think these sessions are an easy option where you can sit back and just listen. He shows real-life examples of the criteria UK and US institutions use, and he emphasises the element of self-assessment or reflective writing which is common to both.

The last part of the book is dedicated to the techniques of creative writing – where to write, how to write, what to write about, what materials to use, and how to present the finished work.

He also includes some real-life case studies of students who have taken creative writing courses and the variety of paths their careers have taken; and finally there’s a useful bunch of recommendations for further reading.

This is a useful adjunct to books which focus on the techniques of creative writing (such as Ailsa Cox’s recent Writing Short Stories) and it’s obviously aimed at students with ambitions in creative writing course who may not know which course to choose – or what to expect when they get there.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Steve May, Doing Creative Writing, London: Routledge, 2007, pp.152, ISBN: 0415402392

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Metamorphosis and Other Stories

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Franz Kafka is one of the most original and idiosyncratic writers of the twentieth century. He published very little during his own lifetime; he lived for literature (in fact he said “I am literature”); he wasn’t formally a great novelist or writer of short stories; and yet he put his stamp on literature to such an extent that his name has become an adjective – and we now speak of Kafkaesque situations and circumstances.

The Metamorphosis and Other StoriesThese tend to be scenarios in which the individual is trapped in madly contradictory situations, confronted by bureaucratic and totalitarian forces over which he has no control. That’s why Kafka’s reputation soared in the 1930s and 1940s. He prophesied the sort of state which condemned individuals as guilty – but didn’t tell them of what they were being accused. He spelled out the mad logic of the show trials long before they took place, and he is quite rightly regarded as a precursor of modern existentialism..

Metamorphosis is a superb piece of imaginative fiction. A young commercial salesman wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into giant insect. He is horrified – and so is his family, who shun him, neglect him, and eventually kill him. The tale admits to several levels of interpretation, and like most pieces of rich fiction it is dense with contextual symbols, metaphors, and suggestive allusions.

This collection also includes three other major short works – The Judgement, In the Penal Colony, and Letter to his Father. The first was written in a single creative burst during one night and concerns an Oedipal conflict between father and son which ends with the father condemning the son to death. The second is a horrifying account of someone undergoing torture in a way which prophecies what was to happen in the concentration camps (of both Russia and Germany) only a few years later. The famous letter to his father (which was never posted) is yet another a soul-searching psychological investigation of the relation between father and son. And for those who have not come across the lighter side of his writing, there’s also a collection of his first-ever published works – fragmentary pieces, to which he gives the title ‘Meditations’.

I was glad to see that in his introduction, Ritchie Robertson mentioned Nadine Gordimer’s magnificent short story Letter to his Son, which presents his father Herman Kafka’s hypothetical response to his neurotic son’s letter from beyond the grave. It’s a marvellous presentation of the other side of the picture.

The translation notes make very pertinent reference to the difficulty of rendering Kafka’s extraordinarily complex syntax. His writing is an odd mixture of startlingly dramatic images or situations, surrounded by endlessly convoluted descriptions and speculations, with deeply nested conditional clauses that can lead on from one page to the next in huge Teutonic paragraphs.

These new editions from OUP offer full value in terms of critical apparatus surrounding the text. There’s a lengthy introduction, a chronology of Kafka’s life, an essay on the new translation, explanatory notes, and an extended bibliography. This volume is an ideal starting point for anyone who has not read Kafka before.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.146, ISBN 0199238553

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The Diary of a Man of Fifty

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tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty first appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Macmillan’s Magazine for July 1879. The first English book version appeared later the same year in the collection The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales published by Macmillan.

The Diary of a Man of Fifty

The setting – Florence

The Diary of a Man of Fifty – critical commentary

This tale is one of James’ least-known stories, and he didn’t even include it in the twenty-four volume New York Edition of his Novels and Tales (1907-09). It’s also rather unusual, because it’s written in the form of a journal. James normally liked to keep the narrative and the point of view tightly under his own control in the form of a first person or omniscient third person narrator. The only other instances of his using the diary and journal forms in his tales were A Landscape Painter (1866), A Light Man (1869), and The Impressions of a Cousin (1883).

