The curious case of the short story

Despite some big names and anthologies hitting the market every year, the landscape for an English short story writer in India continues to be a jagged one

Bharath Kumar, whose short story ‘Thambi, Thambi’ was selected for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, says he isn’t thinking of writing a novel anytime soon. He wants to focus on building his short story collection and is working on this with his South Asia Speaks mentor — author Mahesh Rao. “There is so much to do within the short story form. I’ve just started experimenting and it’s exciting. I want to play with this genre as much as I can,” says Kumar.

Gitanjali Joshua, a Ph.D scholar whose story ‘Accidents are Prohibited’ was part of the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, took to short stories by accident during the pandemic. “It just happened. Things troubling me became stories,” she says, emphasising that she doesn’t see the short story “as a stepping stone” to novels. “Some ideas definitely lend themselves more to a short story... you just want to take the reader along and not really worry about helping them find their way out,” she says.

Literary history is dotted with authors who dedicated their careers to writing short stories; internationally, in the English-speaking world, names like Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Munro and George Saunders continue to attract followers. Closer home too, our relationship with short stories has been long and rich. As Aienla Ozukum, publishing director at Aleph Book Company, says, “Short stories have been an integral part of Indian literature, starting with the greats such as Rabindranath Tagore and Premchand and continuing into the present with modern masters like O.V. Vijayan, Mahasweta Devi, Vijaydan Detha, and Ruskin Bond. Of the new generation, there are Kanishk Tharoor, Syed Muhammad Ashraf, Sara Rai, and Nazir Mansuri, among others, who continue to extend and deepen the boundaries of the form.”

But even with a rich history and enough new and emerging writers of short stories in the country — the winner of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize is Sanjana Thakur, a 26-year-old from Mumbai — the publishing landscape for short story collections and anthologies, especially from debut authors, remains bleak. The constant refrain from publishers is that “short stories do not sell”. Author Mahesh Rao, whose first book, One Point Two Billion (2015), was a collection of short stories, calls this pronouncement “a self-defeating thing”, because it shrinks the market for short stories — reducing their numbers on the shelves leads to lower sales. “To be honest, today, outside genre fiction and perhaps non-fiction, very little sells,” he adds.

Many others in the industry agree that the reasons behind the limited demand for short story collections remain unclear. “Sadly, while there are great stories being written, anthologies don’t always work well in the market. Novels tend to do better. This is not unique to India but few publishers can tell why this happens,” observes Ozukum.

Rahul Soni, Associate Publisher (Literary) at HarperCollins Publishers India, says that this notion may have filtered down from international markets, and might not necessarily hold true for India. But it can be hard for authors, especially first-timers, to sell short stories to publishers, he admits. “There’s an instant switching off that can happen sometimes when you bring a short story collection to the table.” There is a caveat though. As opposed to English-language stories, translated works do quite well in the market, says Soni. “It can actually work better for us to first go to market with short stories by a new author we are translating into English.” Anthologies are often also fodder for OTT productions, with the latest being the Mohanlal and Mammootty-starrer Manorathangal, based on nine of Malayalam writer M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s short stories.

Fewer awards and recognition

Bestselling author Preeti Shenoy, whose first book was a collection of stories and who is ready with her next, ventures a guess as to why short stories in English are not considered popular in the country. She says that Indian stories tend to be more literary and abstract, whereas readers want stories they can relate with. “For instance, Chicken Soup for the Soul was a hit in India... people could see themselves in those stories.”

So if you’re a young author today, with a collection of short stories as your first book, what would your journey look like? Turns out, even published authors find it challenging to face varying levels of difficulties in placing short stories. Shenoy says that despite having several bestsellers on the shelves, she has not found a very enthusiastic response from publishers for a collection of short stories that she has ready. “My books tend to be positive and uplifting. This new set of short stories is darker,” she says.

