When I first started writing my short story I was a little anxious about the task. I had never written a short story and for the first couple of days struggled to find anything at all to write about. The idea of writing a story has never seemed like a simple task to me. Having a holistically flowing piece of work that is both engaging as well as concise seemed like a fairly arduous task, however, as I began to write the task became less and less daunting by the minute.

Brander Matthews wrote in his piece ‘The Philosophy of the Short-story’, “compression is essential”. This is something I considered the whole time whilst writing my story. I found myself repeatedly re-reading and re-writing sentences, making sure to omit all but the necessary information. This is something that made Roald Dahl’s ‘The Lamb and the Slaughter’ particularly interesting, it was entirely “self-contained” and had a “unity of impression”. The idea for my story came from a line from Matthews piece in which he said that the short-story “fulfills the three false unities of the French classic drama: it shows one action, in one place, on one day.” This is what inspired the timeframe for my story, which occurs over an estimated 20-minutes in real time.