The General is very forcibly struck by the parallels between his own situation and Stanmer’s. The General was in love with the beautiful Countess twenty-five years previously, and now he meets young Stanmer who is enchanted by her equally alluring daughter, and who bears the same name – Bianca. The General felt betrayed by the Countess when she married his rival, Count Camerino, and he feels that Stanmer is likely to be ill-treated by Bianca in the same way – though he has no evidence to support this notion.

Stanmer feels that the General is pursuing the ‘analogy’ too far, and resists the attempts to persuade him of any danger. And in the end, Stanmer does marry Bianca, and he is happy according to his own report. So for once in these cautionary tales about the dangers of marriage, the protagonist’s fears seem to be overturned. The General is left wondering what might have been, and the reader is left wondering if he is another candidate for James’s collection of unreliable narrators – a man who is so blinded by his own past experience and lack of real perception that he is unable to correctly interpret the world he inhabits.

It is difficult to form a clear judgement on this issue – because we do not have sufficient independent evidence. But it is worth noting (in the balance of its being a ‘cautionary tale’) that both the Countess and her daughter Bianca ‘lose’ three husbands between them – all of whom die in duels brought about because of rivalry and jealousy. So no matter what we think in the choice between Stanmer and the General, the state of matrimony is depicted as a zone of conflict and potential death.

Study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Diary of a Man of Fifty Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Diary of a Man of Fifty Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Diary of a Man of Fifty – Classic Reprint edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Diary of a Man of Fifty – Kindle edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Diary of a Man of Fifty – eBook formats at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty

The Diary of a Man of Fifty – plot summary

An English army general of fifty-two returns to Florence twenty-five years after a romance with Countess Falvi, a woman who has died ten years previously. He revisits the places they used to frequent together.

He then meets Edmund Stanmer, a young English traveller of twenty-five who is acquainted with the Countess’s daughter Bianca. The General takes a liking to him, feeling that he is a reminder of his younger self.

Stanmer arranges a meeting between Bianca and the General, who is at first reluctant to follow it through, because his memories of her mother are that she was a dangerous woman.

However, when he goes to see Bianca the next day she is charming and attractive. They reminisce about her mother. Bianca lost her own father when she was young; her mother re-married, and she also lost her own husband three years previously.

The following day the General warns Stanmer that Bianca is an actress and a coquette, just like her mother. Stanmer resents the comparison and wants to know what the mother did to hurt the general – but he initially passes up on the opportunity to hear what it was.

Next evening at the Casa Salvi the General learns that Bianca’s stepfather was killed in a duel. They discuss Stanmer together , and Bianca asks the general to ‘explain’ her to his young friend.

The General continues to warn Stanmer about Bianca, but admits that he finds her fascinating. He then stays away from the Casa Salvi for a while, uncertain about his intentions regarding Stanmer.

But then Stanmer demands to know what happened between the General and the countess. The General reveals that he was jealous of Count Camerino, who was a suitor to the Countess, and who killed her husband in a duel caused by jealous rivalry – though another man (acting as his second) was deemed responsible. The General was horrified when the Countess married the man who had killed her own husband, and he left Florence, never to see her again.

The General takes his leave of Bianca, who reproaches him for having deserted her mother at a time when she needed a protector.

The general later hears that Stanmer married Bianca. The two men meet again in London some time later, where Stanmer tells the General that he was wrong about his account of the Countess, and that maybe she really did need his protection. This causes the general to doubt his own judgement, and he thinks it might be possible that he has made a mistake.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Principal characters
General — an un-named former soldier from the English army in India (52)
Edmund Stanmer a young Englishman (25)
Countess Salvi-Scarabelli the General’s former amorata
Bianca Scarabelli her beautiful daughter
Count Salvi the Countess’s former jealous husband
Count Camerino the general’s rival, and second husband to the Countess

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

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Henry James What Masie KnewWhat Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Henry James – web links

Henry James web links Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

Henry James web links The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

Henry James web links The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

Red button A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

Henry James web links The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Henry James web links Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James web links Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

Henry James web links The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Henry James web links The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James web links Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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The Piazza Tales

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classic short stories, tales, and novellas

Piazza Tales is a collection of herman Melville’s shorter fiction. He started writing short stories as a desperate commercial venture to provide for his family, following the disastrous reception of Moby Dick on its first publication in 1851. His career as a writer had been in something of a steady decline from the start, and yet as he became less and less successful, he produced the works for which he is now held in the very highest regard – as a great artist who could tap into the fundamentals of the American nineteenth century psyche.

