All language subtitles for MasterClass Neil Gaiman Teaches The Art of Storytelling - 07Short Fiction

A good short story

is a magic trick. It's close-up magic.

It's not a giant grand illusion where

five people go into a box and the box is

hauled up and then there are fireworks

and then they're gone. It's that thing

where somebody shows you that their

hands are empty and then they cover it

and then when they reveal it again,

there's a rose there. You go, "How did

they do that? Was the rose always there?

The rose must have been there."

I once wrote

a book of short stories for children.

Um, I'm just going to read you my very

short introduction.

When I was young, and it doesn't really

seem that long ago, I loved books of

short stories.

Short stories could be read from start

to finish in the kinds of times I had

available for reading, morning break, or

after lunch nap or on trains.

They'd set up, they'd roll, and they'd

take you to a new world and deliver you

safely back to school or back home in

half an hour or so. Stories you read

when you're the right age never quite

leave you. You may forget who wrote them

or what the story was called. Sometimes

you'll forget precisely what happened,

but if a story touches you, it will stay

with you, haunting the places in your

mind that you rarely ever visit.

Horror stays with you hardest. If it

brings a real chill to the back of your

neck, if once the story is done, you

find yourself closing the book slowly

for fear of disturbing something and

creeping away, then it's there for the

rest of time. There was a story I read

when I was nine that ended with a room

covered with snails. I think they were

probably man-eating snails, and they

were crawling slowly towards someone to

eat him. I get the same creeps

remembering it now that I did when I

read it.

Fantasy gets into your bones. There's a

curve in a road I sometimes pass. A view

of a village on rolling green hills and

behind it huger, craggier, grayer hills

and in the distance mountains and mist

that I cannot see without remembering

reading the Lord of the Rings. The book

is somewhere inside me and that view

brings it to the surface. And science

fiction takes you across the stars and

into other times and minds. There's

nothing like spending some time inside

an alien head to remind us how little

divides us person from person.

Short stories are tiny windows into

other worlds and other minds and other

dreams. They're journeys you can make to

the far side of the universe and still

be back in time for dinner. I've been

writing short stories for almost a

quarter of a century now. In the

beginning, they were a great way to

begin to learn my craft as a writer. The

hardest thing to do as a young writer is

to finish something. And that was what I

was learning how to do. These days, most

of the things I write are long, long

comics or long books or long films. And

a short story, something that's finished

and over in a weekend or a week. It's

pure fun.

My favorite short story writers as a boy

are many of them my favorite short story

writers now. People like Saki or Harlon

Allison, like John Collier or Shirley

Jackson or Ray Bradbury. close-up

conjurers who with just 26 letters and a

handful of punctuation marks could make

you laugh and break your heart all in a

handful of pages. There's another good

thing about a book of short stories. You

don't have to like them all. If there's

one you don't enjoy, well, there'll be

another one along soon.

And I named the book this book

after a Ray Bradbury book. When I was a

boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from

his books of short stories. He thought

younger readers might like and he

published them as R is for rocket and S

is for space. Now I was doing the same

sort of thing and I asked Ry if he'd

mind if I called this book M is for

magic. He didn't.

M is for magic. All the letters are, if

you put them together properly, you can

make magic with them and dreams and I

hope even a few surprises.

One of my favorite short story writers

is the late Roger Zelasni.

I encountered Zaznney's short stories

first as a 9-year-old, a 10year-old,

and I loved them. I loved his books. I

loved his stories. I loved his

characters. These these

angstridden people or super competent

people or just people in situations that

had them at the end of their tether. I

loved his use of language. He could

really deploy words beautifully. Salazy

was a poet and he wrote his fiction and

he wrote a short story writing like a

poet with the poet's eye and ear for the

precision of the right word in the right

place.

And I didn't get to meet Roger until I

was in my late 20s writing Sandman.

And uh we didn't really get to talk

until I was 30. And

I was at the World Fantasy Convention in

Tucson, Arizona, and I ran into Roger

and sat down with him and said, "Roger,

will you talk to me about writing short

stories?

Cuz you do it better than anyone I

know."

and just tell me about writing short

stories.