Another roadblock for a writer is that there are fewer literary prizes for short stories and anthologies. “Many awards don’t accept short stories, because if they did, how would they judge a novel against a short fiction collection?” says Soni. The rulebook of JCB Prize for Literature, considered India’s “most valuable literary prize”, with a ₹25 lakh award, states: “Collections of poetry or short stories, and plays are not eligible”. And the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for fiction writing, which accepted short story submissions, has had only one winner from the said genre in 10 years — No Presents Please (2017) by Jayant Kaikini, translated by Tejaswini Niranjana.

There is one workaround commonly used by publishers when it comes to short stories — taking “the interconnected or loosely connected” route. “If you submit a collection of short stories, they try and disguise it in some way. They’ll say it’s actually a novel, or linked stories. They will try and find some device by which, you know, there’s a kind of continuity so they can claim that it’s not a collection of short stories,” says author Rao.

So then it isn’t unusual for an author, armed with a collection of short stories, to be advised to perhaps begin their writing career with a novel instead. “Yes, it is absolutely important for an author to start with a novel rather than a collection of stories,” confirms Ozukum.

But there are exceptions. Says Manasi Subramaniam, editor-in-chief at Penguin Random House India, “While the novel is often seen as the traditional first book for aspiring authors, trailblazers like Jhumpa Lahiri have shown us that the short story collection can be a high-impact debut as well.”

What works, what does not?

So what can make a short story collection work? What are editors and publishers looking for? Since the space on a publisher’s list is already limited, an anthology must tick a few boxes. For Subramaniam, this is “not vastly different from what we seek out in literary novels: imaginative voices that explore multitudes and contradictions, the sacred and the profane, the funny and the poignant, and a little bit of everything in between”. And while she does say that a “unifying thread between the stories can work beautifully”, she also values “diversity and contrast within an anthology”.

Are there ways in which short story writers like Kumar and Joshua, who find themselves on international prize shortlists, or who’ve built a profile by publishing in literary magazines and journals, can make their work more desirable to publishers? Will an MFA in creative writing help?

“I’m a bit ambivalent about most creative writing programmes because writers who emerge from these courses tend to produce cookie-cutter versions of stories and novels — there is a sameness to them and that tends to rob them of a certain distinctiveness that one looks for in fiction,” says Ozukum. That said, writing courses, while not directly helpful when it comes to publishing, can add dimensions to your work.

Take, for instance, Twinkle Khanna. While already a bestselling author with three books to her name, Khanna’s second collection of short stories, Welcome to Paradise, published last year, came after the former actor enrolled in a Master’s in Fiction Writing course at Goldsmiths, University of London. While the course didn’t necessarily change her writing itself, what she gained was “the ability to analyse work”, Khanna says in an earlier interview. “In the course, your work gets workshopped, you pass it around, and you annotate other people’s work as well. So you kind of start studying, not like a reader, but like a writer. And you break down things — what’s working, what’s not working. Then you use that knowledge in your own work. So I would say that I did not have a framework of analysis before, and now I do.”

Despite some big names and a few anthologies hitting the market every year, for an English short story writer in India today, the landscape is a jagged one, and requires more hustle than a novel might. Rao says that the nearest comparison he can make to publishing short stories is to publishing poetry. “No one expects poets to make a big splash. No one expects huge deals. They do it for the love of the form.” And while he also admits that “it would be disingenuous to say that authors are not looking for money through their writing, or for success”, the only way to stay motivated is to keep “coming back to the work”.

Both Kumar and Joshua are putting in the work first — “exercising the muscles”, so to speak. Kumar talks about the time crafting a single short story can take, and the number of hours he spent editing ‘Thambi, Thambi’, down to debating the use of double quotes. Joshua too spends time working on a short story repeatedly till she’s happy with it. Neither seems too deterred by the publishing journey ahead — right now, their journey as writers is about little other than writing.

swati.daftuar@thehindu.co.in

Published - September 20, 2024 09:31 am IST