The Piazza TalesHis stories are clouded in ambiguity and steeped in multiple levels of complexity. They have narrators whose intentions are not clear.They are often stories with very little narrative in the normal sense of that term. ‘A Paradise of Bachelors’ is little more than an account of a lavish dinner party in London’s Inns of court related in mock-heroic terms. Its companion piece ‘The Tartarus of Maids’ is the report of a visit to a paper mill.

The narrator of ‘Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!’ is shaken out of a misanthropic mood by the cheerful crowing of a neighbour’s cockerel. But when he eventually decides to buy the bird for its life-affirming powers, its owner dies – and so does the bird.

‘Bartelby the Scrivener’, one of his most famous stories, is startling in its simplicity. An elderly Wall Street solicitor employs a younger man as a clerk to copy legal documents. Bartelby works in complete isolation, and lives on nothing but ginger biscuits, sleeping in the office. But then he stops working, meeting every request to do so with the mantra “I prefer not to”. The solicitor is driven to good-natured despair, and finally has to move office in order to be rid of him. Bartelby is eventually placed in prison where he starves himself – and dies.

Melville’s prose is so allusive, so embedded with metaphors and symbols that it often seems that whilst writing about one thing he is actually talking about another. In ‘I and My Chimney’ for instance a man has a house with an enormous chimney. He takes laboured and curmudgeonly pride in the way it dominates the architecture of the entire building. But his wife, who restlessly devises new schemes for ‘improvement’, wants it pulled down. A struggle takes place between them, which he wins by stubbornly refusing to change his views.

It’s impossible to escape the interpretation that the chimney (and the house itself) represents the narrator’s (and the author’s) psyche, over which he wishes to assert his autonomy. And you don’t need a brass plaque on your front door to realise that it is also a commanding phallic symbol.

This collection includes two of Melville’s most accessible masterpieces. Benito Cereno is his re-telling of a historical incident involving a revolt on board a Spanish slave ship. The tale (a novella) is a study in sustained irony of the most chilling kind. Melville tells the story backwards by describing events as perceived by one ship’s captain when he goes to help the other. Everything he sees is menacing and inexplicable. Only when a disaster is narrowly averted is the reason for and the true horror of these mysterious conditions revealed.

The second novella is Billy Budd another apparently simple story with a naval setting. Billy Budd is a popular young sailor who is impressed into service on a British warship. His good looks and his naivety become the focus of malevolent attention from the ship’s master-at-arms, who falsely reports him to the captain for plotting a mutiny.

When confronted with this accusation, Billy becomes tongue-tied and strikes the master-at-arms with a blow that kills him. The captain is very sympathetic to Billy, but feels compelled to uphold the absolute code of military discipline. Billy is condemned to death and hanged the next morning.

This is a tale that has been interpreted in many ways – the most popular of which is Billy as Adam, fallen from paradise and grace into a cruel world. Claggart, the master-at-arms is seen as the devil or serpent – the embodiment of evil. And the ship’s captain, Vere, as a God-like figure, torn between paternal love and the need to exert justice.

Three of these stories have become landmarks of nineteenth century American literature. All of them are worth reading – and there is an added bonus, Melville has an amazingly rich prose style which combines a rich vocabulary, a slightly archaic form of syntax, and an amazingly flexible narrative voice in which he thinks out loud, talks to his characters, asks himself questions, and speculates freely about the very stories he is telling.

