An interview with celebrated short story writer Vicky Grut

The Milestone: How was your first entrance in the world of writing? Which one is your first story? Where was it published?

Author:  My first published story was one called ‘Three Bloody Stories’ and it appeared in 1994 in a beautifully produced, Arts-Council funded magazine called Metropolitan. I can still remember the thrill of receiving the letter from the two editors, Elizabeth Baines and Ailsa Cox, saying that they liked my story and wanted to publish it, and that I would be paid £40, as well as being invited to read at a bookshop launch in central London . It was a great way to start, and an important beak-through moment for me. After this I was able to get work included in several anthologies and collections, and I began to build my writers’ CV.

The Milestone: How do you find inspiration for writing?

Author: Stories spring from different sources. Last year I had a dream that was so startling it woke me up, and I ended up making a story from it, but that’s unusual. I’d say that stories are usually inspired either by an idea or by a feeling – and I hope any finished story will contain both elements.

            Sometimes the impetus comes from something I’ve read. I used to freelance as a copy-editor, and at one point I was working on article about trends in management theory. It was full of terms like ‘symbolic analysts’ and ‘portfolio people’; it said that in future career progression would be seen as a pool with a centre rather than a pyramid with a summit. The article inspired me to write a story about two people working in such an environment. ‘Downsizing’ was shortlisted for an Asham Award in 1999 and was published in an anthology by Serpents’ Tail in 2000.

            At other times a story comes out of something that happens to me directly, or from situations or feelings I observe in other people. For example, ‘Visitors’, the story that was published in last year’s Asham Award anthology from Bloomsbury, came from the experience of visiting my husband’s family in a small town in Wales over many years. For the purposes of the story I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be - not the people who get in the car and drive back to London at the end of a weekend - but the people who stay behind, wrestling with the confinements and frustrations of small town life.

The Milestone: What’s the difference between a short story and a flash fiction?

 Author:  Good question. Flash fiction – also called sudden or microfiction or short short stories – seems to be a relatively recent term. Most people agree that it’s anything less than 1,000 some say 1,500 words. It’s a form that’s clearly linked to the growing importance of the internet and other new media, although you can find examples of very economical stories written in pre-digital times. Both Chekhov and Kafka wrote some very short stories, and there’s the famous six-word story attributed to Hemingway: ‘For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.’

            Paradoxically, shorter stories seem to be better suited to bigger, bolder gestures – a big event, or even the shape of a whole life, whereas many longer stories focus on detailed explorations of  smaller units of time. James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, for example, is more than 30 pages long, and like a dance or a piece of music, it unfolds the events and emotional shifts of a single evening. Grace Paley has a wonderful story of a page and a half called ‘A Man told me the Story of his Life’.

            Some years ago, I tackled the challenge of writing a one-page story of no more than 300 words and I found it quite exhilarating. It makes you focus on the essentials. You can’t afford digressions; there’s very little room for mood or scene setting, and you can’t have a narrative with too many twists and turns. For me it really focused my attention on the essentials of the story skeleton. But we need longer form stories, too.  

The Milestone: Nowadays people are more interested in flash fiction. Why?

Author: I’m not sure I’d agree with this. It’s certainly true that when you browse the internet you’ll find many websites and e-zines devoted to flash fiction. This is perhaps because we live in a faster world, with more distractions. It’s also perhaps an indication that lots of people like to produce very short fiction. But if you go into bookshops or search on Amazon you won’t find many printed collections of flash fiction.

            I don’t think people have lost the appetite for long form fiction. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is an epic, as is Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna, and both have had great critical and commercial success recently.

The Milestone: How would you classify the short story in any particular art form?

Author:  The Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen said that for her the definition of a story – as opposed to a sketch – was that a story must contain some kind of turning point. I think this is a useful way of defining a narrative. A sketch is something static, a snatched snapshot, a single moment, whereas a story – however short – will take the reader on a journey of some kind, and by the end there will have been a shift or a change, so we find ourselves somewhere other than the place where we started from.

            That said, I’m currently reading The Collected stories Lydia Davis (Hamish Hamilton 2009) and many of her shorter pieces severely challenge my definition of a story. Some of them are closer to aphorisms or single ideas, rather than journeys. She has one which reads in its entirety: ‘Idea for a Short Documentary Film. Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.’ Dave Eggers is quoted on the back of the book as saying that Davis has invented a new form, ‘combining the precision and economy of poetry, the wry storytelling of short fiction and a clear-eyed and surgical inquiry into the nature of existence itself.’ She is a wonderfully interesting writer, but she doesn’t supply realistic ‘scenes’ or narratives in any conventional sense.

The Milestone: Who’s your favourite short story writer and why? What special qualities do you observe in him or her?

