How I didn’t become a short story writer

First I was a novel writer (aged five).
Then I was a poet.

Then I was a short story writer.

Then I was a poet again.

Then I was a short story writer.

Now I am a poet.

I think I was probably a bad short story writer. 

The first time I was a short story writer I wrote in an experimental style. At that time U.K. publishers did not publish many books of short stories, and certainly not ones by unknown writers. They were definitely not interested in publishing experimental short stories by a young unknown writer who hadn't even been to university. At that time I read a lot of American short story collections which were a huge influence on my work - Jayne Ann Philips, Ellen Gilchrist, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff., Louise Erdrich. I think now that what I wrote back then sits somewhere between flash fiction and prose poetry. It rarely had a narrative arc. It was often just sniffing around the edges of something.

I was a kid from a council estate who left school at sixteen and went to live in a hippy commune. But as a kid I virtually lived in the local library, and while I lived in the commune I continued hitchhiking into town to use the library. 

You could say the library saved me. 

You could say the library made me. 

I wasn't educated back then. I didn't know about literary journals. I didn't know much at all really. I loved to read and I loved to write. I wrote in those small reporter's notebooks with the metal spiral at the top and I typed my work up on an electronic typewriter. When I look at those old short stories now, I think that maybe I was ahead of my time. They might have been ahead of their time but they're still not very good. But there's something about them that stops me throwing them out. Repeated words and phrases, poetic rhythms, the kind of surrealism that still appeals to me in writing.

When I have tried to write short stories in recent years they have felt stilted and unimaginative in comparison to those early works. I have become a slave to plot but somehow the plots are never good ones. Either the stories are boring and unoriginal or they don't make sense. It seems I have given over my original thinking to the poet in me and I don't know how to become a short story writer again.

The mercurial mind - ways in which to read poetry

When I first started reading poetry I approached it as I would a novel - thinking I had to read one collection at a time from cover to cover, then I began dipping in and out. Now I read cover to cover but I may well have several collections on the go at any given time. Take today for instance, I read a pamphlet sized collection cover to cover and made notes on it for an endorsement I am writing, but I have also dipped into several other collections I am reading, as well as reading bits of a journal and reading some poems online. This seems to me a very natural way of reading. It is rare that a poetry collection is so riveting that I can't put it down and have to compulsively read it straight through - although it does happen (and is a treat when it does) and some poetry collections take a great deal of concentration and mental processing - in these cases I can only read a few pages at a time before I need to take a break. Using my old mode of poetry reading I would have probably put the book down after those few pages and gone and found something else to do or read a novel. Now, if I choose to, I can move onto reading a different collection.

I seem to have developed this mercurial mind approach to reading in general. I still tend only to read one novel at a time (although I may have several I have started and stopped and might later come back to) but I will also have several poetry collections, a short story collection or two and several non fiction books on the go at any given time. In fact Goodreads tells me that I am currently reading 36 books. I think I developed this way of reading when I was studying - I like it it means I spend more time reading overall and that I read more books - something that feels more urgent as you get older. and feel you might be running out of time.

I don't do massively close readings of every poetry collection I read. I usually give more attention to the books I find more engaging. Collections where I want to come back to particular poems again and again. With these collections I sometimes make notes or post snippets on Twitter so that I can remember them later - and perhaps to entice other readers to seek out the book. If I am not finding a collection engaging or am finding it difficult I don't usually give up. Often I will try reading poems several times or reading them aloud to see if I can make more sense of them or get a feel for them. Sometimes I put the book away on a to read pile so that I can come back to it later - it might simply be that I am not in the right frame of mind for it - after all we bring all our emotional states and baggage to a reading of any book. There are, of course, books I don't love. These tend to be discarded after reading - these could be mediocre writing, but they can also be books that I am simply not ready for yet. I remember reading a few books when I did my degree and hating them - Ted Hughes Crow was one of them - I loathed it - I found the language ugly and heavy and too masculine. However a couple of years later I suddenly had a hankering to read it and this time I loved it - it was all those things of course but now I "got it." I think I simply wasn't ready for it yet the first time I was introduced to it. I think of it as a kind of reading evolution. It's like studying art - most people don't love abstract without first gaining an appreciation of more conventional forms - it's like you work your way up to abstract through studying the history of art so that when you get there you can fully appreciate it. Poetry is the same I think - one starts with the more conventional and works one's way towards an appreciation of the more surreal and experimental.

Books Read in 2013

90) Tenth of December - George Saunders (fiction, short stories)

89) Train Dreams - Denis Johnson (fiction)

88) The Colour of Milk - Nell Leyshon (fiction)

87) Her Birth - Rebecca Goss (poetry)

86) How Many Camels is too Many? - Colette Sensier (poetry)

85) Electric Shadow - Heidi Williamson (poetry, re-read)

84) A Dangerous Age - Ellen Gilchrist (fiction)

83) The Round House- Louise Erdrich (fiction)

82) Song Hunter - Sally Prue (fiction)

81) 7 Poets, UEA Creative Writing Anthology 2013 (poetry)

80) Finding Caruso - Kim Barnes (fiction)

79) Maggot Moon - Sally Gardner (fiction)

78) Twelve Slanted Poems for Christmas - edited by Helen Ivory and Kate Birch (poetry)

77) The Stone Thrower - Adam Marek (fiction, short stories)

76) This Afternoon and I - Sarah Roby (poetry)

75) The Norfolk Mystery - Ian Sansom (fiction)

74) A Virtual Love - Andrew Blackman (fiction)

73) Standing in Another Man's Grave - Ian Rankin (fiction)

72) Mateship With Birds - Carrie Tiffany (fiction)

71) Running the Rift - Naomi Benaron (fiction)

70) What I saw - Laura Scott (poetry)

