Short is sweet: why I love short stories

In a short story, every word counts. No waffle, no flab. But there’s freedom in there, too. A short story is a holiday romance: we know it won’t last, and we don’t care, and that frees us up to take chances. Susie Day, author of the Pea’s Book series and The Twice-Lived Summer of Bluebell Jones, talks about the joys of writing short stories for a new anthology, Love Hurts

Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes in the BBC1 series: as a teenager Susie Day read Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes as between-essays treats! Photograph: Robert Viglasky/PA

Susie Day

Wednesday 11 March 2015 The Guardian

One day, when I am trapped on a wifi-less desert island with nothing else to do but fashion yet another itchy coconut bra, I will finally crack the spine on Proust’s À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu: all 3000 pages of it. But until then, there are too many books pleading for my attention. Ones I can hold in the bath. Maybe 10 distinct imagined worlds, not one. Sorry, Marcel, but tomes are off the table. The shorter the better.

As a kid, I hoovered up Pippi Longstocking and Mrs Pepperpot. As a young adult, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were my perfect between-essays treat. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is as potent as any novel I read as a teenager. And, of course, the first stories I made up myself were short ones.
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