Author: I am particularly drawn to North American writers. I love the work of Raymond Carver. I think he’s able to invest ordinary subjects with an energy and strangeness that makes you see the world in a new way. His style is a heightened attention to detail that pushes his work beyond realism. A younger writer who does the same kind of thing is Miranda July (No One Belongs Here more than You, Cannongate, 2009), I particularly like her stories ‘Swim Team’ and ‘Ten True Things’. She’s very funny (as is Carver).

            I have also recently been reading the collection Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro.  I am in awe of her skill as a storyteller. There’s a story called ‘Wenlock Edge’, that has such unexpected twists and turns that I almost literally gasped as I read. Another of her stories, ‘Deep-Holes’, begins with a picnic in which a child has a nearly-catastrophic accident. A lesser writer would have focused entirely on this day and this moment, but for Munro it’s simply a beginning, an incident which sets this child on a particular path in life; the story leaps on into the future and ends many decades later. Perhaps it’s a consequence of having lived to the age she is, and having seen the things she’s seen. She takes a very long view.

            E M Forster said in his book Aspects of the Novel that a well-drawn character should be both convincing and capable of surprising the reader. That sums up what I look for in a fiction: stories that are both convincing and surprising.

The Milestone: Do you believe in writer’s social responsibilities? If yes, how they should discharge it?

Author:  Personally, I have strong political opinions. I am opposed to the agenda of the current government in the UK , for instance, and I believe that their actions will make this a much harsher and more inequitable society, but I’m not sure I want to write about that in any direct way. Chekhov wrote to a friend: ‘You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.’ In other words, writers bear witness to the world they live in, but that doesn’t mean we need to produce agitprop.

The Milestone: What is the present trend of fiction writing in your country? Tell us about the experiments that writers like you are doing with short stories.

Author:  There are always so many different trends and currents co-existing at any one time, and that is a wonderful thing. But since we’ve been talking about flash or micro-fiction, it’s interesting that people are now being commissioned to write for text phones, and even for Twitter, and I do think that will produce formal innovation. For example, last year Rick Moody was commissioned to write a story that could be ‘serialized’ on Twitter. Given that a single ‘tweet’ cannot contain more than 140 characters, it was, he said, a bit like writing a haiku.

            I’m interested in the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and poetry. A British writer who has long been exploring this territory is Bernardine Evaristo. She has written two verse novels: The Emperor’s Babe, and one I’ve just read, Lara, (Bloodaxe 2009). Lara is inspired by Bernardine’s own complex family background, which includes Irish, German, Nigerian and Brazilian forebears. The book is written in couplets and it offers a vivid, panoramic, energetic account of these diverse and often desperate lives, making bold jumps in time without sacrificing detail.  

            Another example is a story I came across on Granta’s New Voices website by an American writer called Jessica Soffer. (http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Beginning-End). ‘Beginning End’ tells the story of a relationship as it evolves over many decades, and it does so through a series of intense and vivid images, so that you feel you’re almost looking through a flicker-book or an album. I often use this two-page story as an example of highly effective but economical storytelling, but recently someone objected to it being described as a story.  It was a prose poem, they said. And on reflection, I had to agree that they were probably right.

            To me this kind of borrowing and travelling between categories and genres is inspiring and instructive.

The Milestone: You conduct many successful creative writing workshops in

Author: People often say that you can’t teach people imagination or creativity, but I do think you can open doors for people. You can push them to think beyond received ideas or conventional forms, and encourage them to explore material they might not tackle on their own. I often give people a scenario and then ask them to write for ten minutes and see where they can take the idea. It’s scary but then again, a bit of adrenalin is useful. People generate some wonderful material in these short bursts of writing. There’s a lot to be said for gathering together with like-minded people and listening to the sheer range and diversity of styles and possible approaches. It’s inspiring.

            Fiction is also a craft and there are definitely techniques and skills that can be taught. For example, I’ve just run a weekend workshop on characterization and setting, and before that I taught a two-day course on narrative and story structure.

The Milestone: Do you have any plan to write a novel?

Author:  I’ve been working quite a bit with novelists in recent years, both in my capacity as a reader for The Literary Consultancy, and through the workshops I run. And yes, I would like to write a novel myself. It’s much more of an endurance test than writing short stories: it demands more in the way of story, and most novels probably require research of some kind.

            At the moment I’m working on a novella. It’s a wonderful form. Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, Heart of Darkness, Animal Farm, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Great Gatsby – all these classic books are novellas. Structurally novellas are closer to the short story than the novel, but sadly it’s not a form that publishers appreciate.

The Milestone: Please give some tips for aspiring writers?

Author: Read as widely and as curiously as you can. Keep a notebook. Write regularly. Be honest. Don’t be put off by rejections.  Enjoy what you write and that spirit will communicate itself to your readers.