by Chris Harris
When a friend told me the stories in my book were too long, my first instinct was to disagree. Then I thought about it. Six days later, I’d written two Very Short Stories — and accidentally discovered an entirely new direction for my writing.
We seem to have developed a culture in this country, particularly within our institutions, where the standard response to criticism is to double down. Whatever happens, whatever evidence is presented, the instinct is to deny that anything has gone wrong and insist that everything is absolutely fine. Which, when you think about it, is a rather stupid way of going through life.
My friend Kate recently bought a copy of my book, Something About England, and naturally I asked her what she thought of it. Her feedback was pretty straightforward. She thought the stories were too long. For a moment, I was perplexed. But they’re short stories. I stopped being defensive and actually thought about what she had said. And very quickly I came to the conclusion that, yes, she had a point.
That doesn’t mean I suddenly think the stories in the book should have been shorter. Most of them are somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 words because I wanted enough space to develop the characters and allow the stories to breathe. I’m perfectly happy with that. But Kate’s comment made me think about something completely differentWhy not write a short stories of just 1,000 to 1,500 words?
Then the more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me. A story of around this length takes perhaps five or six to eight minutes to read. It can be published easily on a blog, Substack, Medium and other publishing platforms, and it is far easier to promote through social media than something that takes half an hour or more to read. Suddenly, rather than seeing Kate’s feedback as something I needed to find an excuse for, I realised she had inadvertently given me an idea. That conversation happened on Tuesday.
On Friday, Eloise and I sailed from Newhaven to Dieppe for a few days in France. And, rather conveniently, something happened on the ferry that gave me exactly the material I needed to try the idea out. It wasn’t a great dramatic event. There was no complicated plot and certainly no profound examination of the human condition. It was simply an unusual and very funny little incident involving some of the people around me.
If you follow the link below, you can read the result: my first Very Short Story.
I think that is what these stories are going to be about. They won’t have the character development or more elaborate plots of the stories in Something About England. Instead, they’ll be based on things I observe: something funny, absurd, peculiar or simply interesting that happens in everyday life.
I can take that little incident, add a character or two—or occasionally put myself into it—and turn it into something quirky and hopefully funny. While we’re in France, I’m going to spend a little time working out exactly how these Very Short Stories might work. There doesn’t need to be a rigid formula, but around 1,000 to 1,500 words feels about right: long enough to tell a proper little story, but short enough for somebody to read while drinking a cup of coffee.
I’ll forever be grateful to her for that, because I thoroughly enjoyed writing it. More importantly, it feels sustainable. I can imagine writing one of these every fortnight without it becoming another enormous commitment. That would give me around 25 stories a year. In fact I’ve written two in six days!
And then another possibility occurred to me. If I keep doing it, in a year or perhaps 18 months I could have enough material for another book: a rather random collection of very short stories based on the strange, funny and absurd things I encounter along the way.
Individual stories could also be entered into competitions. They can be published online, shared on social media, recorded as audio, used to introduce people to my other writing and, perhaps most importantly, simply written because they’re enjoyable to write.
In fact, the possibilities are almost unlimited. None of which would have happened if, when Kate told me my stories were too long, I had simply doubled down and told her she was wrong.
Feedback is a gift, after all!
Make both our days by buying a copy of my book!
Something About England: Amazon.co.uk: Harris, Christopher, Turner, Louise: 9798174255661: Books
Welcome to Denham, a fictitious Sussex village where behind respectable doors, well-tended gardens and familiar faces, things have a habit of going badly wrong.
Obsession, ambition, deception, jealousy and petty rivalry run through this collection of tragi-comical and satirical short stories. From poltergeists and lottery winners to cricket club feuds and environmental disasters, ordinary people embark on discovering just how quickly an ordinary life can unravel into an extraordinary mess.
Darkly funny, occasionally poignant and populated by characters who are rarely quite what they seem, these stories explore the peculiarities of Middle England, and the uncomfortable territory between respectability and ruin.