And he stopped for a bit and he thought

and then he said, you know, really, he

said, all my best short stories are the

last chapter

of a novel I didn't write.

And I loved that. I really took that to

heart

because when you're writing short

fiction,

what you want, whether it's true or not,

is to feel like these characters didn't

just start to exist the moment the story

began.

You want to know they've all been in

existence

all along.

You want to know that things have

happened to them. things have taken them

to this point and now we are at the

point of heightened emotion. We're at

the point where the plot is actually

kicking in. This is the thing you've

been waiting all of that time for. This

is the day numon. This is the unraveling

time. This is the time when we're all

going to understand everything.

And it's the last chapter. It's the

final chunk of a novel that you haven't

had to write. And I always thought that

was such a wonderful way in

to short story writing. And also

because I am fundamentally lazy.

Um it's a lovely sort of headway into a

short story. You go, well look, if I

write this short story, there's 130,000

words I don't have to write. I can just

write this 8,000 words and that puts it

all into place.

So, I like doing that, too.

One of the fun things to do when you're

a young writer and you are just writing

a short story and frankly any writer

writing a short story. The first place

that I start is just with the idea that

instead of being paid by the word, I am

paying by the word.

that the fewer words I can use to tell

my story, the better. That compression,

that economy,

all of these things are good.

You know, I've written stories

as short as 100 words.

In fact, technically,

I've written one exactly 100word short

story called Nicholas Was. Um,

let's see. Do we have a smoke and

mirrors here?

Nicholas was older than sin, and his

beard could grow no whiter.

He wanted to die.

The dwarfish natives of the Arctic

caverns did not speak his language, but

conversed in their own twittering

tongue, conducted incomprehensible

rituals when they were not actually

working in the factories. Once every

year they forced him, sobbing and

protesting, into endless night.

During the journey, he would stand near

every child in the world, leave one of

the dwarves invisible gifts by its

bedside.

The children slept, frozen into time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Cephus,

and Judas.

His punishment was harsher.

Ho ho ho.

It's a very, very short story,

but I learned things from it. I learned

about compression.

I learned how

to make the penny drop.

Part of the fun of that story is where

in the story do you figure that Nicholas

was Santa Claus? Where do you figure

where do you learn

that this is the punishment of Father

Christmas?

And so it's it's just a small thing. The

glory of a short story too is just one

thing has to happen. In novels, lots of

things happen. A novel has to be about

lots and lots of different things. A

story, a short story really only has to

be about one thing. You can say that one

thing. Then you can stop, get on to

something else.

Short fiction is a fantastic place to

learn your craft as a writer.

Um, a lot of writers when they think

that they want to set out and sail their

first craft out under the seas of story.

immediately get the idea that you should

go huge. You should write a

series of 10 books and have a huge mega

plot and you should have a cast of

thousands and all of these things. And

there's a lot of skills that you need to

do that and to do it successfully. Even

those writers who have done that have

tended to have to learn their craft as

they go, book by book in progression.

What's lovely

is taking short journeys, is taking your

boat out and just going around the

headland and coming back in time for

tea,

learning skills.

So,

a short story

is lovely. It's

3,000 words, 4,000 words, 2,000 words,

5,000 words.

You can do that

in a day or a weekend or a week or two

weeks.

You can have an idea for something. You

can take it out.

You can succeed or you can fail.

Well, you can learn things,

but all of the things that you learn,

whether you succeed or you fail, the

important thing is that you just took

the boat out. The important thing is

that you wrote something. The important

thing is that you learned. And that's

the place where you get to master new

skills. That's the place where you get

to find out, okay, I have an idea. Can I

can I make this thing happen? I have an

idea for a tone of voice. Do I want to

do that? Is this

would this thing work? I have an idea

here for something that's slightly mad.

You can start a short story just with

the setup. You can start a short story

just with the end. You can start a short

story just with something that happens

in the middle and okay, well then start

here. Go meet that thing that happens in

the middle and then follow it on and see

where it goes. If it fails, it fails.

That's okay. You've lost three days.

You've lost a week. No big deal.