Ali Smith On Short Stories

The first story in Ali Smith’s collection The First Person is half meditation on the form and half character struggling with her friend’s cancer. I won’t reproduce any of the cancer storyline, but the first two quotes below are said by characters when trying to describe the short story:

“The novel, he was saying, was a flabby old whore. Whereas the short story, by comparison, was a nimble goddess, a slim nymph.”

“A short story is like a nymphomaniac because both like to sleep around — or get into lots of anthologies — but neither accepts money for the pleasure.”

Then, towards the end of the story, Smith makes the unusual move of listing how famous practitioners of the form described the short story. It’s always interesting to read a list like this, but the real success in this story is that it doesn’t feel pedagogic or antiseptic, but streamlines nicely with the emotional thrust of loss and love. But here’s some of the list:

• William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like the flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people’s lives.
• Franz Kafka says that the short story is a cage in search of a bird.
• Nadine Gordimer says short stories are absolutely about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.
• Elizabeth Bowen says the short story has the advantage over the novel of a special kind of concentration, and that it creates narrative about time absolutely on its own terms.
• Jorge Louis Borges says that short stories can be the perfect form for novelists too lazy to write anything longer than 15 pages.
• Ernest Hemingway says that short stories are made by their own change and movement, and that even when a story seems static and you can’t make out any movement in it at all, it is probably changing and moving regardless, just unseen by you.
• Alice Munro says that every short story is at least two stories.