The little red light came on. Fassbinder confronted them in all his exquisite, controlled violence. It was very late when he was done. Jonna switched on the lamp, slipped the cassette into its cover, and put it on the shelf labelled “Fassbinder”.
“Mari,” she said, “are you unhappy that we don’t see people?”
“No, not any more.”
“That’s good. I mean, if we did see them, what would it be like? Like always, exactly like always. Pointless chatter about inessentials. No composition, no guiding idea. No theme. Isn’t that right? We know roughly what everyone will say; we know each other inside out. But here on our videos every remark is significant, nothing is arbitrary. Everything is considered and well formulated.”
“All the same,” said Mari, “sometimes one of us might say something unexpected, something that didn’t fit, something really out of the ordinary that made you sit up and take notice. You know, something irrational.”
“Yes, I know. But make no mistake: great directors know all about the irrational. You talk about things that don’t fit – they use such things, with a purpose, as an essential part of the whole. Do you know what I mean? Apparent quirkiness but with a point. They know exactly what they’re doing.”
“But they’ve had time,” Mari objected. “We don’t always have time to think, we just live! Of course a filmmaker can depict what you call quirkiness, but it’s still just canned. We’re in the moment. Maybe I haven’t thought this through… Jonna, these films of yours are fantastic, they’re perfect. But when we get involved in them as totally as we do, isn’t that dangerous?”
“How do you mean, dangerous?”
“Doesn’t it diminish other things?”
“No. Really good films don’t diminish anything, they don’t close things off. On the contrary, they open up new insights, they make new thoughts thinkable. They crowd us, they deflate our slovenly lifestyle, our thoughtless way of chattering and pissing away our time and energy and passion. Believe me, films can teach us a huge amount. And they give us a true picture of the way life is.”
Mari laughed. “Of our slovenly lifestyle, you mean? You mean, maybe they can teach us to piss our lives away with a little more intelligence, a little more elegance?”
“Don’t be an ass. You know perfectly well…”
Mari interrupted. “And if film is some kind of edifying god, wouldn’t it be dangerous to try and emulate your gods, always knowing that you’re coming up short? That everything you do is somehow badly directed?”

I give him a lift with the old unit, down the stairs and into his van.

When we return to the upper room where the work is going on there is a huge hole in the outer wall where the window used to be. It’s cold outside, and outside is inside now. Kevin rubs his hands together and I smile, knowing what he means.

“You begin in the cold,” I tell him, “and gradually shut it out as the job progresses.”

“Yes.”

Pause.

“There’s an old French story,” he says. “The wood warms you three times. When you chop it; when you bring it inside; and finally, when you burn it in the stove.”

“In Solzhenitsyn’s novel,” I tell him, “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the prisoners march for ever to get to the Gulag, eventually stopping in an open plane where there is nothing but the howling of wolves and a wind and snow-covered waste-land as far as the eye can see. And then they have to set about building the camp that will house them so they may survive another day.”

I went into the cinema wondering if I would be able to take two hours of bits and pieces and came out wondering why I haven’t been to Paris recently. Time to get a trip together, methinks.

The opening story, Lasiren by Mandy Sutter introduces us to a small child who needs the help of a mermaid to conquer her fear of water. There were moments when the story lost me because I ceased to believe that the child was so young. And again, two consecutive paragraphs, both beginning with something seen “by the base of one of the trees”, called my attention to the inexperience of the writer, particularly in the editing department. Super story, though, and from someone with more than her fair share of talent.

Sidura Ludwig’s story, Ten Ways to Better Customer Relations, introduces us to Cathy, who runs a small card shop, handmade jewellery, scented candles, some body products, things to make people feel good. Only by the end of the story did I realise she had been showing us a mirror filled with loneliness. This is a theme recollected again in Ludwig’s second story, Interlake Evergreens, where a man caught between a wife with Alzheimer’s and a new lover, tries to maintain his own sense of self.

Polly Wright can write:

I catch her staring at me while I’m unwrapping the mini chocolate swiss rolls.
I say ‘What?’ and she says, ‘That’s a nice top, dear.’ But I know that’s not what she’s thinking. She’s thinking I look a mess. Mum keeps up standards in the clothes department. She’s wearing her pleated skirt and Aran cardigan and paisley green and cream scarf tied in a knot. Her shoes are very good. Rounded court design with a blocky sort of heel in rich tan. She’s had them for years, but they’ve kept their shape. Mum’s a great advert for the shoetree.

Wright’s Shropshire Gold looks at the long aftermath of an abortion and teeters, unfortunately, because her writing is strong, on the wrong side of that thin line which separates inhibition from sentimentality.

This is the voice of Myra Connell, the fourth contributor to this collection:

There are family photographs all over the house, but they are gathered, as if on a shrine, on these two walls facing each other across the stairs. Several show Heidi at her wedding: she wears a short salmon-pink shift dress in a heavy brocade. It has a high neck and long sleeves, and it doesn’t suit her. She looks ungainly, and the dress seems an odd choice; but in another picture it is clear, from the way he has his hand on her belly and she looks up at him so proudly, that she was pregnant at her wedding. In all of these photos she looks outrageously happy, she smiles and smiles and smiles.

I love that: outrageously happy. If you’re going to use an adjective, save it for something like that.

Myra Connell also provides the key story in this volume with the last narrative in the collection, a brave story set around the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre, entitled, Hero.

People are still out, walking and jogging and skating. But everything has sobered up. The things that seemed fun before, the things that people chased hoping they would make them happy, the gadgets and the pretty clothes and the brand-name trainers, and the shows and the bars and the balls games, all that no longer seems to matter.

