The short story

I am diverging from writing about London to comment on something more personal - the art of story telling, to be precise the art of short story writing. I am doing this because my blog entries are indeed a form of short story telling which in every sense is an internal construct  of the mind - my mind to be precise.

This isn’t a story but a stream of consciousness muse about short story writing and all that there is to it. I find writing stories a bit difficult at times cos of the need to be creative around them, which can be intense, particularly for a restless soul like me, who loves to do a thousand and one things at a time.

With the short story you are obviously creating something from nothing and that in itself takes inspiration to do. I find short stories most difficult to write, largely because you have to pack a punch into a few pages and drive it through to a definite end. For that reason, I’m not exactly an avid fan of reading short stories as I find them limited in scope and sometimes exasperating. Nevertheless, they can be very rewarding, and can be used to express a view about any given situation.

A short story to a writer is a like portrait painting to an artist (I paint by the way). You are painting life and the paper or word processor is your canvas. Your pen or keyboard is the brush and your finished work whether in book form or published article is your work of art. In that sense, short stories have served as a great vehicle for painting portraits of life, for vignettes of the mind and of the heart and of getting particular views across. I can always reveal my concerns about issues by penning a fable that loosely demonstrates the situation at hand, without directly getting involved – but allowing the characters to act it out independently off my direct control (I like to think that it is). This can usually lead to revealing results, for example, things you’d never expect to be the outcome of an interplay of characters and situations may crop up midway or at the end of the story.

In the end,  your view point about a situation might change as you might just see things from a different perspective or from multiple perspectives depending on the number of characters involved. This is what is satisfying about writing short stories. The unsatisfying bit can be the limited scope offered by one’s canvas. For the short story writer does not have the luxury of bright and bold brush strokes that enables the novelist paint life in as many layers of colour as they can afford.

As a writer I try to be as objectives as possible, but I understand that objectivity is relative and after all it is your story, conjured up from the relative depths and subjectivity of your mind or subconscious into reality. It is the sum total of our thoughts on a given theme/subject matter and at the end of the day, it is an expression of your mind.