A Kiss in the Dark....

....from a stranger. What an intense, terrifying, exciting thought. It's how Stephen King describes a short story: a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

There are two things that strike me about this extraordinary image. One is its transience – think how fleeting even the longest kiss can be. The other is the sense of mystery, of the unknown, contained in the description. I am also conscious that although a kiss can be the most sought-after, longed for embrace, a kiss from a stranger, in the dark, might be nothing short of an assault.

So what is King's phase suggesting to us? That a short story is something fleeting, unknown and open to different interpretations.

Without the roomy expanse of a novel, a short story must be, by definition, brief. As a writer you don't have the time or space to paint a complete picture, you have to content yourself with conveying  just enough information to suggest everything you haven't been able to include. It's the art of inference. Yet even within the limited scope of a short story, it's still possible to cover a big subject, you just have to be more selective about how you tackle it. In Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary Tolstoy and Flaubert take hundreds of pages to describe the downfall of their heroines, in a short story you might focus on one pivotal scene, making it resonate with what has come before and what might follow. I suspect resonance is an important quality when writing in miniature.

All good fiction – short or long – should have something of the unknown at its heart, an essential mystery that the plot sets out to resolve – or not: unanswered questions pack a lot of narrative power, giving an extra bang for their buck, which might be particularly appropriate in shorter fiction when space for answers is in short supply. Don't necessarily play safe and write about what you know – write about what you don't know, instead

In a longer piece of writing, you have the luxury of exploring different themes at different points of the narrative. With fewer words, sometimes these themes have to be dealt with concurrently rather than consecutively, with several different layers operating at the same time. Although this happens in large-scale works as well, in short stories everything is a little more dense and concentrated. If you  have different themes or different notes, sounding at the same time, perhaps there is more scope for interpretation. Think of it like shot silk: if you hold the material up to the light one way it is duck egg blue, but tilt it another way and it looks crimson. The fabric is woven in such a way that both are true at the same time.

Why not take Stephen King's phrase – a kiss in the dark from a stranger  – as the starting point for a short story of your own?

An Alphabet of Better Writing # E

E is for Exit...

I'm back in the wilds of Burgundy, or the Haute Marne to be precise, where electricity is pretty hard to come by on the impenetrably green river banks (it's available for one hour in the morning, one hour at noon and one in the evening, if you're very, very lucky) and wifi is virtually unheard of, so forgive me if posts are sporadic at the moment.

Reading and reading and reading - total immersion in writers I know (Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary) and - oh joy - writers who are completely new to me. I've been bowled over by Margaret Leroy's unassuming but enormous talent, her writing flows and eddies like water (I'm in canal mode at the moment as you see), so rush out and buy The Collaborator if you can. I've also plunged into The Song of Achilles, this year's Orange prize winner by Madeline Miller, which is well-researched and lyrical and intuitive and delightful. Now I've re-surfaced I'm reading Alastair Horne's gripping history of the Paris Commune and life feels rich in all kinds of pleasure.

Exit only temporary, normal service will resume...