Over the last few days and weeks, I’ve found myself exploring the short story medium. Last week, I shared one of the short stories I wrote on the blog and since then, I’ve written two more short stories and read a few collections. Having spent more time focusing on fuller, longer stories in the form of novels and novellas in my writing career, writing short stories these past few days has been fascinating and revealing.
The compressed nature of a short story means I’ve been able to tap into the joys of completing a creative project quicker than possible for a novel. However, I’ve also found the process of writing these short stories illuminating, in the sense that each short story brings something new and different, as is often the case with creative projects. I start with an idea and go with it until the story reveals itself on the page, and in the process, I learn something new about myself as a writer, and perhaps more importantly, as a person, subject to the human condition. This brings to mind the words of American civil rights activist and writer James Baldwin:
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are." – James Baldwin
That last part about artists being emotional or spiritual historians resonates so much with me. I’ve previously written about experiences I’ve had at gigs where listeners in the audience shared their feelings and interpretations of my songs with me, and how those experiences made me realise I’d tapped into emotions or feelings that are not unique to me or confined to my lived experience; in other words, shared or universal emotions, feelings, and experiences. While I’ve experienced this in my songwriting, I have no doubt that this is achievable through other creative mediums such as poems, films, novels, and as I’ve recently discovered, short stories, a medium I intend to take forward as I continue to chronicle the perplexing intricacies of the human condition.
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.