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.410, ISBN: 0199538913

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The Short Story an Introduction

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wide-ranging survey of story types and subjects

The structure of this introductory study of the short story as a literary genre is twenty short chapters, each one dealing with a different theme – character, orality, modernism, minimalism, urbanity, and so on. And each theme is explored with reference to three or four short stories considered in some depth. The advantage of this approach is that Paul March-Russell covers many neglected aspects of the short story: why it has declined commercially; how its reputation is propped up by university creative writing courses; and what has been the role of the little magazine in keeping it alive.

The Short Story an introductionThe disadvantage is that sometimes it seems as if everything is being skimmed over in a rather superficial manner. The other strength which is also a weakness is the sheer range of his examples – which is obviously the result of very wide reading.

He cover a huge variety of writers from America and Europe across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond. The names stream off the page at a bewildering rate. I suspect that this will inspire many young would-be writers to read more widely – which is the good part. But I sometimes wished he would dwell longer and explore fewer writers in more depth.

He also has the odd habit of mixing historical periods and writers without any restraint. Even his conglomerations of examples – J.P.Hebel, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Alan Poe – are bizarrely listed out of chronological order.

He considers all the possible variants of the short story – the parable, fable, folk tale, creation myth, and what he calls the ‘art tale’ – the conscious literary contrivance which he claims bridges the gap between the folk tale and the modern short story.

He also deals with the riddle as a sub-genre of the short story – one thing described as if it were something else, as if two non-identical things were the same. But I think he’s mistaken to include the novella as if it merely a long story.

As one chapter follows relentlessly after another – post modernism, minimalism, post colonialism – it becomes apparent that he is cataloguing his reading experience by its subject matter or the literary fashion to which authors have been ascribed. This impression is reinforced by the fact that there is no summarising chapter. He does not draw any general conclusions or produce any synthesis of his arguments.

In later parts of the book his themes – the city, the individual character – are examined with reference to novels and novellas, as well as stories, in a way which seems to confirm that he is more concerned with making use of his undoubtedly wide reading experience, rather than concentrating on the subject in hand – the short story.

This is a book with almost too much substance for its own good – too many illustrative examples – and too little concise argument. [I suspect it’s a re-vamped PhD thesis.] But if it leads readers on to further explorations of the neglected short story as a literary genre, that would be no bad thing.

One of his best chapters challenges the orthodoxy of Edgar Alan Poe’s theory of the short story (that it should be tightly focussed on unity of effect) and he even offers a defense of the much criticised O. Henry. There’s also an interesting chapter on the state of the short story in the UK today- which might well give aspirant writers pause for thought.

The good thing about these disparate reflections is that they do throw up many interesting topics which literary studies students can take further. As an introductory study, it fulfills that function well.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp.291, ISBN: 074862774X

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The Short Story: the reality of artifice

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the history and development of the short story genre

In this classic study of the short story, Charles May traces its development as a genre from its origins as a Renaissance conte to its maturity in the twentieth century. Of course single episodes extracted from texts as old as the Bible and the Koran might have features in common with the short story, but May identifies Boccaccio and Chaucer in the fourteenth century as the first writers of shorter fiction to move out of the mythic and supernatural towards the realistic mode. He places these at the beginning of a first chapter which provides an overview, from the fourteenth century to the present day.

The Short Story: the reality of artificeThis sets out the ground for what follows. The short story as a literary form in its own right really begins in the nineteenth century. I was surprised at the omission of E.T.A.Hoffmann, but he settles quickly into his stride with Gogol, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of course Edgar Allan Poe, who both wrote stories and theorised about the form too.

He offers interesting reasons to support his claim that the short story took off most emphatically in the US (no copyright agreements at the time) but most of his attention is focussed on to a close examination of seminal examples – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s’Young Goodman Brown’, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and Herman Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener’ – all of which, as he rightly points out, combine elements of the allegory and an almost supernatural element, along with a realistic surface.

By combining the code-bound conventions of allegory and romance with the contextually based realistic conventions of the novel, Hawthorne creates a story that has both the unity of allegory, held together by a powerful idea and an overall intentional pattern, and the hallucinatory effect of dream reality, made realistic by psychological plausibility and the specificity of concrete detail – all elements of short fiction that have persisted to the present day.

