A Writer's View

Lapidary perfection can be wonderful, as in Stevenson or Borges. But brevity is limiting.

In 1987, newly qualified in nursing tropical diseases, I set off for Nicaragua and El Salvador to identify medical projects for a London charity. Although, in Nicaragua, the people had supposedly ‘triumphed’ over Yankee-backed oppression, I found that country far more tense than neighbouring El Salvador even though, in the latter, a murderous civil war continued.

I stayed in a San Salvador guesthouse; this was owned by a tyrannical old man, but all the work was done by a downtrodden country woman. The owner never called her by name, but spoke of her as ‘that morena’ (the ‘dark one’).

They were utterly dependent on each other: he, a reactionary and gouty old cripple, could not have run his guesthouse without her, while she would have been homeless and starving without him. In a country torn between left-wing guerrillas and right-wing death squads, this vulnerable pair lived in symbiosis. Hence my tale.

I’ve been writing stories since 1990, and for the last fifteen years have been using one a year as a combined Christmas card and present; I issue a little edition of sixty or seventy copies, and send them out to friends and family.

'The Morena' is one of these 'Christmas stories', many of which are drawn from incidents recorded in travel diaries. It has won a previous prize, the Scottish section of the annual David Wong award from PEN; the prize was, indeed, a very nice pen, which still sits on my desk. But it was never published, and of course that is the perennial dilemma of the story writer today: is writing stories worth the effort?

Indeed, just a few months ago, I submitted 'The Morena' to a publisher as a sample of a proposed collection (to have consisted, in the main, of my Christmas tales). This publisher emailed back that he had “given it scant attention, since story collections are seldom commercially viable”. I have heard (from an agent) that print runs for such collections are often no more than 800 copies. What a waste.

Nor could I have submitted 'The Morena' to many other competitions, or for radio broadcast because, at some 6,700 words, it is more than twice the length limit for most contests and far too long for normal radio slots. In this respect, the National Story Competition is decidedly unusual.

I chafe under the constraints of the 3,000-word limit so often met. Lapidary perfection can be wonderful, as in Stevenson or Borges. But brevity is limiting; characters may clamour to breathe and develop, implications to be teased out. Many masters of the genre – Chekhov, James, Leskov, Mann, Bowen, Maupassant, Lessing and Ballard – write best at rather greater length, often between 5-10,000 words.

Certain novelists (Annie Proulx, for instance) are at their finest not in novels but in work on this scale. Good stories are not literary fast food, made on the cheap; they are intense, with a flavour that expands to fill the mind.

Jonathan Falla (April 2007)

Jonathan Falla's story 'The Morena' has been shortlisted for the 2007 National Short Story Prize.

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