The RTÉ Short Story Competition 2023 in honour of Francis MacManus is back for another year.
Below, one of this year's judges, acclaimed novelist Kathleen MacMahon, explores what she looks for in a good short story.
At the risk of stating the obvious, a short story should have a narrative arc, however small. The short stories I love best are the ones that turn on a moment of significance in a person's life. In some ways, the smaller the moment the better. I’m thinking of the Kevin Barry story, Across the Rooftops. It’s only a few pages long, but there’s great drama to it, as a summer crush draws towards its moment of truth on a Cork city rooftop at dawn.
A good story can just as easily turn on a moment halfway through. That’s the case with Mary Lavin’s The Haymaking, where a pair of fun-loving single sisters from Dublin encounter a dour but eligible farmer at a spa hotel near Dublin. The sisters return to work, with barely a thought to the farmer, who pursues one of them in writing afterwards. His letter comes as she’s in the middle of a particularly tedious day of teaching. Her eye lands on a poster on the classroom wall of an idyllic rural scene, and she decides to marry him on the whim of that moment.
Whimsy works well in a short story. The form is a good vehicle for a bit of fun that wouldn’t stretch to a novel, but it can be serious stuff in the hands of the right writer. Edith Pearlman’s Hat Trick is a good example. Pearlman has a widowed mother sitting on her porch drinking lemonade with her daughter’s teenage friends. The mother suggests they put some boys’ names in a hat and determine by chance who to marry – her bet is that it’s as good a recipe for happiness as love, a bet that’s answered by the end of the story.
Another American writer of short stories that I admire very much is Lily King. When in the Dordogne is my favourite of hers - an account of a single summer in the life of a lonely rich kid whose parents have gone to France and left him to be minded by two college boys. King reaches beyond the summer in one deft paragraph at the end, giving the story a sweep as long as life itself.
It's hard to resist a short story that delivers a punch.
I love a story that manages to fit life’s span into the short form. I’m thinking of Anthony Doerr’s beautiful work, The Deep. Set in a salt mining area of depression-era Detroit, it introduces us to a young man afflicted by a weak heart and doomed to die young. Tom is sequestered from the world until a red-headed girl with a marine obsession takes him on her adventures, and Tom’s fragile heart is endangered by love. With the exquisite precision required by the form, Doerr tells us Tom’s whole life story.
Finally, it’s hard to resist a short story that delivers a punch. I love Lionel Shriver’s wickedly good Kilifi Creek, which takes brutal pleasure in the unexpected. Roald Dahl was a master of the dark twist, but my favourite of all is Bella Fleace Gives a Party, by Evelyn Waugh. The pleasure of the Waugh story is in the long, slow draw on the reader’s heart strings, as an eccentric old Anglo-Irish lady plans a party in her crumbling mansion. Like all the best short stories, it offers extremely good value to the reader.
These are the qualities I have identified in the stories I love the best. The entrants to this year’s RTÉ Short Story Competition will have their own ideas. A short story is a small doorway, but it opens onto an infinitely wide world. There’s no end to the possibilities the short story offers, and I very much look forward to reading what the finalists of the competition make of them. It’s a real honour to be asked to judge them and a great opportunity for me to learn more about what it is that makes a good story.
Writers have until Friday 26th May to submit their short story to the RTÉ Short Story Competition. competition - for rules, information on how to enter, and to read and listen to past winning stories, go here.
