Based on my years of experience in the writing game, I’ve come up with a list of 24 essential rules for creating short stories that will engage, entertain and enthral. Feel free to use them when inventing your own stories!

1. A good short story should not contain a single wasted word. The reader should feel confident that the writer is in complete control of the story at all times. There should be no mystery, no element of chance in the writing of a short story. A short story is not a journey of discovery.

2. In the short story, setting is everything. Appropriate settings for short stories include mountain tops, haunted council estates, low Earth orbit, enchanted forests, 1980s job centres, France, protest marches, swingers’ parties, alternate dimensions, a summer evening in the writer’s youth, The American West, radio newsrooms, and World War 2.

3. Avoid boring your reader. Consider breaking up long paragraphs with dialogue, or descriptions of the weather. If the scene you are writing doesn’t contain dialogue or weather, think about changing the location and adding extra characters. Or have someone go outside and start talking to themselves.

4. Always start a scene in the middle of the action. Or better yet, after the action has already finished.

5. Dogs and birds are not good subjects for short stories. If you are determined to write about dogs or birds, consider poetry or the novella format. Horses, on the other hand, almost always improve a short story. Continue reading “24 Rules for Writing Short Stories” →

I woke up this morning worrying about Vin Diesel’s sleeves

again, and what they mean and where they went

and why he doesn’t just wear vests like his Fast and Furious co-star

The Rock does – if getting his guns out is what this is all about –

 

instead of those weird, slightly ill-fitting military shirts with the sleeves

deliberately torn off that have become his trademark

in the multi-billion-dollar car-based action franchise,

and which make him look not unlike a 1970s binman

Continue reading “Vin Diesel’s Sleeves” →

Ex-Girlfriends

We’re teaching our sons about our ex-girlfriends.

How many of them there have been. What they meant to us. Where it all went wrong, again and again.

We turn up at the doors of our ex-girlfriends with our sons in tow, ask if we can come in and state our cases.

Our sons sit on the sofa, accept offers of juice and biscuits and say please and thank you, are generally a credit to us. Our ex-girlfriends entertain the thought, just for a couple of seconds, that we have borrowed or stolen these children in order to impress them. That we are up to our old ways.

We are not up to our old ways. Continue reading “What We’re Teaching Our Sons #291: Ex-girlfriends & #96: haunted houses” →

Europe

We’re teaching our sons about Europe.

The size of it. The shape of it. How much is theirs.

We’re driving around Europe marvelling at examples of the continent’s rich history and magnificent infrastructure, its  museums and art galleries and national parks. We’re gazing in wonder at roads and airports and railways and bridges.

We drive across the breath-taking Ponte Vasco da Gama in Portugal and think about the future of the European project. We drive across the breath-taking Viaduc de Millau and the breath-taking Pont de Normandie in France. We drive across the breath-taking Øresundsbroen between Denmark and Sweden, across the breath-taking Sunnibergbrücke in Switzerland.

“You can tell a lot about a country from its bridges,” we explain to our sons. Continue reading “What We’re Teaching Our Sons #132: Europe & #178: The Loneliness of Billionaires” →

 

Whales

We’re teaching our sons about whales.

Their habits and habitats, their evolutionary history, their cultural and economic relevance, the many stories told about them.

An adult male sperm whale has washed up, dead, on a beach on the Norfolk coast, and we’re following the clean-up effort on TV and the radio and the internet. People are worried that the build up of gas inside the decomposing whale carcass may cause it to explode. Onlookers have been moved back to a safe distance.

Our sons are gripped by the unfolding drama. Continue reading “What We’re Teaching Our Sons #603: Whales & #189: Geology” →

The Network is Not the Territory

In business, as in war, the important thing is not how much geography we hold, but the supply lines we control. How we get food, fuel, people, goods from one point to another.

The only map that matters is the one that describes the routes we own. Everything in between – the mountains, the deserts, the forest, the places where people live – is dead space.

From the point of view of the one billion shipping containers circling the globe, the world is both one-dimensional and eternally present. The future is currently stacked eighteen thousand deep on 1,300-foot-long ships, each one designed to cover vast distances as slowly as possible – because with a theoretically endless number of ships at sea, the time it takes any one of them to get from one port to another becomes irrelevant.

Time is cheap.

The thing we’re interested in is cadence. Continue reading “Against The Nostalgia of Objects: Extracts from A Manifesto for The Container Shipping Industry” →

The internet had killed the mail-order business and I was broke. I had to go back to Big Frank Metcalfe and beg for a job.

“You know I can’t use you David,” he said. “You’re a loose canon. A maverick.”

“I’ve changed,” I promised him. “No more fancy stuff. Nothing avant-garde. I hardly care about perfection at all these days.”

He sighed.

“You were the best railway modeller I’ve ever seen.”

“Was?” Continue reading “A Model World” →

Things now took what could be described as a turn for the worse, if we are to consider the situation from the point of view of our Captain and his employers, as on the night of April 25th a great commotion took place in Whitehall, the result of the most audacious action yet undertaken on the part of the fledgling Prostitute Republic. Eyewitnesses inform us that the first bombs fell shortly after nine o’clock, partially destroying the London clerical offices of the East India Company and two carriages which were unfortunate enough to have been parked outside, before the rain of destruction moved off toward the Houses of Parliament themselves, severely damaging gates and removing a number of roof tiles as it went. Continue reading “Including The Incident Of The Montgolfier Balloon” →

At the Museum of the Agreed Future will we consume timely and relevant content, appropriate to our particular wants and needs.

At the Museum of the Agreed Future we will spend our days trying to remember everything we have lost.

At the Museum of the Agreed Future all public gatherings of more than five people will be prohibited, except in the case of pre-approved spontaneous comings-together of singing or dancing crowds for e.g. the filming of mobile phone adverts.

At the Museum of the Agreed Future, which will be built on reclaimed, poisoned land, we will never be more than six feet from the possibility of ecological disaster. The soft estuary mud will lap at the reinforced pilings. Our moored boats will shift and jostle like nervous cattle on the rising tide.

As we shift and jostle in front of the many oversubscribed exhibits inside the museum. Continue reading “Proposal for the Museum of the Agreed Future” →

Dracula sunk in despair.  Dracula drunk before noon.  Dracula wandering the magnificent, draughty rooms of his castle, wrapped in a heavy blanket and swigging from a bottle of three hundred year old plum brandy.  Dracula alone, his former brides all having left for the consolations of plastic surgery and younger, richer men (footballers, mostly). Dracula as unwanted tourist attraction, then.  Like the solitary old bear in a failed municipal zoo:  “Oh, but how he used to dance, Elisabeta!  Before the war! When there were trams, etc.” Dracula as embarrassing reminder of the bad old, good old days. Dracula as your grandparents’ favourite sideboard, which they insisted your parents take with them when they moved into their first home. Dracula as metaphor, endlessly. Dracula drifting between holiday resorts along the Black Sea, brooding in spectacular examples of post-Stalinist Soviet architecture. Dracula pondering the monuments to progress and the will of the people. So many atonal concrete symphonies! So many teenagers buying ice creams! Dracula at his Dacha. Dracula seen at the window, staring out at the rain falling softly across the lake (the endless, metaphorical rain).  Dracula visiting his travel agent. Dracula on an arctic cruise to see the northern lights, in the land where the sun never rises.  Dracula stuck up a Norwegian Fjord for two weeks with a party of elderly ladies, throwing himself again and again upon their dry, wrinkled necks…