Short Stories

I began to write short stories in 1991. I thought, after completing an 80,000 word novel and almost getting it published, that a good short story of around 5,000 words would be much easier to write. It wasn't.

I had some advantages over other writers, the main one being that I had seen a bit of the world and, somehow, had the ability to describe a scene. Jamaica was one of the places which featured in my early stories. On the down side, I knew nothing of how to construct a good story - the concept of 'plot' still defeats me.

In a short story, every word, every phrase, counts. The layout, the timing, the grammar and punctuation - nowhere can there be a blemish - yet some of the short stories I wrote appeared on the computer screen first time, as if they were perfectly pre-formed in my mind, while others were the result of hours of careful work.

The first short story that was good enough to send off to a competition was called 'The Last Jump of the Sand Flea'. Set at sunrise on a bar terrace overlooking the Caribbean, it involved a rather arrogant young man, and was all about leaving a place and people's attitudes towards the person who is leaving. Read it here.

Short stories aren't like books, you can't send them off to agents and hope they'll find a publisher, so one has the choice of trying to get magazines to publish them - a hopeless task for an unknown author - or of gaining recognition by winning one of the many short story competitions. So I entered my story in a competition run by a local literary group and, to my amazement, it won.

It didn't do me much good. The group didn't publish anything so the success counted for little - except, once again, to spur me on to try to win one of the big competitions, the most prestigious of which, at that time, was the Bridport Prize.