Short Fiction

Recently, I’ve become fascinated with the short story form. There’s something endlessly delightful about what happens when a writer takes a moment, a situation, or a small piece of a larger world, and holds it up to the light.

Not only this, but, in a short story, there’s nowhere for a sentence to hide. Every sentence has the capacity to do something remarkable, transformative even. Every sentence can shift our understanding, reveal something surprising, change the atmosphere, or move the story (or our thoughts or feelings) somewhere unexpected.

But short fiction can also be wild and wonderfully free. A story doesn’t have to explain everything or follow a single formula. Sometimes a few lines are enough to create a whole world. Sometimes the story needs many more pages to build that world. A well-placed piece of dialogue can tell us more than a paragraph of description. And sometimes a story creates a kind of veil between the reader and the world, opening up a whole new perspective or valuable insight. Something that makes us stop, listen, re-evaluate.

The young writers whose stories appear in this section demonstrate just how many different forms storytelling can take. Their writings range across action, drama, mystery, science fiction and dystopian genres, use clever metaphors and plot twists, and including a short play as well as longer prose pieces extracted from larger works. Each young writer whose work is published here gives us a glimpse into the ways that imagination can be given form in short fiction. Each writer is in the process of learning their craft, and thus if we read their work as if we are also writers (which of course many of us are), then there is much to learn from the writing shared here.

For now, I want to turn my attention to each young writer’s work: to acknowledge what each achieves in their writing, to identify what is distinctive and what there is to commend, and to consider briefly the qualities each writer brings to their work.

This section opens with Iver’s delightfully clever and carefully crafted, “Potato Chip Plunder”. I love the way Iver keeps the narrative moving forward with the use of extended military metaphor while allowing the reader only gradually to realise the identity of the first-person narrator. Iver sustains the metaphor consistently throughout the piece so that it is able to carry the entire narrative logic of the story.

“Landcruiser Sahara ZX Dunebashing” by Agaran Rubakumar is a fun and dynamic account of a family’s day out in the desert in their four-wheel drive. Agaran’s sentences capture the immediacy of the experience, and his delight in the story he is telling is clear. Agaran has also illustrated the story with his own drawings (something we love to encourage at Word Oysters magazine).

Other writers build larger fictional worlds. Kat Frayer’s mythological “How the Dark and Light Halves Were Formed” establishes gods, magical powers, battles, territories – a whole cast of characters and scenarios with world-changing consequences. Kat’s story is ambitious from conception to conclusion, and navigates some fairly challenging story-telling territory, particularly when both ideas and action need to be made clear enough for the narrative to unfold in all its complexity.

Lachlan Howard’s “Last Cognition” plunges us into an extended dystopian science-fiction world of resistance robots, battles, new technologies, aliens and shifting alliances. The freedom and excitement with which Lachlan writes shows us some of the pleasure of creating a world with its own history, rules, and possibilities. At the same time, Lachlan’s wonderful imagination brings into view some of the challenges storytellers face when producing longer works of fiction: how, for example, can we create compelling action sequences while also locating those moments within a complex web of events, histories, relationships, and shifting time frames, so that the reader can follow not only what’s happening, but how it connects to the larger story?

In “Race Against Time”, Eliza Brenan gives us the first part of her longer story about Aziza and Chafik, young Egyptian twins who live with their grandparents after the disappearance of their archaeologist parents. Eliza draws us into their world through light and lively dialogue, bringing her characters to life while moving the story forward with charm and control. Dialogue is the engine of the story: through what Aziza, Chafik and the other characters say, we discover their personalities, relationships, ways of seeing the world and the circumstances in which they live. In this way, Eliza shows us the possibilities of dialogue as a storytelling tool: it can carry character, reveal a world and propel a narrative, often all at once.

