Great short stories keep it pithy, sincere and guidelines-free

The great thing about collections of short stories is that you can finish whole stories in one sitting and feel a sense of accomplishment. If one story takes too long to pick, you can always skip it and start another. You get to decide the order. Start from the middle, the end — whatever suits you.  

You are not forced to power through dull or boring sections as you would a tiring novel.  Short story anthologies are great for carrying around especially on trips.

Writing short stories, however, is a whole different ball game. In my early encounter with this genre, I learned there were guidelines to writing a short story. Apart from the obvious, that they should be short, I learned that ideally, short stories should be episodic.

They should get to the conflict in the first few paragraphs. They should, given their length, have fewer manageable characters and should not span for decades. There must be action, but the plot should be simple.

One of my early mentors shared that although these guidelines were well-thought-out, it is possible for a story to break all the rules and still be great.

WAVE OF FREEDOM

With this revelation, a wave of freedom washed over me. Guidelines are not cast in stone. Literature is not a science and there is always room for grey areas. There is room for experimental styles and perhaps what people consider straying from the well-worn path could still bring forth a masterpiece.

I recently set out on a quest, to see how effectively these guidelines were followed. I had a whole range of anthologies to choose from, but I chose Looking for a Rain God and other Short Stories from Africa for purely sentimental reasons. I had to read it for my exams.

Although my first encounter with this anthology was not by choice, my second stab at it was unburdened by the need to come up with an epic argument that would dazzle my examiners. My investigation was for its own sake. I wanted to find out whether the authors in this anthology stuck to the guidelines and whether that counted for anything.

I found myself wandering down a familiar path in rural drought-ridden Botswana and watched with sadness as parents sacrificed their own children to make it rain. It was especially surprising that I empathised with the tension that finally erupted into this brutality in Bessie Head’s heartbreaking title-story, Looking for a Rain God.

I found myself back in apartheid South Africa, as the story Country Lovers reunited me with characters that refused to leave my head: white boy Paulus and their African farmworker’s daughter Thebedi.   Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Godimer wove this breathtaking teen romance that flowered in the fresh fragrance of innocence but ended in the dark stench of cold blood murder.

As I scuttled nostalgically down familiar towns, sometimes pausing to take a breath other times dashing past at magnificent speeds, I was reacquainted with Mr Ainoo , a play on the words “I know” symbolic of the exaggerated sense of self-importance in a character in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Asemka. I was sent into a fit of laughter by Chinua Achebe’s Uncle Ben’s Choice and Hama Tuma’s The Case of the Prison Monger. Each tale in this 16-story collection proved unique and special; expressing truths worth telling; realities worth sharing and preserving.

I was thus dismayed when it hit me that I had lost sight of my initial assignment. I had set out to explore the techniques the authors used and instead I got carried away by tales, oblivious of their mechanics.

In my simple attempt to resolve this in my head, why the stories were so good, yet I didn’t stop to examine what point of view was used or whether all the boxes in my guidelines were checked; I realised that it is possibly because the authors kept their stories sincere.

They kept them real. They wrote about things that were close to their hearts, things they had seen, heard or experienced that affected the lenses through which they viewed life. They wrote them in the way they knew how to express.

The great poet Horace noted that the role of literature is to instruct and delight.  With these stories in mind, I recognise that memorable stories are unpretentious, unshackled by guidelines but still manage to spin a tidy yarn.