Having established these ground rules, he moves quickly through the rest of the nineteenth century figures who developed the form – Ambrose Bierce, O.Henry, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad – with a very persuasive reading of ‘The Secret Sharer’.

It was Anton Checkhov who is credited with posing the modern alternative to the whiplash ending or the surprise denouement which had been the norm until the end of the nineteenth century (including Guy de Maupassant, who is not mentioned). Checkhov introduced mood, tone, understatement, and careful selection of impressionistic detail as a substitutes for plot and dramatic incident.

James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson seem oddly to bring the century to an end rather than to start a new one – but May’s reading of ‘The Dead’ is exemplary.

Moving into the twentieth century proper, he sees Hemingway as a natural descendant of Checkhov – a creator of dialogue which implies much more than it says on the surface, a master of understatement.

His other central figures of mid-century are writers who I sense are not much read these days – Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, and Eudora Welty. Time will tell if their influence was important or not.

The principal omissions so far as the development of the modern short story is concerned are Virginia Woolf and Nadine Gordimer – but that’s just my opinion.

May comes up to date with a round-up of influential short story writers of the last quarter of a century – Jorge Luis Borges, John Cheever, He makes a particularly large claim for the importance of Raymond Carver.

He ends with a chapter which traces the development of criticism of the short story from Poe to the present. This will be of particular interest to the audience at whom this study is aimed – teachers and students at undergraduate level.

There’s a very useful chronology, giving dates of significant publications, full notes and references. and annotated suggestions for further reading. Despite the obvious US weighting here, for anyone who needs an overview of the short story and an insight into its development as a literary form, this is an excellent place to start.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Charles E. May, The Short Story: the reality of artifice, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.160, ISBN: 041593883X

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Writing Short Stories

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creative theory and practical writing techniques

Can creative writing actually be taught? There is some debate about this question, but the number of university departments devoted to the subject is expanding so rapidly, many people must believe it’s possible. And why not? After all, we believe that the skills of painting, music, and architecture can be taught, don’t we. Ailsa Cox teaches creative writing, and this book is her version of an academic seminar – analysing the details of stories, then suggesting exercises which students (or readers) might complete to develop their own ability in writing short stories

writing short stories She kicks off with a good shot at defining the short story. How short is short? How long can a story be before it becomes a novella or a short novel? There are no simple answers to these questions. As soon as you think of an answer, you’ll realise there are exceptions. But she explains what most stories have in common. She sets out a series of chapters which explore various types of short story: the suspenseful narrative, the fantasy, the comic yarn, and so on. Her approach is to explain the genre, outline its rules so far as they might exist, then look in detail at examples from masters of the short story, from Edgar Allen Poe to contemporary writers such as Stephen King and even her own work.

She deals with the plotless story – the ‘epiphany’ as deployed by James Joyce in ‘The Dead’ and Katherine Mansfield in ‘Bliss’. Actually, she skids around quite a bit from one genre to another – from the tall tale, to the horror story, and back again via the anecdote – but there are lots of examples enthusiastically presented in such a way that I imagine they will appeal to the aspirant writers at whom the book is aimed.

She’s very keen on fantasy and science fiction, so Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ are given close scrutiny, alongside stories by H.G.Wells and William Gibson. Each chapter ends with a series of practical exercises. These are designed to provide ideas and prompts for the would-be writer – to start the imaginative pump working.

She makes a reasonable case for considering the higher journalism as a form of creative writing, and rightly points out that some of the best reportage can be considered as short stories if seen in a different light (or published somewhere other than in newspapers). She’s not so convincing on her claims for erotic fiction, but fortunately she redeems herself by a sensitive reading of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’.

The book ends with several useful lists of resources for writers: magazines in print and online which accept short stories; prizes for short story writers; and organisations and databases – though for the ultimate list of resources readers will still need to consult The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook or The Writer’s Handbook.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Writing Short Stories   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Ailsa Cox, Writing Short Stories, London: Routledge, 2005, pp.197, ISBN: 0415303877

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