Rhys Davies Short Story Competition 2007
The Judges Adjudication
The short story form, popular in Wales since the 1930s, is still in good shape, if the stories that came in for the Rhys Davies Competition this time are anything to go by. At least five hundred and seventy stories were entered into this year’s competition; Catherine Fisher read all the stories and selected eighty to pass on to us. The ones we saw had variety in both subject-matter and style, and engaged with the contemporary world in all its complexity. If personal relationships, often unhappy or fraught with danger, are still the stuff of short stories, there were plenty of surprises and unusual twists to keep the readers’ attention, and to entertain, amuse, appal and move us. Many of the ones we read had a traditional twist in the tail, others broke out of that mould. The ones which appealed to us most were those that avoided cliché, were well observed, and convinced us they were somehow true by drawing us into the world they described. Good presentation, including such matters as spelling, punctuation and paragraphing, also counted. After much reading and discussion – and a fairly minimal amount of creative argument - we chose the one winner and ten runners-up. All the ones we have chosen sing out and achieve a kind of poetry.
From the beginning both of us singled out Penny Simpson’s story Eagle in the Maze as a favourite: it is alive, startling and original. The subject – a woman dying of cancer commissions a monument from a stone mason - could in the wrong hands have been mawkish and emotionally manipulative, but somehow this manages to be quirky, unsentimental, and even funny. The details are good: it is hot for the mason working under that plastic sheeting, Lily’s neck is ‘thin as a bottle stem’. The writing flies off the page: the reader is aware of no effort of cleverness, no showing-off, only the strange sequence unfolding in front of our mind’s eye. At its core is the moment where Lily pulls her dress over her head so that Jim can draw her, then use the drawing when he makes her angel. ‘I want it to be my body, not anyone else’s’, she tells him firmly. The story is beautiful, carried off with such flair, and not like anything else we’d ever read.
And that is a perfect illustration of how there simply is not any one answer to the question of what makes a short story good: there is no winning formula. In fact, what characterises these eleven stories is just how they don’t feel formulaic. Good stories are written because the authors have something they need to capture, to put into words: something that haunts them and matters to them. If nothing is at stake for the writer, then the story can never matter to the reader.
A story often grows around a tension: conflicting truths pull against one another, as in Hell Can’t Claim, set in Pinochet’s Chile, where a wife asks her husband to use his influence to help an old friend who’s been arrested: the whole tangled horror of a nation’s history condenses down for a moment into their private quarrel. In We Have Been to the Moon, too, complex social and political interrelations are drawn inside the space of one family funeral. There’s no rule that says a story has to be small in its scope, just because it only takes up a few pages of writing: these work because the writer has found a few strong signs to indicate whole worlds behind the foreground of the stories, so that they don’t feel like novels squashed into a tight space.
It’s exciting when a writer takes us inside somewhere we don’t know. Sorry for the Loss is about a chaplain who has to break the news to a young prisoner that his grandmother has died. The writing is scrupulous, keeping faith with the detailed observation; so scrupulous that it is a joy when in the last paragraph imagination leaps suddenly free into imaginative space, spinning away from the idea of the butterfly knife the man had killed with. The Flower Maker, seeing occupied Paris from a child’s perspective, makes us believe in a past time and place without overdoing the period detail; the artificial flowers work subtly as a metaphor. This one has a good ending too, resisting resolution, leaving things open.
Many of the stories submitted were written from a child’s perspective, but often they weren’t convincing as child-voices. Stones, though, is striking and felt real: Grace’s attitude towards her missing sister, the intimacy of the little girls’ knowledge of one another, is fresh and poignant, and the writing is toughly sensuousness, imitating the child’s charged awareness. Last Stop, another child-story, might steer too close to homiletic if the observation - of the grandfather’s sickness, the father’s repressed unhappiness - was not so exact, so unsparing. The final moment, where the narrator touches her father to console him, is emotionally effective just because it’s hard-won. Nice ideas can’t make a story work by themselves, nor warm feelings: a good story claims us in a way we can’t resist, surprises us as if it was real life. None of these winning stories judges what it witnesses, or preaches to the reader. Sour Grass is a fragment torn from a life outwardly uneventful: Mary’s solitary imaginings are filled with the shapes of the moorland landscape and the life on the hill farm with her parents; her brief involvement with a boy from the town makes no difference that anybody else will ever see, and there isn’t any moral to what happens, except that these things do.
All the stories we’ve chosen are well put together. Their structure serves their meaning and their shape feels purposeful, sprung with tension, so that we’re eager to read to the end, to find just how the narrative will curl round on itself, and find completion. Endings are even more important in short stories than in novels. White Rabbit is genuinely suspenseful: we watch with Laura as Jed’s car is pulled out of the lake, then the plot develops satisfyingly around to where we should have guessed it was going to bite its tail: the energy between these lovers is tempestuous and sexy. Mrs Dundridge, about an affair in the twenties between a widow and a neighbour’s son, ends gracefully not in the violence the reader half expects, but in an oblique surprising gesture: she cuts the boy a pile of bread and butter and sends him packing. Perhaps Drive has the purest form of all the stories we’ve chosen. Its narrative development is minimal: a woman gets in a taxi and asks to be driven around until her money runs out. The story begins when she gets in the car and ends when she gets out: in between she and the driver talk, although not about much. It’s deadpan and ingenious and effective: actually we learn lots about both characters.
You can put a whole world in a short story, or next to nothing at all: anything’s permitted. In all eleven winning stories, what matters is that subject and form and language combine to make the sparks fly, to make something happen, something new.
Tessa Hadley
Meic Stephens