In her second instalment of the Skylar Banks story, Aurora Cridland navigates a wild, magical world with wit and intelligence. Her story is full of animated dialogue, which she uses to create a compelling and vibrant portrait of her protagonist. She also handles the story’s disorienting fictional landscape with a sure sense of narrative movement, drawing us into Skylar’s increasingly uncertain experience of what is real.

There is a lovely poise and care in Gabrielle Brenan’s writing in “The Flame”. Each word, each phrase, seems to have been chosen to direct the reader’s attention both to the unfolding of the plot and the resonant, thick-with-emotional-depth construction of character and meaning. In this way, Gabrielle’s measured prose is able to lay out the inner workings of mind and feeling with conviction and grace. The story’s emotional centre is less about dramatic revelation and more to do with the textures of experience in that final recognition between a frightened child and the person who has come to find her.

With its classic mystery structure, Milan Kruger’s short play, “Murder at the Cinema” shows how a story can unfold when it has to come alive through actors, voices and action on a stage. Milan uses dialogue to drive an investigation forward, with information emerging through the characters’ questions, interviews and discoveries, while his stage directions give us the physical actions that accompany the words. Milan shows that writing for performance means thinking not only about what happens in a story, but about how an audience will experience it: what they see, hear and understand as the action unfolds.

Taken together, all these pieces of short fiction show us how tantalising stories can be: because of the things they can do, the ideas and questions they can set in motion, and the worlds they can create, complicate and invite us to lose ourselves in. And this is true not only for us as readers, but for us as writers too. Stories draw us in, but they also tempt us to make our own: to take an idea, a character, a moment, a strange possibility, and follow it somewhere we have never been before. That, perhaps, is one of the great pleasures of writings: discovering, through the act of making a story, what a story might be capable of.

There are many, many elements of skill and craft that need to be practised, played with, experimented with and enjoyed on the road to developing a distinctive storytelling voice. I’d like to end this introduction by offering you three things you might want to play with on your writing journey.

• Read like a writer. When a story grips you, don’t just notice that you love it. Notice the moment it gets you. Where did you become curious? Where did you start to worry about a character? Where did you suddenly see something differently? Then go back and look at what the writer actually did to make that happen. Did they withhold a piece of information? Begin the scene at an unexpected moment? Give you one strange, precise detail? Change the pace? Put you inside one character’s thoughts?

Now, try doing that thing in a story of your own. You are not copying the writer’s words or style. You are discovering another possibility for what writing can do.

• Listen to your dialogue. Say it aloud. Does each character sound like themselves? Step inside your character and imagine what it feels like to be that person with all their emotions, their memories, thoughts, worries, hopes and fears. Speak from there.

Note that people have different rhythms, favourite expressions, ways of avoiding questions and ways of saying one thing when they mean another. Think about what each character wants from the conversation (and what they don’t want the other person to know). Sometimes the most interesting part of dialogue is what remains unsaid. A character saying “I’m fine” may be telling us almost nothing about how they actually feel. Listen for the story underneath the words.

And remember the practical side of dialogue: when the speaker changes, start a new paragraph. Put spoken words inside quotation marks, and don’t feel that every line needs an elaborate dialogue tag. Often said is enough. You can also let a character’s actions carry the emotion rather than explaining it, for example: “I’m fine.” She picked up the cup with both hands. Let your reader notice what is happening.

• Play with perspective. Take one event and tell it from two different points of view. What does each character notice? What do they misunderstand? What does one character know that the other doesn’t? What might each of them be hiding from the reader (or from themselves)? Then try something stranger: tell the same moment from the point of view of someone who isn’t normally at the centre of the story. A stranger watching from across the street. A dog. A tree. An object sitting on the table. You may discover that changing who gets to tell the story changes the story in surprising ways.

And please, please keep sending us your stories. They can be short, long, complete, unfinished, part of something much bigger, funny, strange, serious or experimental. Word Oysters is a place to share your writing while you are still discovering what kind of writer you are.

Finally, please remember to keep your eyes peeled for more writing ideas and guides in the next issue of Word Oyster magazine!