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The Bridport Prize 2007
Short Story Report - Tracey Chevalier
It has been a pleasure and a challenge to judge the Bridport Short Story Prize this year. Mind you, I've had it easy. I only had to read the longlisted stories, culled by an army of diligent readers from a record number of several thousand submissions. Anyone who thinks short stories are a dying genre should note that figure and think again.
I admire good short stories. It is so hard to get them right. I began my writing career with stories before "graduating," as I thought at the time, to novels. I have since returned to respect the genre. In a novel, you can get away with a little flabbiness, the odd clanger of a sentence, a tangential paragraph. Not so in a short story, where every word counts, every character is crucial, every metaphor pops out. Writing a short story forces you to use your writing muscles in controlled, precise movements rather than hiding behind the paunch of a novel.
It was fascinating, if not a little dispiriting, to find out what subjects people choose to writing about these days. Certain themes recurred with almost monotonous regularity: aging and problems with elderly parents, suicide, road kill (yes, really!), illness, religious faith. Oh, and cigarettes - lots of 'em. With smoking now banned in public places, smokers have come to represent rebellious, misunderstood outsiders - not just teenagers anymore, but adults too.
Underlying all of these issues is a persistent attempt to make sense of death, particularly of those most vulnerable in society - children, the elderly, animals. It's not surprising, I think: writers often use stories to work through subjects they don't understand and are struggling with. I'm not necessarily suggesting that all short story writing is therapeutic, but it does have a purpose beyond entertainment, and that is to explore what it means to be human. In this age of all information all of the time, death continues to be the great unexplained event that happens to everyone. No wonder we write about it so much.
If only writers could be a little, well, jollier about it! Sorely missing from the entries was humour, with the honourable exceptions of "Ghost Lights," which made me laugh aloud, and "The Fish," with its surreal subject matter and bravura style (there is only one full-stop, at the end of the story). Otherwise, reading the stories made me more and more depressed. While I'm not in a position to chastise - I myself am not known for many laughs in my books - I would like to make a plea to future writers: humour is good! Not only that, but a funny story is so much harder to write than a sad one. Let it be a challenge to us all. I will if you will.
Subject matter aside, I was very impressed by the many examples of good writing and the confidence and economy with which entrants established character, voice and scene. I was often completely convinced by the narration, marvelling again and again at how easily I was pulled into an alternative world for a few minutes. Many stories felt so real I couldn't resist speculating on their possible autobiographical nature.
Certain lines and phrases leapt out at me as well: "a careless merriment of freckles"; rain "slants down like harp-strings"; "the sea is flat like a pencil line drawn at the bottom of a blue piece of paper." And this line from the winning entry: "His mother fed him a piece of cake from a china plate and his head came forward for the morsels like a tortoise." I wish I'd written that.
What let down many of the stories, however, were their endings. As good as entrants were at setting scenes, fleshing out characters and giving them authentic voices, they often didn't know what to do with them once they got them there. Too many times I thrilled to a story, only to be bitterly disappointed on reading the last page. For one story I even had the prize administrators check with the writer to make sure there hadn't been a printing error or page left off by mistake. If it hadn't ended so abruptly I might have given it a prize.
Of course, endings are difficult to pull off. I sweat more over endings than anything else. In a way, they're impossible, for the reader demands the impossible: to be both surprised and satisfied. Too often entrants didn't give me either option.
Endings aren't everything, though, and the three stories I have chosen as winners are so well written, so complete, with content and style knitted together so successfully, that the endings are not really the point so much as part of a truly integrated whole. I have chosen them mainly because they have done what so few stories do these days: make every word count.
"Slip, Out, Back, Here" is an unusual, gorgeous contemplation of a young girl's relationship with her mother, a dream-like examining of the tight bond that both stifles and secures them. It takes risks with structure, and its ending is soaring and emotional without being sentimental.
"I Can Squash the King, Tommo" tells the story of a childhood accident that reverberates over he years. Its strange, surreal tone perfectly suits the subject matter, feeding the nostalgia and guilt that weave through the narrative.
I chose "The Prince" for first prize because the writing is word-perfect. A young boy's dying is set against the seasonal rhythms of a northern village community, with the story quietly remarking on how something out of the ordinary both does and doesn't affect daily life. In particular, I was enchanted by deft descriptions of nature, of "the damp musk of elderflower," of "oystercatchers [returning] to their ritual of picking over stones in the beck," of slugs and snails "turning cabbages and lettuces into a fine lace of greenery and then into slime." Writers today don't notice this sort of detail nearly enough, much less connect it thematically to the narrative. By awarding "The Prince" top prize, I hope to remind writers out there that such details are crucial to make stories which will move us.
Tracy Chevalier
October 2007
 | The Bridport Prize is a fundraiser for Bridport Arts Centre, charity no 1069780 |