69) Familiar - J. Robert Lennon (fiction)

68) The Mind's Eye - Hakan Nesser (fiction)

67) Burning Man - Alan Russell (fiction)

66) Borkmann's Point - Hakan Nesser (fiction)

65) All the Birds Singing - Evie Wyld (fiction)

64) The Havocs - Jacob Polley (poetry)

63) Daybreak - Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson (fiction)

62) Why be Happy When You Could be Normal - Jeanette Winterson (non fiction)

61) Godforsaken Idaho - Shawn Vestal (fiction, short stories)

60) Apple Tree Yard - Louise Doughty (fiction)

59) The Detective's Daughter - Lesley Thomson (fiction)

58) Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos (fiction)

57) Homesick for the Earth, Poems by Jules Spervielle with versions by Moniza Alvi (poetry, re-read)

56) Kei Miller -A Light Song of Light (poetry, re-read)

55) Black Vodka - Deborah Levy (fiction, short stories)

54) A Map of Nowhere - Martin Bannister ( fiction)

53) Reservation Road - John Burnham Schwartz (fiction)

52) The Crumb Road - Maitreyabandhu ( poetry)

52) High Performance - Luke Wright (poetry)

51) The Son of a Shoemaker - Linda Black ( poetry)

50) One Step too Far - Tina Seskis (fiction)

49) The Dinner - Herman Koch (fiction)

48) The Falling Sky - Pippa Goldschmidt (fiction)

47) The Most Beautiful Thing - Satya Robyn (fiction)

46) Rites - Sophie Coulombeau (fiction)

45) Property Of - Alice Hoffman (fiction)

44) The Wildflowers of Baltimore - Rob Roensch (fiction, short stories)

43) Absolution - Patrick Flannery (fiction)

42) Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson (poetry)

41) Broadcasting - Andrea Holland (poetry)

40) Cross Bones - Kathy Reichs (fiction)

39) Flash and Bones - Kathy Reichs (fiction)

38) Waiting for Bluebeard - Helen Ivory (poetry)

37) The Blue Bedspread - Raj Kamal Jha (fiction)

36) Raptors - Toon Tellegen (poetry)

36) Hills of Doors - Robin Robertson (poetry)

35) Faber new Poets 1 - Katherine Benson (poetry)

34) The Doll Princess - Tom Benn (fiction)

33) This is How to Lose Her - Junot Diaz (fiction)

32) Behind the Beautiful Forevers - Katherine Boo (non fiction)

31) Furious Resonance - Terry Jones (poetry)

30) Speaking Without Tongues - Jane Monson (poetry)

29) Bevel - William Letford (poetry)

28) The Other Side of the Bridge - Geraldine Green (poetry)

27) The Overhaul - Kathleen Jamie (poetry)

26) Stalker - Lucy Hamilton (poetry)

25) The Wigbox; New and Selected Poems - Dorothy Nimmo (poetry)

24) Once You Break a Knuckle - D.W. Wilson (fiction, short stories)

23) This isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You - Jon Mcgregor (fiction, short stories)

22) Grace - Esther Morgan (poetry, re-read)

21) Contemporary American Poetry - eds A. Poulin Jr & Michael Waters (poetry)

20) The Silence Living in Houses - Esther Morgan (poetry)

19) Chick - Hannah Lowe (poetry)

18) Peacock Luggage - Moniza Alvi and Peter Daniels (poetry)

17) The Hungry Ghost Festival - Jen Campbell (poetry)

16) How the Stone Found its Voice - Moniza Alvi (poetry)

15) Faber New Poets 1 - Fiona Benson (poetry)

14) Stag's Leap - Sharon Olds (poetry)

13) Place - Jorie Graham (poetry)

12) Infinite Sky - C.J. Flood (fiction)

11) Dear Editor - Amy Newman (poetry)

10) Shelter - Jayne Anne Philips (fiction)

9) Self Portrait in the Dark - Colette Bryce (poetry)

8) The Bridle - Meryl Pugh (poetry)

7) Claiming Breath - Diane Glancy (poetry)

6) Jump Bad - A New Chicago Anthology (poetry and prose)

5) Night Journey - Richard Lambert (poetry)

4) The Man from Beijing - Henning Mankell (fiction)l

3) The Thing About Joe Sullivan - Roy Fisher (poetry)

2) Adventures With My Horse - Penelope Shuttle (poetry)

1) Carrying My Wife - Moniza Alvi (poetry, re-read)

Can Reading Novels Effect Your Productivity?

It is no secret that I have been far less productive writing wise since I finished putting together my collection, but I am pleased to say that that while I am still not prolific I have started writing poetry again - phew! I had put my lack of productivity down to various things - the fact that I put so much effort into getting the work finished by my Arts Council deadline, the fact that I wrote so much new material whilst I was working with my mentor, the all but demise of my regular workshopping group, even the possibility that once the collection was finished and I no longer had deadlines that I wasn't as motivated to write. All of these reasons may in part be true, but this week another reason also occurred to me.

I am in the Readers Circle reading books for potential inclusion in next years's Writers' Centre Norwich Summer reads programme, which means that as well as reading poetry I have also been reading a lot of short story collections and novels. Whilst reading (good) poetry and short stories often leaves me feeling inspired to write, I find that I reading a novel rarely, if ever, has the same effect - even if it is an outstanding read. I am not sure why this is - it may be because novels are so immersive - they draw you into another world, and create a reality that we believe is real while we are reading. Or it may be that the novel just works on a different area of the brain to poetry or art, but whatever the reason it seems likely that the amount of novel reading I have been doing during the last couple of months may have a direct correlation with my decreased productivity in the poetry writing department. It will be interesting to see of my urge to write increases after the programme is finished in January.