Short stories are not something I’d choose to read instead of novels – I always have at least one of those on the go – but they are something I like to read alongside novels because the two narrative forms offer such different pleasures. When reading a novel I often want to become engrossed, to lose myself – in other words to indulge in a form of escapism – but when reading a short story, I want not so much to escape from life as to engage with it.

Lesley Glaister

I should have known at that point that I’d be starting a new story. When I was younger it was characters who came to life first — now, it’s settings. Within a few days of coming home I had a character who wasn’t particularly fazed by trees in her town giving way to blue sky and asphalt, and who really didn’t understand why anyone else would be. As I read indignant letters to the newspaper editor from my fellow townspeople and wondered why no one had yet mentioned Dr. Seuss’ Lorax, I thought about this character, who said, flat out, that she spoke for the cars, not the trees.

That was two weeks and 14,000 words ago.

Some have said that writing is like an archaeology dig. You walk into your square with a set of tiny brushes, and let what you uncover dictate where your brush goes next. Maybe you know from previous digs what you are likely to find, but it’s never exactly what you’d predict – and there are always good and bad surprises. That’s the way it is for me.

Had anyone asked me three weeks ago, I wouldn’t have known that I’d be writing about someone trying to baptize themselves in a hotel swimming pool. Or an unemployed man who’s gotten himself into some trouble, and isn’t sure how to get out of it. Or a girl’s birthday party at a bowling alley where the smell of pizza fills the parking lot. Or little cans of energy drinks with six exclamation points in their names. Or people who brush their teeth while they drive.

I don’t know what’s coming tomorrow, or the day after that. I can’t wait to find out, though. I don’t write because I’m a master storyteller. I write because I love stories, and I’m fascinated by how, a good deal of the time, there really is something worthy underneath all that dirt.

Erin writes short stories and novels. She blogs at: http://www.rarelylikable.com

When I started writing (short stories) I used to carry a notebook around and make endless notes: ideas for current works in progress; ideas for new stories; overheard conversations. I still carry a notebook but rarely make notes. They tend now to be from books I am reading, a particular word I like, or a style element. Whilst research can trigger story development ideas, I discovered fairly early on that too much research and too many notes can become more of a time-wasting procrastination exercise than a contribution to progress. For me it’s not so much the characters who take on a life of their own as the story itself. Like most writers, I have far more ideas than I could ever turn into stories. It’s when an idea refuses to go away; when the story itself takes on an embryonic life and nags to be written that I have do something about it. It’s one of the most fascinating and intriguing things about being involved in the creative process. My first piece of creative work was a film. Situations arose that weren’t ordered by me or thought up by me. They simply arrived, looking for all the world like I’d been smart enough to consciously think of them. Writing is far more of an individual journey and these connections, coincidences, signals that I’m on the right track, never fail to fascinate me and are a huge part of the addiction.

Getting the story flowing isn’t straightforward, especially when writing has to be fitted in with work, family and the rest of life. Martin Amis said recently ‘your unconscious does it. Your unconscious does it all.’ I completely agree. When a story is in full flow I find myself in the happy state of waking up with the next scene in my head waiting to be written down. All I have to do is get up and write it out with little, if any, conscious effort at all. Before I get to that stage it’s a matter of turning up. Experience has taught me that there will be bad days, bad weeks, but so long as I keep going the words will, one day, flow again. When I’ve left the desk to do something completely different, the subconscious, churns away behind the scenes. The sound of a voice, a piece of dialogue, the opening line of the whole book, a resolution, a need to cut out a whole scene will pop up as if from nowhere. I have never been able to go out for a walk, say, to think over a scene. I either have to be writing down words or thinking I’m thinking about something entirely unrelated.

The best way for me to start is to get my characters up and speaking. No lengthy character profiles, often using random names that might stick or be changed later. I’ll do several chapters trying to keep to dialogue. Snippets of description will creep in, to be enhanced or deleted later. Chunks of plodding exposition will always get through. I see them more as notes to self rather than part of the finished story, to be deleted later or changed into dialogue. In the first quarter of the first draft I’m finding out what it’s about as I go. The only thing I have to do is keep going. My writing methods are constantly evolving. My first published novel was written using few of the craft techniques and little plotting, but with detailed character profiles and piles and piles of research notes. It went through at least 6 full rewrites. As I’ve become more experienced I want to cut down the rewrites. For my latest novel it would be possible to spend months and months on lovely research but I’m holding back as best I can. For the first time I’ve diagrammed out 12 or so scenes with the opening, the point of no return, the big complication, the climax and the end. These have already evolved in some places but the bigger structure remains in place. At the final rewrite I’ll check for colour, light and wind (any breath of movement I find very effective at bringing scenes to life). As for the completed novel, I agree with Susan Hill, who said recently that she sees hers as a creature apart which goes off on its own journey to make its way in the world.

Amanda Mann has published two mass-market paperback novels and two non-fiction lifestyle books. She blogs at: Confessions of An Author.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist (Purple Hibiscus) talks of a sense of loss because of the lack of a bridge between the dying oral traditions and the novel in Nigeria.

Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) regards himself as coming from the oral tradition of Sri Lanka.

Perhaps a nation that is developing (from one thing into another) needs to lose as much of the old as possible in order to gain space for the new?

At first glance story telling is a performance art, like poetry, but on closer examination one has to remember that poetry is actually closer to music, which leaves story telling in the realm of theatre.

I have not been successfully initiated into this oral tradition since the days of my childhood. I love the novel and often find myself involved by poetry. There is something about the written word that stimulates me to life, that wakes me up and sets the blood coursing through my veins. But oral story-tellers just put me to sleep.

I was told that I should only watch out for the best story-tellers, that I had been subjecting myself to story-tellers without talent, without experience. So I went only to those story-tellers who were claimed to be the best.

I’ve stopped going now, because even the best ones put me to sleep. I don’t want to be told stories any more.

Am I missing something?