Bloomsbury Publishing has shared an extract from its new publication Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ and Artists’ Companion, featuring writing advice from Henrietta Rose-Innes.
Read the excerpt:
Lost stories
Henrietta Rose-InnesHenrietta Rose-Innes is a South African writer based in Cape Town. She is the author of a short story collection, Homing, and three novels, Shark’s Egg, The Rock Alphabet and Nineveh. Her story ‘Sanctuary’ won second place in the BBC International Short Story Award in 2012, and she won the South African PEN Literary Award in 2007 and the 2008 Caine Prize for African Writing.
There was that one about the body of a green giant, washed up on a beach. And the one about the blue birds, who made you happy if you stroked their feathers. The brother and sister, wandering through an infinite graveyard. A man, erotically instructed in a train carriage as it crossed a dark plain on a foreign planet, lit by
stars …These pictures are all from short stories, 30 years old or more. Maybe you read them too; maybe you remember a different set of pictures.
Most of them are science fiction stories, I think, because that was what I was reading age 12, 13, when these images pressed themselves into my receptive brain. Crouched between the shelves in the Cape Town Central Library, lost in the sci-fi compendiums. I don’t recall their titles or the names of the authors. Back then I wasn’t concerned with provenance, just greedy for raw images.
The pictures remain as bright as postage stamps, steamed free from the letters they came on. I’ve lost the envelopes, lost the addresses. Lost the letters, too: I don’t remember plots, characters, the beginnings or endings of any of those stories. Just: the green giant, the blue birds, the gravestones, the train. And others. Each image has its own particular synaesthetic taste, sharp or bittersweet. Mystery, longing, adventure, a touch of grief.
These lucid moments are, for me, the unique gift of the short story. (The sense memory of a novel is different: less concentrated, a more complex accretion.) And this is what I grope after in my own writing. Each story I have ever written has been an attempt to print a vivid postage stamp and mail it to the reader: the bust of a queen, a national bird … I’d love to know that some bright image, peeled off one of my stories, has found a place in someone’s collection.
It is harder to have that purity of experience now. The sensations don’t arrive so cleanly. These days, my reading – and my writing – is more selective, cautious, tangled up in awareness of canon and context. I take note of authors’ names. My books are bought not borrowed. If I need to, I can lay my hand on a particular story, I can cross-check. I may never lose a story again – and perhaps I’ll never find one again in quite the same way, with that same serendipitous magic.
Over the years I’ve thought of those stories often. Replayed so frequently, the images become fixed, and no doubt distorted. By now they are probably unrecognizable facsimiles of the original. I’ve often wanted to track them down. Recently, after a couple of tries, I successfully googled that green giant; I thought he might be one of Ray Bradbury’s monsters. Turns out the story was, of course, Ballard’s ‘The Drowned Giant’ – and the giant was never green, but ‘pearl-coloured’. I think I’ll let the other stories stay lost. I rather like my pictures as they are.
Related stories:
Presenting Green Lion, The New Novel by Henrietta Rose-Innes
Fiction Friday: Excerpts from New Stories by Richard de Nooy and Henrietta Rose-Innes
20/20: A tiny story made of 50 first lines by Henrietta Rose-Innes
Book details
- Writing Short Stories : A Writers’ and Artists’ Companion edited by Courttia Newland, Tania Hershman
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EAN: 9781408130803
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- Green Lion by Henrietta Rose-Innes
EAN: 978141520685
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- Nineve by Henrietta Rose-Innes
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EAN: 9782881829147
- Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes
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EAN: 9781415201367
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- Homing by Henrietta Rose-Innes
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EAN: 9781415201343
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- The Rock Alphabet by Henrietta Rose-Innes
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EAN: 9780795701931
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- Shark’s Egg by Henrietta Rose-Innes
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EAN: 9780795701153
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