The RTÉ Short Story Competition 2024 in honour of Francis MacManus is back and is now open for entries.
Below, one of this year's returning judges, acclaimed novelist Kathleen MacMahon, explores the fine art of short storytelling - read more of her advice for budding writers here.
Here’s the thing about the short story. It can be anything you want it to be.
Last year we chose ten stories for the final shortlist for this award, and there was no one thing uniting them apart from their quality. Among them were descriptive stories, told in traditional style, where the beauty of the language and the quality of observation was the standout factor. There were stories that were almost novelistic in condensing a whole life into the short form. We had a story with barely any human characters, only a nightmarish ever-expanding lake. We even had a story based on a conversation between a narrator and a chatbot. All brilliant stories, but told in very different ways.
I think the most important thing is that the story does what it sets out to do. If it’s a descriptive piece, the descriptions should be excellent. If it’s a character study, the character should feel alive and real. If the setting is the thing, the reader should be brought there. If the story turns on plot, then the plotting needs to be good.
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Last year’s winner was the marvellous Mr. Hoo, by John O’Donnell. The story was our unanimous choice for many reasons, but it was the plotting that impressed me most. There’s a segue in the story where the narrative skips from a band of kids standing on a motorway bridge to a courtroom, where one of the kids is to be sentenced for the action that ensued on the bridge. This segue from action to consequence is so abrupt that I had a hand on my heart as I read it. The skill in the storytelling made this a very worthy winner.
It can be anything you want it to be.
Other stories have little in the way of plot but capture a moment in time with such mastery as to make it unforgettable. I’m thinking of Nabokov’s very beautiful story Sounds, which transports us to rural Russia, where a heady summer affair is taking place between the narrator and a married woman intimately addressed as ‘you.’ The story starts with rain and the sound of the woman playing the piano. It ends in the evening of the same day in silence. In between lies a whole world, exquisitely realised.
The Irish writer Mary Costello is a contemporary star of the short story. There’s one in her new collection, Barcelona, called The Choc-Ice Woman. It’s a complex story of marital infidelity, but it’s also very funny, as a woman takes a lift to a country funeral with the undertaker, who worries he has the wrong body in the coffin. It’s a classic road-trip narrative, but it’s also the story of a life, brilliantly told in a few short pages.
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Alice Munro has an extraordinary ability to capture the truth of human experience. One of the primary pleasures a reader can have is the recognition of some true thing the writer has observed and recorded. There are so many examples of this in Munro’s writing, but the one I’ll include here comes from a story called My Mother’s Dream, where a mother dreams she’s left her baby out in the snow. On waking, she realises it’s summer and the baby is safely asleep in its crib, but the sense of unease remains. This is writing of a visceral nature, telling the experience of human life as it is lived. That’s a powerful thing in a story.
So, what am I looking for from this year’s entrants to the Francis McManus? The capture of some moment of truth, some piece of beauty, some raw insight or heart-stopping storytelling. How it’s done is up to the writer. It will be our pleasure as judges to see what they produce.
Writers have until Friday 10th May 2024 to submit their short story to the RTÉ Short Story Competition - for rules, information on how to enter, and to read and listen to past winning stories, go here.
