Magic & Mechanics gathers six of the best anglophone short-story writers to show us how it’s done. George Saunders, Claire-Louise Bennett, Mark Haddon, Camilla Grudova, Amber Medland and Colin Barrett disassemble their work, stripping the form down to its barest elements. The result: a loose workbook, a love letter to the genre.
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The book offers invaluable technical insights into the craft, as well as some eccentric – and only occasionally mutually contradictory – advice from the authors. “[Don’t] explain too much”, Haddon suggests, “just hint [...] and concentrate on things like ice creams, fairgrounds, the sound of ships’ horns”. “People really do need to be told things fairly explicitly,” Medland counters.
But in the broader sense, the anthology uncloaks the largely instinctive, tentative nature of a somewhat mystical process: “It’s a very practical thing,” says Barrett. “There’s nothing particularly intellectual about it,” adds Saunders, “it’s more Vaudevillian”. It is reassuring to learn that these stories didn’t pour out of their authors in a single, epiphanic sitting, but were instead the products of much trial and error and, crucially, of “editing, editing, editing”.
You learn a lot of rules in a creative writing workshop – about plot, structure, ways to keep the reader engaged. Many are echoed in this book. Many, too, are done away with. All six stories subvert, in one way or another, what is expected of them, resisting formal axioms in favour of distinctive voices, evocative details, things “perfectly futile and terribly moving”, to quote Bennett. Resonating throughout the anthology is a distrust of the forms we default to, “naturalistic stories about people like [us]” as Haddon phrases it, either for their myopic perspective or their failure to convey subjective experience.
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An encouraging consensus springs from the pages of Magic & Mechanics: about the economy of the short-story form. The stakes are lower than those of a novel – “you’re not going to spend two years filling the wastepaper basket if it goes wrong”, Haddon remarks. As Grudova charmingly puts it, the short story is “like a blue cheese”– “hard to consume in large quantities”. Stories ask less of the reader, less of their attention, less of their belief. There is more freedom to experiment, to cast our strange, skewed perceptions across the uncanny stuff of life.
Margot Guilhot Delsoldato, an Italian-French writer, is a contributor to The Irish Times
