Biography:

Gerard Woodward is a novelist, poet and short story writer. He studied fine art at Falmouth School of Art, and Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, later carrying out postgraduate research in the same subject at Manchester University. His trilogy of novels concerning the Jones Family (August, I’ll Go To Bed at Noon and A Curious Earth) have won widespread critical acclaim, including shortlistings for the Man-Booker Prize and Whitbread First Novel Award. His five poetry collections (Householder, After The Deafening, Island to Island, We Were Pedestrians and The Seacunny) have earned him a Somerset Maugham Award and two T.S.Eliot Prize shortlistings. His most recent publications are the novel, Vanishing, which is set partly in the village of Heathrow (before the airport was built) and partly in Egypt and Libya during World War Two, and Legoland a collection of short stories. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Independent and TLS and is currently working on a new novel.

(Gerard Woodward is appearing at the Bath Literature Festival which begins next weekend, 27th February 2016. His workshop on March 3rd on writing Short Stories is sold out, but you can hear him reading his poetry alongside poet Greta Stoddart on 29th February, 8.00 pm – 9.00 pm at the Guildhall Bath. Book at Festival box office.)

Interview by Jude, February, 2016

• I’m re-reading your short story collection, Caravan Thieves, which I like very much. The stories manage to be both unsettling and funny. Several make me laugh out loud. I think this combination is also a great feature of your novels. Can you say more about your new collection Legoland?  Is it infused with a similar dark humour? 
  

  Available on-line and in bookshops now and also from the Bath Festival bookshop next week

Yes, I think so. I like to unsettle, certainly, and this is part of the attraction of humour. I especially like the type of humour where you suddenly wonder if you should be laughing at all. Humour and comedy operate in much more subtle ways than we usually imagine, partly because we tend to divide works into ‘humorous’ and ‘serious’, when the best writing is very often a combination of both. I’m currently rereading the classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House – it is a very frightening novel, but it is also (intentionally) very funny as well.

• I  interviewed A L Kennedy for the  Bath short story website in 2014 and because humour is also a feature of her stories, I asked her about writing humour  She said ” it’s hard – you have to be quite confident before you deploy it and then it’s about timing and observational skills being really tested.” Would you agree with that? 

Yes, timing is very important. It is also very instinctive – you follow a particular line of thought because it appeals to you in a certain way, and for me that is often because it makes me laugh, and the thought of being able to share that emotion with a reader becomes very exciting. The comedy is often about surprise, and in order for the surprise to be effective, the context in which it happens has to feel very real. It is like the set up of a joke – the punchline is only funny if the story that leads up to it is well told.

•  In a recent interview with Bath Life Magazine, you said you’ve been working on Legoland since Caravan Thieves was published eight years ago and you’ve also had a couple of novels and a poetry collection published within this time. Do you move in between genres as the mood takes you. Or do you have periods where you concentrate on one form?

I tend to work on one particular form at a time, but keep in touch with the other forms during that time, and don’t abandon them completely. The writing of novels is by far the most time consuming, so stories and poems tend to get written mostly in the quieter spells between novels.

• At a workshop on suspense you gave for Writing Events Bath several years ago you said if you get stuck, you choose random words from books to further the writing. Your example at the time,  was finding the word ‘blackberry’, and as this was a novel set pre-technology rather than a mobile phone incident you had a pot of blackberry jam tip into a character’s hand bag. Can you say more about your short story  writing methods? 

The random word trick is just a way of using the world that is immediately to hand as a way of breaking through an impasse. When the writing is going well you tend to be doing that all the time, using things that happened yesterday to fill in the blank spaces in the writing, the person at the bus stop provides the face for a minor character, something that happened at the dentist’s provides the detail for a scene in the novel. Sometimes your head is empty (or feels like it is) so you reach for a prompt by looking for a random word, or a picture or anything. Most often you pick up a novel or other book by someone you love reading, and that very quickly gets the ideas and the words flowing.

• Which short story writers do you admire and return to? Do you have any contemporary favourites?

I enjoy reading most of the names that are familiar in the canon of great modern short story writers from Chekov onwards – Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, James Salter. Our own Tessa Hadley is one of my favourite contemporaries

• Finally, what short story writing  tip would you give writers who want to enter Bath Short Story Award this year?

Make use of the limitations the form imposes on you. You can’t get everything into a short story, so don’t try to.

