Toby Litt, © Jerry Bauer

How Short is Short?

TOBY LITT is one of the rising stars of British fiction, and was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He maintains an engagingly idiosyncratic website, and has kindly given us permission to run one of his occasional ‘editorials’.

Short Short Stories

Earlier this month [February 2003] the Guatemalan author Augusto Monterroso, whom I admit I had never heard of before, died. He was the author, the news articles said, of the shortest recorded short story. By now, you’ll probably know it by heart, it runs:

‘The Dinosaur’

Upon waking, the dinosaur was still there.

During the afternoon, the day news of Monterroso’s death broke, I was called by the BBC programme Front Row, and asked if I’d come in to their studio and chat with the presenter for a little while about how short a short story could be. Despite the fact I’d just returned from Oxford Street, and would now have to go back again, I said yes.

On the tube, I wrote down a few notes.

I remembered an English teacher at school who told me that a poem had to ask a question, and that the shortest poem in the English language was therefore:

I –

Why?

I also remembered Norman Mailer reciting Muhammed Ali’s equally short (in number of letters) poem:

Me!
We!

Another thing which came to mind was the joke about the Jewish telegram: ‘Start worrying. Stop. Details to follow.’

What I tend to tell students in creative writing classes, if they ask, is that a short story usually deals either with a moment of chance or of change. Nothing need happen (it can be a moment of chance of change, failed), but there is always the drama of it not happening.

Another answer I sometimes give is that a story should contain a situation and a surprise. This seemed the best explanation of ‘The Dinosaur’, which seemed to me an admirable little piece of work.

I had about this time last year written a very short short story myself. It ran:

The wingèd man left the party, and we carried on much as before.

I thought, if challenged to break the world record, I could edit this down to:

The wingèd man left us, quietly.

I also came up with a couple of even shorter stories, in dialogue:

The Affair

‘Hello… I do… With her?… Goodbye.’

This I further reduced to:

The Marriage

‘Hi…Why?… Bye.’

Which I think leaves me holding the world record. (Good luck if you’re going to have a go cutting back.)

More generally, I noted as I sat on the tube on the way to the BBC, short stories have been getting shorter for most of the twentieth century. Henry James thought little of including ‘The Turn of the Screw’ or ‘In the Cage’ in collections of short stories, rather than publishing them separately as novellas – despite their coming in around a hundred pages long.

I think time-starved contemporary readers, despite their greater addiction to the novel, still beam a certain amount of gratitude towards writers who keep it short. Authors like Philip Larkin, Jane Austen, Bruce Chatwin, all of whose outputs were small, seem very endearing – we can get to know them, properly.

And Saul Bellow, in the Afterword to his Collected Stories, notes how, ‘we respond with approval when Chekhov tells us, “Odd, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read – my own or other people’s works – it all seems to me not short enough.”’

He adds: ‘I find myself emphatically agreeing with this.’

Voltaire famously ended a letter with the words: ‘I’m sorry to write at such length, I didn’t have time to write less.’

When I got to the BBC studios on Portland Place, I was told the short story article had been cut – in order to make room for something else. They said sorry for the inconvenience, thank you for coming, gave me some money for a taxi home.

I took the tube.

Toby Litt, February 2003

Toby Litt was born in Bedfordshire in 1968, and lives in London. He read English at Worcester College, Oxford, and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where he was taught by Malcolm Bradbury, winning the 1995 Curtis Brown Fellowship. He lived in Prague from 1990 to 1993 and published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Adventures in Capitalism, in 1996.

He is the author of four novels: Beatniks: An English Road Movie (1997), a modern On the Road transposed to middle-England; Corpsing (2000), a thriller set in London’s Soho; Deadkidsongs (2001), a dark tale of childhood; and Finding Myself (2003). Exhibitionism (2002) is a collection of short stories that explore the boundaries of sex and sexuality. A short story by Toby Litt was included in the anthology All Hail the New Puritans (2000), edited by Matt Thorne and Nicholas Blincoe, and he has edited The Outcry (2001), Henry James’s last completed novel, for Penguin in the UK.

Toby will read from his new novel, Ghost Story, at the Inverness Book Festival, in a session he will share with Jackie Kay and Ali Smith, Eden Court Theatre, Thursday 7 October 2004, 7.30pm.

© Toby Litt, 2004

Related Link

• Toby Litt website