If you have typically written short stories and then wrote longer (novels or novellas), what was the transition like for you, and how did you teach yourself to take the leap and go long?
I went the other way. Well, pretty much. Back when the world was young and I started writing, I produced one very solemn autobiographical short story, full of darlings that should have been drowned in a bucket, then a PG Wodehouse pastiche, then a sitcom script. The two shorts are unpublished. The script got me a meeting at BBC Scotland. It even went into development. (As far as I know, it's still there.)
But then I resigned from my job and started writing for real. And it was novels all the way. My first short story didn't appear until over ten years later when I was invited to contribute to an anthology.
First ever published short story
In total, I've written fifteen short stories (and more than twice as many novels) mostly when asked to contribute something. I've only submitted three or four to a blind selection panel. Two got knocked back, one got accepted, one is pending.
So the Venn diagram of current short mystery fiction writers would be a glorious super-imposed elliptical extravagangza of Michael Bracken, Barb Goffman, Art Taylor, Charlaine Harris . . . all that lot, and near the margin of the page, a rash of dots representing the writers whose short stories are squeezed out in homeopathically tiny doses. I'm one of those dots.
The main difference between writing short stories and writing novels, for me, is probably caused by not reading many shorts. That means - I think - that I'm not good at evaluating my own shorts. Weirdly, I always conclude that my completed story is a towering work of staggering genius. Truly. Every time, I think this is going to win awards. People are going to reel away stunned from the anthlogy this appears in, their heads fizzing with wonder and awe. (I wish I was kidding.) It's like those parents that put babies forward for modelling contracts, blinded by love, and are puzzled when the bundle resembling a boiled bulldog doesn't get the gig.
swankiest anthology I've been in
Novels are different. I think I can place myself quite accurately in the league table of effectiveness: with - say - Rebecca at the top, shining and perfect, and couldn'tpossiblycomment down in the gutter, stinking. I know I'm not hopeless; I know I'm not Margaret Atwood.
But I find it very difficult to identify what makes a great short story. Sometimes, I read the winner of a prestigious award, or an entire issue of AHMM or EQMM and I don't get more than half of them. I probably need to take a class with Art Taylor.
Proudest short-story moment
It's just occurred to me that I'm spilling this having written the introduction to more than one anthology of shorts. I've even got another introduction coming soon. But when I read as an intro-writer, I'm using a different bit of my brain, a bit that finds it easy to identify the strengths and charm in every piece of writing. It's when I sit back with a cup of tea and read as a reader that I feel lost in the weeds. Lucky they're not very tall weeds. You know, because they're short.
Lucky, too, that it's the output of a few days' or weeks' work that I submit thinking it's astonishingly brilliant, only to get a "Yeah, naw" response. It would be much worse if that happened after a year's slog on a novel. The developmental edit is humbling enough for me any day.
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