With short stories the cliché really does hold true: anything goes. The novel or the poem may be infinitely variable with each new example you read, but their variations always derive from a fixed set of formulae, a prescribed and proven format.

You can try to write a novel-length prose poem, but you won't be able to get anyone to read it (I know, I published one); you can try to write a poem with thriller-like plot twists and a pot-boiler compulsion to narrative, but the result will ultimately elide into something like an Edward Lear joke-poem, or worse still a limerick.

There are certain things, at these two ends of the literary spectrum - the novel and the poem - that simply don't work. You just don't do them.

With the short story this isn't the case. There are so many different traditions, and new ones emerging all the time; there are image-based 'blossoming' stories, which slowly open up images that continue opening after you've stopped reading them (not unlike the way a poem works).

There are shorts with industrial'The short gives an author greater moral freedom; because the reader doesn't have to put up with a short's moral universe for long, the writer can present a much more ambivalent, and ultimately more realistic, one.'-strength plots, great twists and denouements, climactic, instantaneous sea changes in the narrative space you thought you were occupying; that is to say shorts in which the plot is actually more tightly mastered than they ever could be in a larger novel; plots that tie everything together in a neat bow at the end, or snap shut on you so sharply that they take the skin off your fingers.

There are stories in which the structure is neither an external plot of events, nor a non-plot of imagistic writing, but rather internal dramas - epiphanies, moments of clarity that sometimes hit you in such plain terms you're barely able to keep up with them; realisations so subtly trapped in the story that there's a time-lag at the end when you think 'What just happened?' and then the satellite link reaches you and the world crashes in ... as it has for characters in the story.

It's not only the short's structure that's so versatile: the types of characters you meet in a short are also a lot more varied, unlike in the novel, where the protagonist, no matter how well he's disguised, is effectively a cypher for you-the-reader/me-the-author, in other words an everyman. (In fact the best everymen are cunningly disguised ones.) The short story protagonist can really be anyone; they can be irritating, unsociable, truly (rather than initially) unsypathetic, and not the sort of person you want to share a 300-page novel with. They can also be complete strangers - people you don't get a backstory on and are all the more vivid because of it.

The short gives an author greater moral freedom; because the reader doesn't have to put up with a short's moral universe for long, the writer can present a much more ambivalent, and ultimately more realistic, one.

In short, the short story is flexible: a laboratory where just about all the structures, forms and tricks available to writers (OK, not rhyme) can meet. It's an entry point for writers and a mixing bowl for writing itself.

Anthologies and collections published by Comma Press can be found in the bibliography

My classic story

'The Waiting' by Jorge Luis Borges from Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (Penguin Modern Classics)

One of smartest stories I've ever read - by 'smart' I mean self-aware - is this quiet little piece from the otherwise very unquiet Labyrinths. It introduces us, or rather it doesn't introduce us, to a man on the run. The man's crime is unspecified, his background - even his name - is kept from us. All we know is that he's hiding out in a rented flat in an unfamiliar suburb of Buenos Aires, that he never goes out, and that the name he gives his landlord is the name of his avenger... for he will be avenged. He's terrified of it, but also resigned to it. He's waiting for it.

On the rare occasions that he does go out, Borges gives him a quirk; and though this quirk isn't the point of the story, it tells us something. Borges has him go to the cinema. Once there he always sits on the back row and without fail leaves before the end of the film. "Unlike people who read novels," we're told, "he wasn’t a person who expected to see himself in works of art.” Of course he wasn't (given that by 'works of art' Borges means art's larger canvases, novels and films). He’s detached, anonymous, the eternally un-met protagonist, and one you wouldn't see even fleetingly in a novel or film. Indeed, it's the kind of anonymity that modern life is thick with but which isn't reflected in any other literary form.

Another recommendation

'A Tray of Ice-Cubes' by Gerard Woodward (from Hyphen). Download 'A Tray of Ice-Cubes from this web site