Introduction

For a short story to lure me in, I need one thing: great voice. If your narrator and/or character doesn’t have a unique or bizarre voice, I’m back to Netflix or staring at my neighbour across the road arguing with his bins. A convincing voice is, of course, tied up naturally with character, and character tumbles along neatly with plot, and plot is a close mate of pacing… so it begins for me with a solid grip on voice, ending in that last satisfying fork of risotto. Sometimes, in the pursuit of superior smarts, writers forget to actually spin a story, to entertain. Don’t flaunt your medial prefrontal cortex and disregard the notion of the big fat lie. That’s what fiction is after all. Short stories genuinely excite me and I’m happy so many people are committed to writing them. Here’s some of my favourites.