I’ve been thinking about something very specific Matthews said, and it’s been bothering me. It’s not really fair to hold 115 year-old thoughts to modern standards, but I’m going to do it anyway at the risk of looking like a nit-picking bully. It’s his contention that a short story must exist over one day, in one place, just so. I agree absolutely that a short story must have a central theme, a thread to follow. But I think it’s incredibly short-sighted to essentially lump in the short story with the play, confined by a stage, a budget and general human limitations that the written word oughtn’t be subjected to. (Read too much from 1901 and you’ll start using words like “oughtn’t”, apparently.)

The example I want to use is a lovely short story: Married Love by Tessa Hadley. It follows a young woman through the eyes of her brother, from a premature wedding to her professor to the drudgery of middle age. Now I think about it, there is something of a play about it – the sets are clearly defined and laid out for us in loving detail. Excruciating, some might say, but that’s really just down to preference. With the scenery so well-described, I found myself not really minding too much that the characters were sketches. The world that they operated in felt so real that they felt real too, by extension.

The most striking thing is, of course, the several decades the story spans. It focusses on key points, obviously; mostly the reveal of the engagement and a visit to the couple’s house years later. The contrast is stark. Home, the first time around, is warm and soft and cozy as only rainy Sunday mornings can be. The second time, it’s a dingy flat strewn with the debris of messy children and their dissatisfied parents. Everybody can see her future about to fall apart but her, and then we see her in the mess of a broken life. She’s given up her passions and lives in tracksuits. It’s depressingly human.

It serves as inspiration for my first project brief, too. At this stage (who knows, it may change) I want to write over a period of time – a little over a hundred years – and Married Love has given me a good sense of how to achieve this without alienating and confusing the readers. I like the idea of boiling down a lifetime into a few morning conversations. I wonder if I can achieve it in my own writing.