Someone mentioned Tales of the Decongested recently, which reminded me of one of the early meetings. I've also been judging the Fish Short Histories Prize. Adding it up, of those 25 or 26 stories, only three didn't have death as an important part of them, either as the mainspring of the plot, or an important event in it. Very few were outright funny, either.

Don't get me wrong. I was really, really excited by just how good and how wide-ranging the Fish stories were. And the ToD ones were good too, though it was harder to judge because so many of them were badly read. But there it was: 25 writers, in some of their best work, all using death.

Now I rub my hands with glee at the prospect of writing a juicy death scene as much as the next author. But why do we need to use it time and time again? Touch wood (and knowing there are some threads in the lounge at the moment which are encountering it in real life) it's not part of most of our everyday existences, except in our own personal long run as Keynes would say. So why does it seem to dominate such a high proportion of short stories? Is it easier to seem profound if we write sad things instead of happy ones? Is profundity always the more prize-winning option? Is it a cheap profundity? I have to say that in one or two of that 25 I felt it was, but for the most part it made perfect sense within the bounds of the story. But in the wider context, it's got me wondering.

I haven't written enough short stories myself to know what my body-count is. What do others think?

Emma

But isn't death one of the great themes - right up there with love? The subject of so many poems and songs? Why not of short stories?

Frances

I've never written a short story about death, but speaking as a reader I do sometimes get fed up of the unremitting misery of a lot of literary shorts. What the judge of this year's Bridport was saying, really; that if an alien landed and took the entries as a snapshot of society, that alien would think there was nothing but abuse, fractured lives and inhumanity on earth.

Yes death's a Great Theme, and there are times I want my literature to explore it. But we need light and shade in our art because that reflects life.

I also resent being manipluated in a Pavlovian way by a story - event x requires this response, or you're a cold-hearted bitch of a reader. In a well-written story I don't get that, but occasionally a writer seems to light on a 'challenging' subject as a subsititute for good writing.

but occasionally a writer seems to light on a 'challenging' subject as a subsititute for good writing.

I think that's what I was feeling with some of them - as if it's the easy way of making your writing appear to matter. Love is the other Great Theme, of course, but somehow stories about it can take one little facet, play with ideas, use it as a frame for some other exploration, give it as much or as little of a part as makes sense - rather as it does at any given moment in our everyday lives. With death, it's as if that overrides everything: that's what the story is About. It doesn't seem to be allowed to have a little part in a story, just be part of life, as it is for most of us most of the time.

Emma

I think though that writers tend to reflect the world around them in their writing. Perhaps they have too often looked in the paper for an interesting story. The media only reports the bad things happening in the world and we take on board everything they say.

I watched The Secret Millionaire last night, where a rich guy went to one of the poorest, deprived areas of the country. In the beginning I was seriously worried for the chap, moving into a flat and living alone in this area. News reports don't reflect these places very well. My eyes were opened though when all he found was lovely people trying to make their way through life as best they could. They all had interesting stories, some doom and gloom but a lot of them uplifting. There was no mention of the death and destruction so often reported in the papers.

Perhaps if these writers got out into their communities to find stories rather than looking at the world as portrayed in the media there may be more stories of hope and triumph.

(Sorry to break into the thread, Emma, but I have to say what a fantastic programme TSM is. There should be more positive, humanity-celebrating stuff on tv like this rather than the endless down-beat frightening diet of people-behaving-badly.)

It's a good point. I might be being unfair, but I couldn't help wondering how many of the writers in my un-statistical sample actually do encounter death in the way and with the frequency that they write about it...

I suppose it's true that one of the reasons we write is to find out about things we haven't experienced in real life. Maybe this death thing is a result of our comfortable lives: most of the death happens somewhere else to someone else.

Emma

Some very amusing, lighthearted stories about death, or containing death scenes, have been posted in Flash Fiction over the past few months!

(smiley holding scythe)

Here's one by Sam Morris, which subsequently appeared in Twisted Tongue -

An Ordinary Man

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Plenty of death in my life lately, but I think the more laughs the better.

Love the use of 'lamped' there - if ever there was a right verb for the job, that's it!

Must resist the tempation to read it now. I know I dropped myself in it, but why, oh why, do people have to post such interesting things when I ought to be finishing a chapter...

Emma

I used to be a reader for various theatres and then the themes that continually came up were child abuse and rape. It got to the point that anything that I became totally allergic to these issues being used- despite the fact that there are plays that deal with them very well. However, with the submitted ones (which of course are not going to be good necessarily) I did feel "used" was the word - to justify a character's behaviour they had been abused. To make the audience shocked and horrified someone was raped. And then a bit of moralising to pretend that you're not just exploiting them too. Trouble is it doesn't work, you don't feel anything and feel ticked off with the author for shoving it in there without really having anything to say about it.

scuse terrible writing of last comment. I was deleting things and half of it doesn't make sense - hope you get the idea though.

Trouble is it doesn't work, you don't feel anything and feel ticked off with the author for shoving it in there without really having anything to say about it.

Yes. Exactly. Stories about child abuse and rape were all over the place in my MA, and they did my head in.

Literary fiction does tend to deal with sad themes, and I have often wondered why ths is. Was it Tolstoy who said something like, 'Happy families are all happy for the same reason. Unhappy families are interesting'. I don't think those were the exact words, but the gist of it was that unhappiness was more varied. Perhaps that's part of the reason.

I can't imagine writing about happy stuff. My first novel is full of death. I had to remove one funeral cos when I read over it, I thought, 'No, Sarah. You must limit yorself to one funeral per hundred pages. Anything more is pure self-indulgence.'




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Sorry. I know we're supposed to be chatting about short stoies.

Conflict and flawed characters are what drive a story, but that's a different thing from always choosing Depressing Subjects.

I don't choose depressing subjects. They choose me!

Sorry. No. I agree. But there's a difference between 'depressing' and 'serious'. The subject needs to be serious enough to engage a reader's attention. But there should be more leeway in short stories not to write about endlessly sad things, I think.