The Short Story, Voice, and History: A Conversation with Richard Smyth

Richard Smyth is a novelist and journalist in West Yorkshire, England. This week, we featured his short story, “Crying Just Like Anybody,” as an editor’s pick. Here, he chats with The Fiction Desk editor Rob Redman, who first published “Crying Just Like Anybody” in a short story anthology of the same name. They talk about short fiction as performance, voice and authenticity, and the intersection of storytelling and history.

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Rob: I like the way you use the first person in your story, “Crying Just Like Anybody.” As with your novel, Wild Ink, and some of your other short stories, the first-person narrative comes across as a kind of performance. It’s a trait you share with some of the other Fiction Desk writers, like James Benmore. Can you talk more about this? I know you’re involved with live reading events, like Liars’ League in London, and I wonder if this has affected your style.

Image credit: Catherine Bale

Richard: Much of my work begins with a voice. The voice gives me the character, and the character gives me the story. That’s certainly how Wild Ink began, and how “Crying Just Like Anybody” began, too. Adopting different voices in my writing comes naturally to me; the temptation — which I don’t always feel the need to resist — is there to simply go rambling on, because writing in someone else’s voice is such a pleasure. I imagine singers and actors must feel similarly.

If you’re interested in this “writers write, actors read” approach, check out other Liars’ League networks: Liars’ League HK in Hong Kong and Liars’ League NYC in New York City.

I wrote Wild Ink long before I was involved with the Liars’ League. I found my way of writing to be well-suited to the Liars’ League format, in which professional actors perform rehearsed readings of writers’ stories. The challenge for me is striking a balance between monologue and storytelling.

There’s a scene in The Catcher In The Rye where Holden is talking about a class at school where the boys have to stand up and talk about a subject without straying from the point — but Holden likes it when a boy gets over-excited and goes off on a tangent. He doesn’t care whether a boy sticks to the point, or even if there is a point. I feel like that a lot myself, both as a reader and writer. Sometimes I’ll get to the end of a story and realize I’ve sort of neglected to include a plot. And I think that sometimes that’s okay. But with “Crying Just Like Anybody,” I think I got that balance pretty much right.

Rob: We see more short story submissions, often very good ones, coming in from people who are involved with Liars’ League and similar live reading events, and we’ve had stories from our anthologies performed at them in the past. Do you think there’s a movement in favor of short fiction as a performance medium rather than printed material?

I love seeing my writing performed, because it opens up so many new angles and interpretations.

Richard: I love seeing my writing performed, because it opens up so many new angles and interpretations. For the same reason, it can also be agonizing: sitting there thinking, “But that’s not how I meant it to sound!” You get over that, though. You learn to let go. And of course it’s also an accessible way for people to hear what you have to say.

Rob: Writers don’t often get the opportunity to hear their readers as they encounter the work. Do you think that’s had any impact on your style? Is there a temptation, say, to use punctuation or sentence construction as tools to direct the emphasis more than usual when you’re writing with the expectation of being read aloud?

Richard’s first novel, Wild Ink, published in 2014.

Richard: If I’m writing specifically for a live-lit event, I have an idea of what will work in terms of an audience reaction, and sometimes I’ll make the humor a little broader or more grotesque, or heighten the drama in a way I otherwise wouldn’t. As well as wanting to put on a good show, you want to give the performer something juicy to work with.

But as a rule, no. For me, the page is king. Ink on the page is writing in its unadulterated form. If I’m writing in the first person, or writing dialogue, then I hear the words very clearly in my head, so I’d like to think it has a natural quality — but it’s still usually written for the page.

An actor, for instance, can help bring out certain strengths or themes in a work, but then that becomes a collaboration between the writer and performer — a wonderful thing in itself, but a different thing from the written word. I like literature that’s made for the page and designed to stand by itself. Even when it isn’t — in Shakespeare, say, which was meant to be read aloud — I find it more satisfying as literature on the page than on the stage.

Rob: In addition to fiction, you also write books about British history. How would you say that the two interests inform each other?

Richard: It’s all storytelling. I’m not a proper historian, in the sense that I don’t unearth new discoveries or examine primary sources. But I do think I have a good eye for the interesting bits, and in my history books, I try to turn these into illuminating and enjoyable stories.

Narrative fascinates me. It has such a hold on us, on the way in which we think about history. History is, basically, a massive mess. Imagine a page covered with 100,000 dots. You can draw almost an infinite number of lines by joining dot to dot, and that’s how much historical storytelling proceeds: joining event to event to make narratives. Then, if we’re good historians, we test each narrative to see if it makes sense and fits all the evidence. But if we’re bad historians and don’t bother doing that, the chances are we’ll get away with it — such is the power of narrative. You see it in politics all the time. We even think of our own lives in terms of linear narrative lines: how often do we think of ourselves as being somehow “in the middle” of our own life story? As if there’s a line laid out for us to follow. When of course, if our life is a story, we’re actually always, always on the last page.

We even think of our own lives in terms of linear narrative lines: how often do we think of ourselves as being somehow “in the middle” of our own life story? As if there’s a line laid out for us to follow. When of course, if our life is a story, we’re actually always, always on the last page.

Rob: That makes me think of Wild Ink, and Chaliapin’s arrangement and examination of his own dots as the novel progresses.

Richard: I think looking for narrative is a big part of trying to answer the big questions: why am I who I am, how did I get to this place in my life, what could I have done differently? We try to make sense. And I think mostly we fail.