Jude interviewed Anthony Doerr in March 2013 and we’re re-posting his interview here for 2016 entrants to read. He’s written some great tips on writing short stories and we highly recommend reading his wonderful prize-winning novel and his story collection,

Anthony Doerr is the author The Shell Collector, About Grace, Four Seasons in Rome, Memory Wall,  He spent ten years writing his most recent book, ‘All the Light We Cannot See’  which was  published by Scribner in early 2014 and became an instant New York Times bestseller.  It was one of four finalists in the US National Book Awards, in November 2014 and went on to win the Pullitzer prize for fiction in the US in April, 2015.

Doerr’s short fiction has won four O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, three Ohioana Book Awards, the 2010 Story Prize, which is considered the most prestigious prize in the U.S. for a collection of short stories, and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, which is the largest prize in the world for a single short story.  His books have twice been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, and made lots of other year end “Best Of” lists. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American novelists.

Interview

•  I was bowled over by your short story collection ‘Memory Wall’, which was recommended to me by UK short story writer Tania Hershman. Your stories range over a wide span of history and give the point of view of  characters of different ages, genders and cultures. They  focus on profound human dilemmas and experiences. Can you say more about how you came to write these stories?

When I was in high school, my grandmother developed Alzheimer’s disease and came to live with us.  Over the course of months, we watched her mind disintegrate; she forgot who we were, where she was, where her bedroom was, even how to bathe herself.  But she remembered curious things, too: her childhood telephone number, the date of her wedding, etc.  She got to the point where she had no idea who I was, but could beat the pants off of me at gin rummy.  So the readiest answer I have is that my own memories of my grandmother informed my work on the stories in Memory Wall—I had learned, at a young age, just how fragile our personal histories are.  And I suppose, in a way, I was trying to rectify my own self-absorption when I was seventeen and eighteen, watching my grandmother lose her identity, and failing to understand the pain my parents were enduring.

As for imagining different places, histories, and individuals, I’d argue we write to learn what we don’t know; we write toward the mysteries, the things we can’t articulate but believe are there, feel are there.  Maybe we start with what we know, but then we work in the opposite direction, away from the things that are comfortable, familiar known.  Otherwise we’re not learning, and if we’re not learning, why bother?  So that’s why I often choose subjects and characters whose experiences, on the surface at least, are quite different from my own.

• Your  stories in ‘Memory Wall’ are long – the title story is 85 pages and still  works very well as a short story, in my view. Do you think important themes can be developed in a much shorter text and do you have any thoughts or advice about writing to a word limit? The Bath Short Story Award is limited to 2200 words.

I love working on short stories for a lot of reasons, but one stands out: they’re short.  When I’m working on a story, even an inordinately long one like “Memory Wall,” there are usually about 10,000 words I have to comb through before I start adding new material. So it’s short enough that I can read through the entire piece, make some revisions, and add new material in a single day.  Here’s an easy metaphor: I’m able to keep the paint wet in all the corners of the canvasI really think that helps make a narrative feel whole to a reader. A novel, on the other hand, quickly gets too large and unwieldy.  Sometimes there will be passages in your novel that you haven’t reread in a year. The canvas is so large that you are never able to visit all of it in one day (or several weeks) of work.

As for a word limit, I tend to prefer reading and writing stories that are longer than 2,200 words, but yes, of course, I think stories of that length can achieve a great deal.  Look at Peter Orner’s work in Esther Stories, or many of Stuart Dybek’s short stories, or Jamaica Kinkaid’s “Girl” or Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose” or Joyce’s “Araby.”  Look at Tobias Wolff’s “Say Yes.”

• Which other short story writers have influenced your writing? Can you say why?

Maybe two more than any others: Amy Hempel, because of her compression and playfulness with language.  And Alice Munro because of what she can do with time.  Munro can skim through a decade in a paragraph, or trawl through a single decision for several pages.

I also love story writers who pay attention to the natural world: Annie Dillard, Nadine Gordimer, Andrea Barrett, Sarah Orne Jewett…  I’m an amateur naturalist at heart, a person who is most comfortable outdoors looking for creatures, looking for beauty, weather, light, water.  And I love to render the things I see into language–only by writing it out, I think, can I make it real to myself.

• What editing advice would you give to writers who are considering entering our competition?
  

Reward the generosity of your reader! Try to examine every single word in your story and ask yourself: Is it a lazy choice? Does this adjective/article/noun/verb absolutely need to be there?  If someone is nice enough to spend a half-hour reading something you’ve written, try to make your prose absolutely worthy of his or her time. Make the dream that unfolds inside your sentences so persuasive, seamless and compelling, that your reader won’t put it down.