If you haven’t already, read Richard’s story, “Crying Just Like Anybody,” then read his piece on the historical background and the Martian-Hungarian myth of the early 1940s that inspired the tale.

Rob: On the subject of history, let’s move to your story “Crying Just Like Anybody” and talk about setting. I regularly hear from British short story writers who choose to set stories in the US because they think they’ll have more chance of finding success on that side of the Atlantic. It’s frustrating at times because it means they aren’t necessarily writing what they know best, and instead using a composite setting and characters taken from American books, films, and maybe the odd holiday. (We sometimes see stories coming the other way, too — stories that originate in the US and feature British characters saying “bloody” and referring to the queen and drinking tea.) But the setting in “Crying Just Like Anybody” felt very authentic to me. How did you come to write this story, and how did you prepare for it?

Richard: This is a complex question, and one that fascinates me.

Crying Just Like Anybody, a short story anthology from The Fiction Desk.

The first point to make is that you can’t put real things into fiction. Even if it’s as familiar to you as your own coffee cup or your own garden gate, as soon as you put it into fiction it belongs to the fiction; I think Martin Amis said that the fiction “bends it out of shape,” and twists it to fit its own purposes. So I think “write about what you know” can be misleading. It’s all a fiction, all a lie. I think it’s like that old joke: “The key to getting on in life is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” For “sincerity” read “authenticity.” I think people often forget how much of good writing is illusion.

That said, I did get to know the milieu of “Crying Just Like Anybody” pretty well. I’m familiar with the literature of early twentieth-century America — my undergraduate thesis was on John Dos Passos — and to a lesser extent with the history, too. So I had a feel for the ideas and language of that time.

I also wrote a novel set in much the same place (and with some of the same people: Tom Keys and Yes Moller, both mentioned in “Crying Just Like Anybody,” were the main characters). By the time I wrote this story, I had a solid imaginative grasp of the place.

I read that the author Jim Crace sets some of his work in what’s been called “Crace world,” not a fantastical place, just a very non-specific one, so that you can use the bits from history that you like without getting pinned down on specifics. You could say the same about a lot of post-Tolkien fantasy fiction: take all the cool bits from the Middle Ages, and leave out the boring realities. And at the other extent, you get someone like the amazing Hilary Mantel, who’s said that the idea of getting a historical fact wrong makes her feel physically sick.

The first point to make is that you can’t put real things into fiction. Even if it’s as familiar to you as your own coffee cup or your own garden gate, as soon as you put it into fiction it belongs to the fiction…

I fall between those two extremes. I feel perfectly comfortable in the knowledge that I’m reimagining history (I think Mantel has said she’s just filling in the gaps — I think we all go a lot further than that). As long as you don’t have Henry III checking his iPhone, I’m pretty easygoing about it. Where it gets tricky is where very recent events are fictionalized — as in, say, David Peace’s work. Again, I’m not uncomfortable with it. But it tests the limits.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m cynical about authenticity. Quite the opposite. But I think that, just as fiction is a lie designed to reveal a deeper truth, so the “truth” of a historical novel or story is dependent on more than just its adherence to historical fact.

As long as you don’t have Henry III checking his iPhone, I’m pretty easygoing about it.

Rob: Finally, I wanted to ask about your thoughts on the short story as a medium. For me as a publisher and editor, it’s wonderful to be able to work with a relatively wide range of authors on these small, focused projects, but it’s hard to get readers to pick up a book of short stories. As a writer, what are the challenges and rewards of writing short stories as opposed to longer fiction?

Richard: I love short stories. It’s how I started out — my brother James and I sending short stories to sci-fi magazines, without success. It’s the form in which I was first published, and in which I’ve been most widely published, and aside from my journalism it’s still my main route into print.

But I think there’s a tendency at the moment towards idolizing brevity, the “short” aspect of the short story. We marvel at it as you might marvel at the work of a miniaturist, someone who’s engraved the Book of Joshua on a grain of rice, as though working on a small scale were an accomplishment in itself. We talk about the discipline of it, we talk about it in terms of constraint and limitation.

Of course, I think that short stories should be beautifully and carefully constructed — but then, this is art, and everything should be beautifully and carefully constructed. Length is totally irrelevant.

But I think there’s a tendency at the moment towards idolizing brevity, the “short” aspect of the short story. We marvel at it as you might marvel at the work of a miniaturist, someone who’s engraved the Book of Joshua on a grain of rice, as though working on a small scale were an accomplishment in itself.

To me, short stories aren’t about limitation at all. Each story is me reaching a little wider, going a little bit further — whether that’s in terms of style, genre, theme, whatever — in a way that I couldn’t if I only explored these things in novel form. Short stories are about thinking bigger, not smaller. And I love it when I read someone else’s story and I feel like it’s maybe exploring a small part of themselves that they haven’t looked into much before.

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In addition to The Fiction Desk, Richard Smyth’s short fiction has appeared in The Stockholm Review, Riptide Journal, The Stinging Fly, Litro, .Cent, Firewords, and Vintage Script. As a journalist, he has written for publications including New Humanist and New Scientist, and is also the author of the nonfiction books Bum Fodder and English History: Strange But True.

His first novel, Wild Ink, was published by Dead Ink Books in June 2014. You can buy the ebook on Amazon or a print copy on Inpress.

Read more of Richard’s stories on his blog on WordPress.com and follow him on Twitter (@RSmythFreelance).

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.